Americans love their killers. Still, Luigi Mangione, who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson dead in December 2024, may be the most beloved of them all. It took a special sort of fetishist to see something in maniacs like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed for no reason other than their sadistic compulsions. Mangione, though? Nearly every American has been ground down by our country’s healthcare system.

Mangione’s defenders rarely dispute that he gunned down Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare

Mangione’s defenders rarely dispute that he gunned down Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare

Police had prepared for a mob last Friday, as Mangione appeared in a Manhattan courthouse to plead guilty to federal stalking charges. But by midmorning, the officers outnumbered everyone they’d been sent to contain. The cult of Luigi had not come. Still, the press had, in force: those of us outside were, by my count, about 98 per cent press and 2 per cent Luigi’s admirers. The photographers, finding nothing to shoot, shot one another. A BBC reporter, also at a loss, attempted to interview me.

So who, 19-some months after Thompson’s killing, still keeps the faith? Well, there was Fione, 42, a coordinator in a home care agency. She’d moved to the United States from China, she told me, and had discovered that ‘insurance is, you know, just like a scam.’ Companies like UnitedHealthcare, she told me, ‘charge people for their human right’ – and Thompson, as CEO, had ‘murdered thousands of people using his laptop.’

I asked Fione why she’d come to the courthouse. She hoped Mangione would see that she ‘didn’t forget what you did for the patients.’ She’d cancelled a medical appointment to be there.

By the courthouse steps sat Kristopher Aadahl, 39, a homeless man with a pentagram tattooed on one hand and an ‘A’, for anarchy, on the other. He admired Mangione, he told me, as a man ‘willing to sacrifice his own life to benefit others.’ Today he wore a MAGA hat, but he’d first become politically involved on the other side of the spectrum: with Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign,........

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