“They call me a traitor. But coming from them, it’s a compliment”
Everything apparently starts by chance. On June 6, 2020, at the end of a demonstration against the restrictive measures related to Covid in Rome’s Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, a young woman approaches journalist Paolo Berizzi and leaves him a note with a phone number. If he wants to know the truth about CasaPound, the most important Italian neo-fascist organisation of the past 20 years, all he has to do is call it. It is from this unexpected encounter that the book Il libro segreto di Casapound was born, published at the end of last year by Fuori Scena. “At first I thought it was a joke, or rather a trap,” Berizzi explains. “It seemed completely illogical that a long-standing CasaPound militant would decide to speak to the journalist they consider the most ‘infamous’ in Italy. I threw the note away and didn’t think about it again until, a few months later, I was contacted again through social media by the person who would eventually become my real source. I was still very sceptical, but this time I replied and began exchanging messages. I contacted my acquaintances in Rome and, when I realised that he really was a long-standing CasaPound militant, I decided to meet him. It would be only the first of a series of meetings during which I would fill dozens of notebooks.”
What did it feel like to be the “chosen one”?
In the history of the Italian far right, it had never happened that someone from inside a neo-fascist group decided to speak. He decided to become an “infame” [traitor], which in the unwritten code of the radical right is a key concept, because he felt betrayed by the leadership. And he chose me precisely because I am the most hated journalist of all. So it is the traitor speaking to the traitor. And if the label of “infame” comes from CasaPound and from Italian neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups, for me it is simply a source of pride.
In what sense is it a source of pride?
I am happy to make life more difficult for these organisations, which I have been constantly and systematically breathing down the necks of for years. It is also a source of pride to be considered an “infame” by the enemies of democracy, even though what they call infamy is nothing more than my work of reporting, investigation and denunciation. Not only the most infamous among journalists. They have also called me a “scoundrel” and a “serial liar”. Yes, the two things go hand in hand. It is the method of criminal groups: when they see their structures, their activities, their misdeeds brought to light by the press, they try to delegitimise you, saying that you are telling lies, that you are not credible. Politicians do the same, as do those who today hold senior positions in our democratic institutions, when they feel attacked by a journalistic investigation. In the case of the book, they did not respond to the substance, they did not deny anything I had written, and I did not even receive any lawsuits. Instead, they put you on a blacklist, a method I know well, given that I have been under police protection for almost eight years because of threats and acts of intimidation by these groups. Of course, they were not the only ones to attack me, because the book also discusses the links between Fratelli d’Italia and the Italian neo-fascist far right.
Receiving threats, constantly feeling under attack, living under police protection must be difficult. What gives you the strength not to give up?
Probably the idea that I am doing something useful. It is a realisation I have not always had; in fact, at the beginning there was a considerable amount of frustration. I started covering neo-fascism and neo-Nazism when nobody was talking about it; it was an underground phenomenon. For years, both on the right and on the left, people underestimated it. Then, over time, the resurgence of fascist, racist, ultra-nationalist, nostalgic and remigrationist impulses became a global problem. I did nothing extraordinary; I simply connected the dots. Once the wave of the terrorist subversion of the 1970s had ended, it seemed clear that something was awakening. And I began reporting on that something through articles and investigations. My first book on the black galaxy dates back to 2009.
How did it affect you not to feel taken seriously enough?
For a long time, I was almost made to feel like a delusional visionary, someone who saw things that weren’t there. They told me I was paranoid, obsessive: adjectives that I welcomed with a certain degree of pleasure, because sometimes in life obsessions can prove useful. In this case, they helped bring a phenomenon to light, counter it and provide the knowledge needed to try to defeat it. In some cases, obsessions can even prove more effective than talents, because studying a phenomenon every day for years produces an expertise that you can put at the service of the community. “There comes a moment in life when honesty and dignity are no longer a choice, but a duty, if we are not to become accomplices,” Sandro Pertini used to say. And at a certain point I felt the duty, not only as a journalist but also as a citizen, to do everything possible to defend the republican Constitution through my work, that is, with the very few weapons at my disposal: the pen and the spoken word. That is why I decided to expose the fascists, reporting on their hideouts, their structures, the support they receive, their funding and the political protection they can count on.
So is that why you decided not to look the other way?
