NYPD TO CEOs: DON'T SHOW YOUR FACE IN NEW YORK CITY
'THIS ONE HAS ALL THE HALLMARKS OF SOMETHING THAT IS GOING TO INSPIRE AND CONTRIBUTE TO A CONTAGION EFFECT," NYPD’S TOP TERROR COP SAYS
Mugshot, Luigi Mangione; CEO “Wanted” poster in Manhattan on Dec. 10, 2024. Photo credits: Altoona Police Department via Twitter; screenshot.
Dec. 12, 2024
The NYPD's top counter-terrorism official has warned CEOs they better watch their backs because copycat assassination attempts are likely after Luigi Mangione's alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
"This one has all the hallmarks of something that is going to inspire and contribute to a contagion effect," Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence & Counterterrorism, said on Wednesday.
Mangione allegedly shot the 50-year-old father-of-two to death in midtown Manhattan on Dec. 4. Thompson was strolling down the sidewalk outside the Hilton hotel on his way to UnitedHealthcare's annual investor conference when a masked man walked up behind him and fired three shots from a suppressed 9mm handgun.
The dramatic street execution at dawn was caught by a surveillance camera, part of the NYPD's Lower Manhattan Security Initiative.
Mangione escaped. He evaded capture for five days until police in Altoona, Pennsylvania caught him in a McDonalds. Police said he was carrying a fake ID used by the killer to check into a Manhattan hostel before the murder, an entirely 3D printed ghost gun in 9mm, a suppressor that fit the gun, 9mm bullets and a 262-word note. The note is close to a confession.
"I do apologize for any strife or traumas but it had to be done," the note says. "Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming."
The note charges health insurance corporation with continuing “to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it." It's not "an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
The NYPD attempted to keep the note out of journalists' hands and asked them not to publish it in its entirety, but cops leaked it anyway.
Weiner, the NYPD's top counter-terrorism official, spoke on Wednesday in Washington, DC, as part of a symposium sponsored by the Atlantic Council on the "Future of US Counterterrorism policy." Like politicians and corporate media, Weiner too sermonized against "the lionization of the alleged perpetrator as a hero."
By condemning it, Weiner recognized that Thompson's killing unleashed a "torrent of online vitriol" against not just health insurance companies but corporations of all kind. She compared it to a "domestic terror attack."
In fact, the closest analogy in modern New York City history is El Sayyid Nosair's assassination of Zionist terrorist leader Meir Kahane outside the midtown Manhattan Sheraton on Nov. 5, 1990.
Before that, Mangione's alleged assassination of Thompson echoes Anarchist violence of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, Alexander Berkman's attempted murder of Henry Clay Frick and Leon Czolgosz's successful murder of Pres. William McKinley at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo in 1901. Anarchists called it “Propaganda of the deed.”
The NYPD's top terror cop sees what's coming.
She pointed to "wanted" posters pasted to lamp poles blocks from police headquarters in lower Manhattan. The color posters featured the photographs of health insurance company CEOs under the classic "wanted" headline printed in red ink followed by "DENYING MEDICAL CARE FOR CORPORATE PROFIT." The posters encouraged people to "FIGHT BACK!"
Thompson's face was on one of the posters, but his photograph was crossed out with red spray paint.
"Already in the real world yesterday in New York City we had a bunch of posters around another conference, finance conference," Weiner revealed on Wednesday. "So threatening material online."
"How are we going to deal with that?", Weiner asked rhetorically, "This is going to take on a counterterrorism footprint regardless of the underlying motivation of the individual."
Mangione is charged with murder, illegal weapons possession and using a fake ID. He is held without bail in Pennsylvania, and resisting extradition to New York.