The cowardly assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson can be convincingly classified as the work of an anarchist.  The suspect, Luigi Mangione, was found to have writings and documents evidencing that nihilistic philosophy. 

Mangione allegedly planned the execution as a radical social act to exploit the growing national dissatisfaction with private healthcare.  Although Mangione was not insured by United Healthcare, Mr. Thompson was to be the symbolic villain who represents a system that denies coverage to millions while earning billions in profits.

Beside the mounting evidence against Mangione we are learning that he comes from a prominent Italian American family in Baltimore, MD.  How their son became the focus of a horrific crime committed in New York City is a puzzle to them as well as us.  All indications attribute Luigi Mangione’s radical change, from an award-winning scholar into an accused assassin, to a fairly recent debilitating back injury.  That injury, we are told, somehow led to an anti-corporate, anarchist mindset.  Among the documents found by police is Mangione’s positive review of a manifesto by late “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, certainly an anarchist.

Although anarchism is not uniquely Italic, it has been a deadly streak in our ethnic image.  A few minutes of research easily reveal anarchists with surnames like Zangara, Galleani, Lucheni, and Bresci, as well as the famous pair Sacco and Vanzetti.  Unlike Mangione who was born with a silver spoon, most anarchists come from hardscrabble roots: impoverished families, oppressive work experience, or witnesses to government violence.  Giuseppe Zangara shared Mangione’s poor health.

Zangara tried to assassinate President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933.  His bullets missed Roosevelt but hit Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak and five bystanders.  Cermak later died of his wound.  Zangara suffered from chronic abdominal pain most of his life. If this was the reason he targeted politicians, it is only speculation.  When caught he confessed, “…I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.” He was electrocuted a few days after FDR’s inauguration.  Had Zangara succeeded, WW II might have had a different trajectory.

Anarchism is the belief that man is ultimately good and human nature perfect but doomed by any sort of organization, rules, or discipline.  Any intelligent or practical person who embraces anarchy as a cure for society’s ills denies reality.  In fact, anarchists rarely get along with each other, yet their violent acts inspire the like-minded to keep the insanity going.

In 1898, Luigi Lucheni killed Austrian Empress Elizabeth by stabbing her with a sharpened file.  (It is worth noting that sixteen years later a Serbian anarchist murdered Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand setting off the First World War.)  Lucheni’s act, and the killing by Italian police of Milanese protesting bread prices, inspired Gaetano Bresci to assassinate King Umberto I in 1900.  Polish American anarchist Leon Czolgosz, in turn, was inspired by both Luceni and Bresci to assassinate U.S. President William McKinley in 1901.  Is it any wonder that anarchists and mafiosi fueled American feared of Italian immigration?  Paterson, New Jersey was the epicenter of Italian anarchism.  Gaetano Bresci lived there before returning to Italy to murder his king. Giuseppe Zangara settled in Paterson when he applied for citizenship.

The chief propagandist of Italian American anarchism was Luigi Galleani who fled imprisonment in Italy to settle in, you guessed it, Paterson, NJ.  (Comedian Lou Costello was born in Paterson in 1906, but on the ‘good’ side of town!)  Galleani published anarchist newspapers that included the formula for nitroglycerine.  Among Galleani’s disciples were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, which didn’t help in their famous kangaroo trial.  Galleani was deported to Italy and imprisoned in 1917 but was eventually freed in failing health by the Fascist government in 1930.  (The irony is that nonviolent Sacco and Vanzetti were wrongfully executed in 1927 by the democratic State of Massachusetts.)

A bombing of a U.S. official’s home in 1919 set off the Palmer Raids which rounded up anarchists and communists in 35 cities – including Paterson, NJ.  Italian and Jewish immigrant activists were the main targets.  Despite that crackdown, on September 16, 1920, a car bomb on Manhattan’s Wall Street, the epicenter of capitalism, killed 38 people and injured hundreds more. The crime remains unsolved. And anarchists still walk among us.

Where there’s a gripe, unjust or not, there’s an anarchist. -JLM