Advice, Luck, and Random Help

“You just need to make powerful friends,” said Diego, a Red Cross volunteer in San Martin square. “If you have friends high up, and they introduce you around, the rest can’t touch you.” I had explained that I was doing a study on soccer hooligans and he had readily offered his advice. Like most Argentines, he started with a warning: “you know, things are pretty f**ked up here, you should be careful.” He listed a few incidents, each ending with someone beaten (or worse) for being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, wearing the wrong jersey. Or for having money. But “you’ll be fine if you make friends with the bosses,” he assured me. “You know what you could do? You could go to jail,” Diego went on.

“You mean…” I knew I would have to prove myself, to some extent and in some way, to get access to the barrabravas. But Diego’s advice had running through my head images from a whole other level of manhood-demonstration. Images of me meticulously sharpening the back end of a toothbrush, before finally jamming it into the tattooed lower back of someone named Bruno. And then the more realistic images of Bruno and a gang of guys named Tony and Gordo stomping me relentlessly, my broken toothbrush kicked hopelessly far from my outstretched hand.

“I mean you could write a letter asking for permission to enter the jail where they’re holding Rafa Di Zeo.” Diego brought me back to a slightly more believable reality. “Seriously, you think they’d let me into the prison to interview him.”

“Well if he wants you to get in, you’ll get in.” Rafael Di Zeo, head of “La 12,” Boca Juniors’ barra, turned himself in a year and a half ago, after a couple of months in hiding. He is serving a 4+ year sentence for something called “aggravated coercion,” related to his role in an especially bad bout of football violence in 1999.

So my first plan for accessing “La 12” involved sending letters “up the river,” asking politely for permission to speak to a jailed head hooligan. Other thoughts have involved randomly introducing myself at game time, visiting a body shop in La Boca where some barras hang out, and buying a “tourist pass” to ride the bus and watch a game with the boys from “La 12.”

Still unsure what route to take, I spent my first week focused on finding an apartment and getting settled in. A few days later, I was sitting in a friend’s café trying, futilely, to convince him that 9-11 was not an inside job. He is Ukrainian, an avid internet reader, and much more-, if not better-, informed than I am about 9-11 theories. His Spanish is also much better than mine. So it was a welcome interruption to my frustration when two older locals walked in to start an afternoon of drinking. They greeted us coldly and Dmitri gave them their beers and went to the back to help his mother with something, leaving me alone with the less-than-friendly drinkers. A few minutes later one of them, apparently bored of his companion’s company, turned and asked me where I was from. “From the U.S.,” I said, “near the capital.” He immediately walked over and extended his hand to shake mine. “Let me congratulate you and your countrymen on your new president. We’re all expecting good things from him.”

The conversation was much warmer from then on. “What are you doing in Argentina? Anything I can help you with?”

“Working on my Spanish and, if you can believe it, studying football fans.”

“Wow,” he replied, “very interesting. You know, I have a friend who is part of ‘La 12.’ Actually, I’m his lawyer, he’s in jail. His name’s Rafael Di Zeo, you might have heard it before.”

I have learned never to lie or be vague about what I am doing. Dependent as I am on contacts in order to enter the relatively closed world of barrabravas, I make as many friends as I can, hoping that one or two will have friends with friends who can help me. In Paraguay it was “refreshments counter guy” and Julio from Club Olimpia, who gave me my most important contacts. Here, in my first week in Argentina, I had met the man in charge of getting Rafa out of prison and back running the streets of La Boca and the cheap seats of Boca’s stadium, “La Bombonera.” He promised to leave his number with Dmitri, and to ask Di Zeo if he would talk to me.

I took the subway back to my hostel marveling at my good fortune. My best project lead yet had come as I debated conspiracy politics with a Ukrainian, a friend of a friend’s boyfriend, in his small café on an out-of-the-way corner of one of Buenos Aires’ many middle class neighborhoods. And my good luck started with the lawyer’s high hopes for our President elect. I have no idea whether he would have offered to help me under other circumstances. But I like to think that I was one of the first Americans to benefit directly from the election of Barack Obama.