Very well-written article from
The New Yorker:
Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero
The support for the alleged shooter is rooted in an American tradition of exalting the outlaw.
By
Jessica Winter
December 13, 2024
He is from a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, the valedictorian of a prestigious private school, an Ivy League graduate. His family and friends speak of him fondly, and they worried about him when he fell off the grid, some months ago. His reading and podcast habits, as gleaned from his Goodreads account and other traces of his online footprint, can be summed up as “declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism,” according to Max Read, who
writes on tech and Internet culture. In other words, a typical-enough diet for a contemporary twentysomething computer-science guy, and certainly not the stuff of alarm.
He is, by consensus, handsome, and jacked. “Holy happy trail, Batman!” Stephen Colbert enthused, over an en-plein-air portrait of a shirtless and beaming Luigi Mangione, who was briefly America’s most wanted man, and perhaps still is. “You know that guy’s Italian, because you could grate parmesan on those abs,” Colbert went on. (His fellow late-night host Taylor Tomlinson was more succinct: “Would.”) In his mug shot, Mangione, chiselled and defiant, appears ready for his closeup in a reboot of “Rocco and His Brothers.” He wears a hoodie well. On Monday night, a friend texted me a photograph of police escorting a
dramatically backlit Mangione to his arraignment, and added, “Even the cops are trying to get him acquitted.”
Last week, Internet citizens were
making dark, cathartic jokes about the fatal shooting, on December 4th, in Manhattan, of Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, which is the insurance arm of the world’s largest health-care company. Now that Mangione has been provisionally identified as Thompson’s assailant, and has been arrested and charged with Thompson’s murder, the terminally online are decorating Mangione’s picture with glittery graphics and heart emojis,
sharing fancams of Mangione scored to Charli XCX’s “Spring Breakers,” and editing Mangione into time-stamped snapshots to try and provide him with an alibi. (A sympathetic death-metal band
posted to X, “Free Luigi who on December 4th around 6 AM helped us load our trailer and drive with us to play a secret set in California which is about 2.8k mi from Manhattan and at the show he bought merch from every band except for the hoodies because he said he hates them.”)
In trying to establish a motive for the alleged murder, authorities have cited
a note that was apparently found on Mangione when he was arrested at a McDonald’s, in central Pennsylvania. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” it read. “A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.” The note also stated that UnitedHealthcare’s size and power have permitted it to “abuse our country for immense profit.” Thompson, who became C.E.O. in 2021, increased UnitedHealthcare’s profits by five billion dollars in just two years. Between 2019 and 2022, UnitedHealthcare more than doubled its denial rate for prior-authorization requests for post-acute care. One of Thompson’s signature innovations was to use a predictive algorithm to kick ailing and disabled Medicare patients out of nursing homes and rehabilitative programs, causing untold misery and penury. And UnitedHealthcare has increasingly demanded—and often denied—prior authorization for any number of ordinary necessities:
colonoscopies, or
insulin, or pain
medication following major surgery, or physical, occupational, or speech
therapy.
As of now, Mangione remains in Pennsylvania, where his legal team is fighting his extradition to New York. The support and affection for him that predominates online—its photo negative is the fear and loathing directed at our health-care system—appears to extend to the jail where he is being held. On Wednesday, Mangione’s fellow-inmates could be heard
calling out of their windows, “Free Luigi!” and “Luigi’s conditions suck!” Meanwhile, Luigi
merch is already hitting the market.
More than forty years ago, Richard E. Meyer, a scholar of American folklore, noted the essential difference between the outlaw—which Meyer defined as “a distinctively, though not exclusively, American folktype”—and the mere criminal. He wrote that
“the American outlaw-hero is a ‘man of the people’; he is closely identified with the common people, and, as such, is generally seen to stand in opposition to certain established oppressive economic, civil and legal systems peculiar to the American historical experience.” (The italics are Meyer’s.) The outlaw-hero’s persona is that of a “good man gone bad,” not unlike the oncology patient Walter White, of “Breaking Bad,” who started cooking meth because his insurance didn’t cover his cancer treatments. To remain in good standing as an outlaw-hero, a man’s crimes must “be directed only toward those visible symbols which stand outside of and are thought of as oppressive toward the folk group,” Meyer writes. In exchange for both his audacity and his discretion, “
the outlaw-hero is helped, supported and admired by his people.”
In the Reconstruction-era South, the outlaw-heroes Jesse James and Sam Bass “robbed banks and trains, symbols of the forces which kept the common man in economic and social bondage,” Meyer wrote. The bank robber and murderer Charles Arthur (Pretty Boy) Floyd, whose crimes spanned Ohio, Oklahoma, and Missouri during the Great Depression, idolized James as a Wild West spin on Robin Hood. Floyd took in possible tall tales “about how Jesse and his boys shared their bounty with widows and orphans,” Michael Wallis writes in “
Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd.” “Adoring fans said that when Jesse plundered a train, he examined the palms of the passengers and took valuables only from the ‘soft-handed ones.’ ”
Floyd likewise shared his loot with those in need; according to several accounts, Wallis writes, “when Charley robbed banks, he sometimes ripped up mortgages in shreds before the banker had an opportunity to get the papers recorded.” This magnanimous gesture, though it burnished Floyd’s legend, would have also considerably slowed his escape from the scene of his crime. He hid in plain sight: attending weddings and funerals, crashing with family and friends, and getting treated as a dreamboat celebrity wherever he went.
By contrast, Mangione lasted all of five days on the lam, and appears not to have redistributed any of UnitedHealthcare’s revenues. In other ways, though, he comfortably fits into Meyer’s taxonomy of the antihero. The U.S. health-insurance system is both “oppressive” and quintessentially “peculiar” to America, as the only developed nation in the world that does not provide universal health care. It has been widely speculated that Mangione’s alleged descent into violence may have been spurred by a debilitating back injury and subsequent spinal-fusion surgery. A health-care C.E.O. who receives ten million dollars in annual compensation is likely disqualified from membership in a “folk group,” and another note that Mangione reportedly wrote indicated that he did not want to endanger that group. (“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents.”)
Like Floyd, Mangione may also have a knack for the myth-building flourish. Bullet casings left behind at the murder scene read “deny,” “defend,” and “depose,” borrowing from the obstructionist nomenclature of the health-insurance industry—as if its bureaucratic weapons were being turned against one of its own. And, although the manhunt for Mangione came to an ignominious end, early on, he hinted at being a more artful dodger, as when he allegedly left the perfect gag gift for the N.Y.P.D. in Central Park: a backpack stuffed with Monopoly money.
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