On the day they finally killed him, Roberto “Pimpi” Camino was out in his city enjoying what was becoming a boozy all-nighter. Locally, Camino was famous: he was the head of the hardcore fan club of Newell’s Old Boys, the adored professional soccer team of Rosario, Argentina. And in Rosario, a prosperous and populous port on the coast of the Paraná River, Camino’s position meant something: renown, respect, fear, and—in a clandestine, roundabout kind of way—a significant cash flow. He was also famously debauched: a bad gambler, he was known to fuel himself up for long nights of high-stakes punto banco with generous helpings of cocaine and a curious mixture of Dom Perignon and Red Bull.

Camino had taken leadership of Newell’s extremist fan club—known, in Argentina, as a barra brava—in the late ’90s. He ruled with choppy control: there were constantly oppositional factions who fiended for his spot. He’d travel with a bodyguard, sometimes even several at a time, but he was still vulnerable. Three years before his death, in the summer of 2007, Camino was in his Peugeot 607 when a gunman—Leilo Ungaro, an old enemy of Camino’s from their joint childhood in the infamous Rosario neighborhood of La Tablada—pulled up on him. One bullet zinged through his pelvis, another smashed through his abdomen.

ADVERTISEMENT

He survived that attack, but by the top of Newell’s 2009 season, his reign was over. It wasn’t violence that did him in, but a popular coup: Diego Ochoa, a thirtysomething long-haired son of a baker, had pushed him out. Relative to the barra brava’s rank-and-file, Ochoa was both better educated (he’d gone through some high school) and better off. He never actually spent much time working in the family business. Nonetheless, he was known as “Panadero”: The Baker.

He established himself over Camino by culling support with the barra brava’s youngest members. He’d take them drinking and partying. He’d make sure all were involved, and all had a good time. In text messages and phone calls later intercepted by Rosario prosecutors, Ochoa called them “the kids”; he would tell people he wanted to “make them happy”—to “pamper them a little.”

“When I was in the street, I was at his side,” a barra brava member named Elias “Gordo” Alderete would later tell prosecutors. “I had [it] like a king. He gave me everything I wanted.” And “in exchange,” Alegrete explained, “I accompanied him, to care, to secure him.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Ochoa’s charges had silly nicknames—“Pollo,” “El Indio,” “Virus”—and a serious fealty. His primary accomplices were divided into two tactical units. One was the fuerza de choque, or strike force: they were tasked with handling any physical threats, either from everyday fans or from rebellious elements of the barra brava, that occurred in the stands at Newell’s games.

The others worked the knottier problems. They were the sicarios—the hit men. As another member of the barra brava would later explain to the authorities, “If they needed … someone heavier to ‘tirar tiros’”—take shots—“Ochoa would send for them.”

A year into Ochoa’s tenure as the recognized chief of the Newell’s barra brava, in the early morning of March 19, 2010, Camino was out drinking at a Rosario pub called Ezeiza. In the months since being ousted, Camino was still running his own, breakaway faction of the barra brava. He and his group were aware of their precarious position, but they hadn’t been cowed into hiding.

ADVERTISEMENT

Later reports would say he’d been tailed that night by a man in a burgundy Crypton motorcycle, who then relayed Camino’s location to his killers. At some point between 5 and 6 in the morning, Camino stepped out of the bar to have a smoke. That’s when two of Ochoa’s sicarios—including Rene Ungaro, the brother of the man who attacked Camino in 2007—walked out of a car and shot Camino five times, hitting him in the legs and the heart. Later, his body was seen being dumped out of a BMW and out onto the front steps of Carrasco Hospital.

At the time of his death, according to a report in the local Rosario newspaper Olé, Camino was plotting on seizing back the control that Ochoa had taken. “Preparaba un ejercito,” they wrote: he was “preparing an army.”