Through the Eyes of Thugs : Books: Bill Buford wondered what made some ordinary soccer fans erupt into violent lager-swilling hooligans. So, for four years, he followed them.

The British call him “Buffalo Bill,” this fast and clever-talking culture salesman; this Granada Hills High School graduate who hung up his scuba diving suit and went East, way East to live in England; this serious editor who launched the most original and intellectually important international magazine of the 1980s, and for whom, in the rarefied British literary world, the nickname signifies both endearment and skepticism.

“Buffalo Bill” Buford recently blew into town, dressed in the carefully rumpled casualness and gray-on-gray color scheme often beloved in London. There he is primarily known as the brains behind Granta, the magazine he resurrected on a shoestring as a graduate student at Cambridge University in 1979 and coaxed into the height of chic as a cutting-edge purveyor of important writers like Salman Rushdie, Nicholson Baker and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Like all good entrepreneurs, Buford has lately spun off in another direction and become a first-time author. In doing so, he has become physically as well as intellectually heavyweight, acquiring a beer belly that is like a badge of courage for surviving his research into his new book “Among the Thugs” (W. W. Norton), a study of violence among lager-swilling British soccer hooligans.

He was not present when the most serious soccer accidents occurred--in 1985 when 39 fans were crushed to death at Heysel Stadium in Brussels and at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, in 1989 when 95 people died.

Buford discovered soccer crowds on a train carrying Liverpool fans home from a match in Wales. He watched the soccer crowd smash train windows, tear apart the seats and throw lighted matches at other passengers. Buford had never been to a soccer game, and when he asked British friends about his experience, he was surprised to learn they were jaded about the violence.

“It was just one of the things you put up with,” Buford wrote. “Every Saturday young males trashed your trains, broke the windows of your pubs, destroyed your cars, wreaked havoc on your town centers. I didn’t buy it, but it seemed to be so.”

To write his book, Buford almost became one of the thugs, entering their world and making friends.

He was surprised to learn that many of the thugs were not the dispossessed and unemployed, but often those like “Mick,” whom Buford got to know well. Mick had a well-paid job as an electrician. In his leisure time he was the leader of a “firm”--a group that organizes mayhem at matches.

Among the soccer thugs Buford met was an engineer for British Telecom, an accountant, a bank clerk. There was Henry, an employed husband and father whose idea of fun on weekends was to attend a match, down a fifth of vodka and a dozen large beers and smash up pubs.

Immersion in this strange, twisted, drunken world has led Buford to conclude that soccer thuggery is symbolic of all of British society.

“I think (Britain) is the most macho culture I’ve ever seen,” he says. “It’s got the very crude, bloated bulldog codes of masculinity--which are more extreme than anything I’ve seen here (in the United States) and more extreme than anything I’ve seen in the machismo cultures of Latin America and the Mediterranean.”

Buford explains from experience how crowd violence develops.

“I was there (at soccer matches) with people who effected that transition from being normal people, to being a group of people, to being a crowd, to being a violent crowd. One of the things I was trying to capture was what happens as that changes--what the excitement is like,” Buford says.

In the book he describes the aftermath of a match in Italy in which the Italians defeated the British team. As fans tried to leave the stadium, “I remember some screaming. There had been a stabbing (I didn’t see it) and with the screaming, everyone bolted--animal speed, instinct speed--and pushed past the police and rushed for the exits. . . .

“Throughout this last period of the match, I had been hearing a new phrase. ‘It’s going to go off.’

“ ‘It’s going to go off,’ someone said, and his eyes were glassy as though he had taken a drug.”

Buford saw a woman almost crushed by the crowd. He watched “the firm” gather to seek and attack the Italian fans. During the huge brawl that followed, Buford was hit in the head by a full beer can thrown hard enough to knock him down. An Italian boy was savagely beaten by half a dozen British thugs. Gangs of British hooligans attacked people in cars, smashed windshields and destroyed the souvenir tables at the stadium.

“In the vernacular of the supporters, it had now ‘gone off,’ ” he wrote. “With that first violent exchange, some kind of threshold had been crossed, some notional boundary: On one side of that boundary has been a sense of limits, an ordinary understanding--even among this lot--of what you didn’t do; we were now someplace where there would be few limits, where the sense that there were things you didn’t do had ceased to exist.”

Time after time over four years, Buford says, he placed himself at the front of the action of the muscular (almost exclusively male), sweaty, seething throngs packed into standing-room-only sections of dilapidated stadiums in Britain and Europe. “I made a point of always being at the front--if you’re there, the biggest component is danger,” Buford says.

As a result, he believes he has achieved new insights into the causes of crowd behavior and group violence. “I went into it (the book) assuming that the violence was an expression of political discontent. What I found instead is a generation that has discovered violence as entertainment.

“It’s almost sexual, the whole thing, the way it builds up and has a sense of climax. And there’s a definite sense of transgression, of crossing some kind of border, and once you’re on the other side of that border, it is weightless and lawless and free and dangerous.

“I think people have an appetite for being in a crowd and it’s actually an appetite to lose yourself, an appetite for an experience so intense you do lose yourself and your sense of future and past.

“It’s the most concentrated experience of the present tense. Fear can be pleasurable--the pleasure of adrenaline. What these guys would experience was an adrenaline high which was as intense and strong as any drug.”

Buford says he sees parallels between his experience in soccer crowds and the crowd behavior in the Los Angeles riots--but he believes the root causes of the disturbances here were very different from those that motivate British soccer rioters. In Los Angeles, “the sense of terrible injustice was the spring that broke all sense of limits.”

However, he says, “Once the rules went, a lot of people came rushing in--a lot of people are attracted by the magic of a crowd, the excitement of being in a place where there are no rules.”

When Buford, who was in London, heard about the riots he telephoned Richard Rayner, a British journalist who lives in Los Angeles, and asked him to do a piece for Granta.

Rayner went to observe the looters who entered Frederick’s of Hollywood. They were “people with a very refined sense of what they were acquiring: pieces of popular culture,” Buford says. “There was a rush to get Madonna’s bra. What was interesting for me was that this was crowd behavior that was a long way from the original source.”

Buford admits that such incidents obsess him: “I’m interested in when the social structures break down,” he says. “I don’t believe in civilization as a given, but I’m fascinated at the artifice, so I like the moments that show it as an artifice. I like the moments when it falls apart.”