Why a rapier-faced assassin’s blatant hit on a CEO is an era-defining crime

Plus, the LA Times’ daft new “bias meter” and Georgie’s unique Christmas list

What does it say about a moment in time when the most bonding topic of national discourse is the latest murder? As everyone retreats to their news silos and trusts nothing outside them, true crime, gurgling forth from every streamer, podcast, and news platform, is the last safe refuge of community. The masked rapier-faced assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, struck down at 6:44 a.m. outside New York Hilton Midtown, provided holiday parties with an unending source of macabre conversational icebreakers. (Except, perhaps, “Are you one of the people who commented with a grinning emoji under ‘thoughts and prayers for the family?’”)

Now that the alleged gunman has been nabbed in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, this elusive pimpernel with a ghost gun has a name: Luigi Mangione; a background: 26-year-old engineering grad from Penn from an affluent and distinguished Baltimore family; and a manifesto: a handwritten anti-capitalist screed. Mangione is being hailed as the 21st-century heir to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, whose letter bombs and 35,000-word manifesto about the evils of modern technology sowed terror for seventeen years between 1978 and 1995. But Kaczynski’s diseased rants, as even Elon Musk acknowledged after Kaczynski’s suicide in prison last year, turn out to be disturbingly prophetic. The Unabomber saw modern technology as inherently menacing, a source of alienation and psychological distress. “Would you like it if people lived in a virtual world?” he wrote. “If machines were smarter than people? If, in the future, people, animals and plants were products of technology? If you don't like these ideas, then for you the computer and biological sciences clearly are dangerous.” Mangione himself was accomplished in computer science, a tech whiz whose life seems to have been irrevocably changed by a spinal injury that left him with lasting pain. Bitterness seeped in. His world view went dark. He withdrew from his friends and family. He apparently expressed his admiration for the Unabomber’s manifesto in a review on Goodreads in January, stating, “It's simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”

We don’t yet know what pushed him from admiring Kaczynski to emulating him. But Mangione’s manifesto offers clues. He asserts that as UnitedHealthcare’s market capitalization has grown, American life expectancy has not and he condemns companies that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”

The resonance of his evil actions, the sinister brilliance of his inscribed bullet casings, and the shocking way a middle-aged father of two’s brutal killing has unleashed a social media fury not at his murderer but at the health insurance industry will, I suspect, make the slaying of Brian Thompson an era-defining crime. The viral ugliness of the response on social media is just a taste of what is boiling in the hearts of countless Americans ground down by the cost of healthcare and the rejection of their claims. (An ER nurse posted on TikTok, “The things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick.”)

It makes the conclave of tech titans, overpaid CEOs, and Wall Street Gilded Agers in Trump’s new court at Mar-a-Lago seem even more discordant. According to the New York Times, a week after the election, Trump brought Elon Musk and another bestie, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, to a meeting with his inner circle. “I brought the two richest people in the world today,” Mr. Trump told his advisers. “What did you bring?

Perhaps this unseemly cabal should take heed of the seeds of a threatening new national mood: Brian Thompson’s pitiless assassin has become a chilling new folk hero.

Obsessionals

When I was editor of The Daily Beast, we used to identify murders—and other scandals—that took hold of the public imagination as “obsessionals.” For murders to remain obsessionals, there’s a requirement of ambivalence, unease, and questions—even if the crime is solved—that are never conclusively answered (cf. the new Netflix exhumation of the heartbreaking eternal baby doll JonBenét Ramsey). Sorry, Menendez brothers, you may have missed your moment. Too many questions have been answered in the recent streamer binge. Plus, it was a bad break that at the peak of newly aroused sympathies from the Ryan Murphy Netflix series, Democratic DA George Gascón was unseated in the election by hard-assed former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman, who ran on a clean-up-crime platform and is now re–reviewing the Menendez clemency recommendation. One feels the zeitgeist turning. Soon I may no longer be obsessed with what happens to the Menendez brothers and, sadly, others may feel the same. Meanwhile, fresher murders come on the market. NBC’s Peacock streaming channel paid a reported million bucks to sign up the estranged wife of accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann, Asa Ellerup, as the subject for a documentary about his forthcoming trial. The deal has been slammed by relatives of his sex worker victims, who first were ignored and now are exploited.

