SAINT LUIGI: A GOOD OUTLAW IS AMERICAN LIKE APPLE PIE
THE OUTPOURING OF POPULAR SUPPORT FOR ALLEGED ASSASSIN LUIGI MANGIONE IS PART OF A LONG AMERICAN TRADITION OF HONORING OUTLAWS
Luigi Magione, St. Sebastian. Photo credit: Altoona, Pa., Police Department.
Dec. 16., 2025
To the horror of pundits and politicians from both parties nationwide, the American public turned an assassin into a saint last week. While the elite shook in fear, the folk tradition of anointing outlaws is as American as apple pie—especially when state power ebbs or its legitimacy is questioned, as it is now.
Luigi Mangione allegedly shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to death outside the health insurance giant's annual stockholder gala in New York City on Dec. 4.
"Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming," Mangione allegedly wrote in a note police said they found in his possession when they arrested him in Altoona, Pennsylvania, five days later.
Judging by the flood of social media posts and other public comments praising Mangione and condemning the corporate-controlled, profit-driven American healthcare system, millions of Americans agreed. Even suburban moms morbidly quipped Thompson's killing might inspire potential school shooters to gun down corporate titans instead.
Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence & Counterterrorism, agreed the popular rage will likely lead to copycats.
"This one has all the hallmarks of something that is going to inspire and contribute to a contagion effect," Weiner said last Wednesday.
Clayton Patterson, an outlaw folk historian based in New York City, helped contextualize the public sentiment on Sunday.
"There's plenty of other cases where people think 'Oh good its about time that fucking happened,'" the 72-year-old Patterson told The Free Lance by phone from his Outlaw Art Museum, which he founded on the Lower East Side in 1986.
"The guy is kinda needed," Patterson opined. "Things are all fucked up right now."
Not only is "the government out of whack and out-of-touch with people," he explained, but corporations and "all these greedy fucks have just destroyed the country."
To understand all the popular support for Mangione, one must consider the long American tradition of loving a good outlaw.
America's Founding Fathers were, in the eyes of the Crown and sometimes even each other, the OG outlaws. Henry Knox, for example, was one of George Washington's top generals, but he had also belonged to a Boston street gang.
In 1849, Henry David Thoreau was so enraged by slavery and the Mexican-American war he urged Americans to resist them even if it meant being jailed.
"The mass of men serve the state," Thoreau charged in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Consequently, he wrote, they "command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt."
Soldiers and police "have the same sort of worth as horses and dogs," Thoreau added. Politicians rarely make "moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil ... as God."
Throughout the century, Americans attended public executions of murderers and cheered the condemned as they walked to the gallows.
"Eulogies of the deceased are pronounced as if he were a martyr instead of an executed criminal," a government panel investigating the death penalty and charged with recommending improvements reported in 1888. "His evil deeds are glorified into acts of heroism."
“‘He was game to the last,’” is how the men and women who faced their fate without flinching were honored by witnesses, according to the report.
Sometimes family and friends even partied with the corpse.
After a public execution "duly performed with all the solemnity of the law," the report reveals, "the friends of the deceased, his companions in crime and his sympathizers in its commission ... indulge in the most drunken and beastly orgies."
The "most disgusting scenes of this character have occurred ... in the city of New York,” the report adds.
These public spectacles bothered the government panel so much it recommended making executions private by moving them behind prison walls—exactly what New York and every other state did in the years that followed.
By the mid-20th Century, migrant ghettos and the Great Depression had given rise to about a dozen iconic gangsters and gunmen so embedded in the American collective consciousness even the least formally educated can correctly identify Al Capone as one of them.
Bonnie Parker, 23, and Clyde Barrow, 25, romanticized outlaw love forever when they crisscrossed the country committing armed robbery and murdering anyone who got in their way. They were martyred in a police ambush in Louisiana in 1934.
By 1980, outlaws were considered so significant that folk historian Richard E. Meyer wrote a treatise on them titled The Outlaw: A Distinctive American Folktype. Meyer asserted true outlaws tended to share 10 identifiable characteristics, which distinguished them from common criminals.
In sum, according to Meyer, the "outlaw-hero is a 'man of the people.'" He stands "in opposition to certain established, oppressive economic, civil and legal systems."
Using Meyer's criteria, it's easy to see why millions of Americans consider Mangione a heroic outlaw instead of a common criminal.
UnitedHealthcare doubled its denials of treatment between 2019 and 2022, New York Magazine reports. Thompson took the helm in 2021, and doubled the corporation's profits by $5 billion in two years primarily by using AI "to kick ailing and disabled Medicare patients out of nursing homes and rehabilitative programs, causing untold misery and penury."
Corporations like UnitedHealthcare, Mangione's alleged note explained, "continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it."
"Evidently," the 262-word note concluded, "I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”