Life under police protection is complicated; it is a physical and mental cage. It is not a benefit, it is not a merit, it is not a prize. Nor does it make you feel like a hero. It is simply a misfortune that happens to you because you have annoyed someone very much. But you decide to carry on because, as Pertini said, “to do nothing means making yourself an accomplice.”
Where did your obsession with this black galaxy, which you have been exploring for more than 30 years, begin?
With football ultras and stadium terraces. I was and still am a big Atalanta fan, and when I was in high school in Bergamo I used to spend time around the stadium. There I was able to witness the gradual but inexorable politicisation of the terraces, which began turning black at the end of the 1990s. Even back then, they had been infiltrated by neo-fascist groups. Ultras and violence in stadiums became the subject of my Philosophy degree thesis. I started working as a journalist early on and, by exploring the underground world of the terraces, I immediately understood that these were communicating vessels: the terraces began providing manpower to the far right and, conversely, the far right provided manpower to the terraces. A model that emerged into the open during the Covid period, when ultras would leave the stadiums when needed and go into the streets to cause trouble.
But then you moved away from football.
Yes, I moved from the world of football to that of political militancy. But at first my interest was not driven by political or ideological reasons; it was driven by purely journalistic curiosity, which then became a method. I began tracking down the fascists who were re-emerging on the scene, constantly keeping an eye on them. And it is precisely that persistence that they cannot forgive me for.
How did you manage your relationship with the source? On a personal level, how did you experience that sort of transference that always links a journalist to someone who entrusts them with their story?
I feel a sense of gratitude towards the source who, I don’t know with what degree of awareness, made an extraordinary concrete contribution to countering neo-fascist groups. It must be made clear, however, that he is not a repentant former extremist; he is a fascist who maintains that he was, is and will continue to be a fascist, and who decided to speak after a long period of inner turmoil. For him, it was the painful and carefully considered choice of someone who felt betrayed in his ideals. Because not only did CasaPound fail to make the revolution, but over time its leadership embraced an increasingly slapdash, authoritarian and commercial management of the organisation.
By entrusting you with his story, he took a great risk. Were you afraid for his safety?
It is the journalist’s ethical duty to safeguard, conceal and protect sources. In this case there was also a question of physical safety which, in writing the book, forced me to use many devices to conceal the militant’s identity. But when he contacted me, offering me a huge amount of videos, photographs, messages, chats and internal documents, I immediately understood that this material could and should become a book. CasaPound tried to stop the publication, having its lawyers write to me on the pretext that I was going to publish their symbol on the cover. But in reality they were afraid of the content, of everything I had reported.
What were they most afraid of?
Since the source was a very senior militant, he had access to information within CasaPound that was known only to a few. For example, they did not want the names of the 70 secret financiers, the so-called “Unici”, to come out; they are essentially sympathisers. This was perhaps the book’s biggest scoop: revealing the names of people who are very well established in Italian civil society, demonstrating that CasaPound goes beyond militancy and activism and enters directly into the inner workings of the democratic state. Because the fascists are still inside the machinery of the state; they have simply changed their look. They have put away the black shirt to wear the double-breasted suit of democracy, but they have remained the same as ever.
Despite the source’s disappointment, the book also describes the pride of CasaPound militants. What kind of pride is it, in concrete terms?
Given that pride can be divided into good and healthy pride on the one hand, and harmful and destructive pride on the other, that of CasaPound’s neo-fascist groups is a pack mentality kind of pride. The book describes a political organisation, but also a human community that comes out of it very badly, with almost grotesque portraits. Characters who are anything but tough and pure, who are unable to live up to what they say, they seem like Alberto Sordi’s “arcitaliani”. And yet anyone who approaches CasaPound absorbs the proud idea of belonging to a community that makes you feel protected and defended. No longer a citizen, but a political soldier. A form of pride that then spills over into violent and destructive practices, in contempt of civic conduct and the Constitution on which our democratic Republic is founded.
So what is your idea of pride?
Pride is a term that can sound grandiose, and calling myself proud of my work makes me feel a certain embarrassment. But unlike the neo-fascists I fight, I do not belong to a group. I am a journalist who does his job and who sometimes feels proud of having chosen an uncomfortable path from every point of view, including in terms of my career. For many years I have worked as a correspondent, and in my life I have covered many different stories. But then there is one issue that you choose and that has got under my skin, turning my professional and private life upside down. I would not be able to do journalism differently, because for me journalism is either civic-minded or it is nothing.