Crime vampire that I am, I can’t wait to see it. The Gilgo story was for me the ultimate obsessional when I first assigned it as a story to Christine Pelisek for the Beast in 2011. There was something so haunting about the images of dune grass blowing in the wind on that bleak strip of Long Island where police dogs found the forgotten escorts trussed up in burlap sacks, only an hour from the glitz of the Hamptons social scene. How had those tragic Jane Does ended up there? Why did no one seem to be looking for them after so many years? We now know that the monstrous suspect is Rex Heuermann, a hulking B-level architect you would have been happy to hire to ensure your new HVAC system complied with building codes, who was caught thanks to DNA on a tossed pizza crust. Rereading Pelisek’s piece today, I was struck by how close she came to uncovering his identity. The boyfriend/pimp of one of the victims told Pelisek he had informed the police he could point them to the house of a john on Long Island where he had dropped her off in the past. That lead was not followed up at the time by the cops, who cared little about women discarded by society, though they were never forgotten by their shattered families.

Bias Bull

Why is LA Times owner and biotech tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong so frantic to make a good impression on the Trump regime? This respected former transplant surgeon and vaccine investor even made an approving comment (“Not many 70 year olds could do that!”) about a video showing a gnarly, bare-chested RFK Jr. doing a pull- up rollover at a gym.

Not content with killing his paper’s Kamala Harris endorsement to engender greater reader “trust,” Shiong's newest craven idea is an AI-driven “bias meter”— which in former times was called a rigorous editor—to appear beside stories by his beleaguered journalists. (Libel attorneys representing powerful plaintiffs outraged by probing investigative inquiry will no doubt be thrilled to death.)

The daft pervasive myth amongst those who don’t understand how real journalism works—with its required sourcing, fact-checking, and vetting—is that there is something in the ether called “objective truth.” This has been turned into shorthand for both sides getting equal time, with no conclusive negative finding, even when the facts support it. But as CNN’s Christiane Amanpour put it in a 2023 interview, “Objective means cover all sides. It does not mean come to the same judgment about all sides.” Or as Watergate legend Carl Bernstein likes to say, “Truth is not neutral.”

The current “bias” bromides are just a right-wing demand made of the liberal media, designed to castrate what few testicles they have left. Media owners are becoming so cowed by Trump, they stoop to impugning the integrity of their own newsrooms. If the media has actually lost credibility for seeming “biased,” why are these truth-seeking moguls not exercised about Fox News, which lost a humongous $787.5 million defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems for all the lies their anchors knowingly told on air, but otherwise suffered no consequences? And if the public is so concerned about trust, why does Fox remain triumphantly ascendant in the ratings?

All He Wants for Christmas

The best thing about the insane time crunch between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve is the receipt of my son Georgie’s Christmas gift list. For those who are not read in, Georgie, who will be 39 in January, is on the spectrum and refreshingly unfiltered. For the last two years, after the crushing blow of his beloved dad’s death left him unmoored, he has been my roommate in Manhattan, a domestic arrangement I feared might be a disaster but has turned out to be the saving of us both.

He is now back to his buoyantly oblivious self. He can often be glimpsed wandering in the background of my Zooms, half naked in a towel wielding an enormous loofah and singing the jingle from the Ozempic ads. In a few weeks, he will move out to his own place, a long-term goal for us both that I now dread. When I first floated where he might want to live, he replied, “Las Vegas,” but a one-bedroom in an apartment building a block from me seems like a good compromise.

Georgie’s 2024 Xmas List

1. Leather pants

2. Gift cards up the wazoo

3. A Fuck Off welcome mat

4. A very big furry purse made of real leopard

5. My own martini glass

6. Earpod headphones, the kind that go in your ear

7. Six extra large nightshirts

8. A Subway sandwich gift card

9. Socks, Mom you are always taking them

10. A lot of kitchen stools

Happy holidays, dear Georgie. How am I going to manage without you?