Assassins: Luigi and His Brethren
Door Number 3
In 1919, Carlo Valdinoci placed a bomb near the front of then U.S. Attorney Mitchell Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C.
It was one of eight bombs used in different cities targeting prominent Americans.
The Palmer house bomb exploded but unfortunately for Carlo, so did he. It’s reported that his remains were gathered up over a two block area.
There were pamphlets with the bombs and they said,
War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.
Valdinoci and his co-hort were Italian anarchist followers of another Luigi — Luigi Galleani, an immigrant insurrectionist anarchist.
Together they went on a seven-year spree of terror and are widely believed to have perpetrated the 1920 Wall Street bombing which killed 28 and severely injured nearly 150 more.
Luigi Mangione, the apparent killer of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had his own manifesto and it said, in part,
Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming … No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed [sic] them to get away with it.
Mangione was born 125 years too late — their gripe and their answer is his gripe and answer, too.
The Galleanisti, as they were called, were poor, barely scraping by and their’s was an act of rage and revenge.
Mangione on the other hand is the product of a life of privilege and wealth, much more part of the “they” he refers to than the dispossessed or downtrodden.
Mangione may have been acting out of rage but he doesn’t really represent the underclass, he just adopted a cause and carried out a plan.
In that way he much resembles another American assassin--John Wilkes Booth, who murdered Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
Both were born in Maryland, well-to-do, educated, handsome to a fault and with egos to match.
Mangione ends his screed referring to “power games” by saying, “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty” — heady, egoistic and self-congratulatory stuff for a 26-year-old out-of-work gamer.
Booth was similarly convinced that he was the one who knew the Nation’s soul and by killing Lincoln the South would rise again and win the war — the truth was otherwise.
While we’re on the subject of assassins there’s also a whiff of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mangione: the unsettled wanderer with a big chip on his shoulder out to make a mark.
(Who doesn’t think Luigi could win a JFK, Jr. look-a-like contest?)
Booth, Oswald and Mangione: white men in their twenties out to “change the world” one murder at a time.
Mangione conned his legions of adoring fans by knocking off a healthcare exec--they expressed an orgasm of satisfaction at his cowardly ambush — he claimed his victim from behind — just like Booth and Oswald.
He targeted insurance providers but a good friend just spent four days in the hospital and the bill was $164,000 with no fancy procedures included--they’re extra.
There is zero rational relationship between our healthcare expectations, what providers charge and what an insurer will cover.
Luigi Mangione just picked door number three and the rest is history.
