Handsome Assassin

The Strange Case of Luigi Mangione

Most people could not name all of the ten commandments, but there are two or three that are recallable without resorting to Siri or Wikipedia. They are the sixth, the eighth and the ninth. The ninth is that of bearing false witness, which would be legally interpreted as a perversion of the course of justice, lying under oath, or framing someone for a crime they did not commit. While there is no prohibition on lying per se, to lie with the intent of incriminating someone would fall into the category of giving a false testimony. When associated with the oath a witness swears that they shall tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, it has a peculiar relationship to the mission and purpose of the prosecution and the defence to convince a judge or jury beyond a reasonable doubt that a suspect is guilty or not guilty. In so doing, the counsels have no legal or moral obligation to tell the truth, let alone the whole truth, but to interpret and present the evidence in such a way that it resonates with the court. In the case of O.J. Simpson in 1994, there was a clear distortion of the evidence to skew the facts in a certain direction that led to Simpson’s unanimous acquittal, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In short, the verdict of the People v O.J. Simpson had little to do with truth and more to do with history and politics. Mark Fuhrman, the police officer who allegedly planted a glove at the scene of the crime, was exposed as a bigot who boasted on tape about brutalising African Americans in a prior interview with a journalist. After the acquittal of the four policemen who were caught on camera beating Rodney King in 1992 and the Los Angeles riots that ensued, the case was reframed by the defence as the killing of a White woman by a Black man whose guilt, though unquestionable, was whitewashed by the political and cultural backdrop of a nation on a knife edge. Truth was martyred on the altar of politics, tricked by history into ripping off the blindfold of justice whose effigy was revealed as a white goddess presiding over a Black minority, many of whom were justifiably convinced that the law was not on their side. In the eyes of history, truth and justice are morally relative.

The murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, by Luigi Mangione presents another opportunity to question the machinations of the justice system and the power behind it. Mangione, an intelligent, well-educated twenty-six-year-old man from an affluent family may be the last person you would expect to commit such a crime. Why throw away your best years risking a life sentence to assassinate a man who is eminently replaceable in the executive pool of corporate America? The answer lies in the motive and the inspiration behind it. Mangione had allegedly been reading Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber who had been convicted for sending home-made bombs to other university professors in the 1990s. Driven by an enmity towards a technocratic society, Kaczynski’s philosophical defence of terrorism is by no means the first of its kind. In the early 19^th Century, the Luddites destroyed factory machinery in revolt against its disruptive impact on society, uprooting communities and a centuries-old culture of artisans and dragging thousands of working class men, women and children into what William Blake called the ‘dark satanic mills’ of England’s industrial revolution. Luddism continues to influence thinkers and activists on the left and right, from utopian socialists to anarchists and radical environmentalists. If society refuses to change, it must be altered from within. The crimes and abuses of the state and its ruling class have to be resisted, peacefully, violently or otherwise. When the system is unjust, it is the moral duty of the rebel to challenge and overcome it. It would be negligent, if not criminal, to do otherwise.

Luigi Mangione

While a mass movement can trigger social upheaval and even foment a revolution, a lone actor has no such power. Their options and targets are limited, but the damage they can do can be substantial, as in the case of Timothy McVeigh, whose bombing of the Oklahoma Murrah Federal building in 1995 sent shockwaves through the world. Mangione has made a similar impact, not by arbitrarily killing large numbers of people, as McVeigh did, but by targeting a particular individual, who as the CEO of a Health Insurance firm, was associated with an industry that was responsible in the eyes of some of its clients and critics for withholding and denying healthcare to patients in the pursuit of increased profits. Brian Thompson was on his way to a meeting to announce record profits to the company’s investors. So impactful was the shooting that the vast majority of reactions in the morally ambiguous realm of cyberspace were favourable to the killer, varying from tacit approval to outright adulation. We can only speculate on how many marriage proposals Mangione will receive in prison. As a handsome assassin, he has that Adonis-like beauty that would have sent Truman Capote into a rubicund flush of homoerotic ecstasy. Pictures of him bare-shirted, toned and ripped can only magnify the appeal of a hunk in the full bloom of youth taking on the venal and corrupt world of Big Pharma, which in the shadow of the opioid crisis already had a tarnished reputation. To take out one of their own is to shine a light on the monster behind the mask. It begs the question: if the Sixth Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, applies to all, what happens when a billion dollar corporation withholds payment for treatment, makes healthcare unaffordable and thereby potentially if not actually deprives patients of their lives? While few can argue that this justifies first degree murder, there is a point at which letters to Congressmen, emails to the company’s complaints department and unaffordable legal action become ineffective means to change what is an endemically corrupt and systemically unjust reality. In speaking truth to power, the power of a gun is sometimes more potent than the power of the word. In the case of Mangione, the word was transfigured into bullets, the three words, Deny, Defend and Depose etched into casings in a brutal parody of the corporation’s own documented policy of Delay, Deny, Defend that so many were outraged by. His subversive appropriation of that cold-hearted language is already legendary and whatever sentence Mangione receives, he will be celebrated as a martyr by those who empathise with him. Some may indeed stand on both sides of the fence, honouring his anger while condemning his crime. A vigilante can have good and bad angels in the same flawed and tragic composition of his nature. Good and evil are relative in a world where ethics are radically compromised. To deny access, to defend that denial, to delay the provision of care, and to make it so expensive that it is completely out of reach, is an egregious breach of trust, so egregious that the firm is arguably guilty of violating the sixth and eighth commandments, not to kill and not to steal.

Timothy McVeigh

Assassination is as old as history, but the origin of the word is relatively recent. Derived from the name of a mysterious 12^th Century Shiite sheik, Hasan I Sabbah, its provenance is a peculiar mix of truth, fiction and legend. Hasan is credited with developing assassination as a tactic of war at a time when the Muslim world was fighting the Crusaders in Syria and Palestine. As a minority sect, the Shia faced a double threat from the Christian armies of the West and the Sunni Caliphate from which it had split following the martyrdom of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet. The Shia had expanded from the Gulf of Arabia into Persia and Egypt but were facing persecution and oppression under Sunni rule. Hasan emerged as a third force, conscripting and training a secretive militia to target high-ranking Sunni and Christian leaders that included caliphs, viziers, princes and kings. As legend would have it, he recruited his followers by doping them with hashish and soliciting beautiful women to appear during their drug-induced slumber in a verdant setting that resembled the Garden of Allah. Thus entranced, they believed they had seen what awaited them in Paradise and as they came to, Hasan would convince them that once martyred they would indeed be received by the very women they had encountered.

Hasan I Sabah: etchings

The story, like the fabulous trance, is entirely fabricated and it was Hasan’s Sunni enemies who used it to demonise the Assassins who wreaked terror and havoc in their ranks. His legend continues to resonate, albeit obliquely, in the modern world. The game Assassin’s Creed bears some resemblance to the kind of missions that Hasan and his men conducted in the byzantine world of the First and Second Crusades. In certain respects, Luigi Mangione, acting in the shadow of his spiritual mentor, Ted Kaczynski, is a contemporary descendant of Hasan, a man with a mission to cut the head off the snake and wreak fear and terror in the hearts of corporate executives who think they can get away with murder. He will be celebrated for some time to come in memes, transfigured into a superhero, a masked and caped crusader, a smiling Adonis with a 3D printed ghost gun taking out the shadowy villain of a latter day Gotham where the good guys are really the bad guys and the world is turned upside down and inside out, an antinomian labyrinth in which we are always teetering on the edge of a new world chaos that is really just the old world order rebooted and unleashed.