Guilty Pleasures

Luigi Mangione and the making of a folk hero

‘Mama I’m in love with a criminal.
This kinda love ain’t rational’
- Britney Spears

‘You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge the starving of their deadly sin
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then after that, your preaching can begin.’
-Macheath, the Beggar’s Opera

Tiktok user: cloutcandle

He was a handsome lad in his early twenties with dark eyes and a nice smile, and he was wanted by the law for crimes he had certainly committed. Nobody thought he was innocent. Nobody seemed to care. A worrying proportion of the public was openly hoping he’d get away. The media loved him. The ladies loved him. His name was on everyone’s lips.

His name was Jack Sheppard. He grew up in a London workhouse. He was also known as Gentleman Jack or Honest Jack, the joke being that he was neither, which was extremely funny in 1724. He was an incompetent highwayman and a mediocre thief - but he was very, very good at breaking out of jail. He escaped from Newgate prison four times. Once, he managed to get all the way down the outer wall on a blanket rope while carrying his entire girlfriend, a buxom lady called Liz Lyons who was about twice his size. By his third escape this scrawny little man had become a huge embarrassment to the authorities - who were already struggling to keep order in the capital - and a celebrity among the London underclass. It was well known that Sheppard was, at very least, an accessory to murder. Everyone loved him anyway. For the whole summer, as the thief-takers scoured the city, the broadsheets and folksingers were simping hard for Jack Sheppard. Almost exactly three centuries later, the right sort of ethically suspect protagonist still does far more political damage by force of personality than they do by committing actual crime.

There’s nothing moral about narrative. When it comes to political violence, a great story will have got halfway to the border with a fast car and a fake passport before sober ethical judgement has fired its first shot. This is why stories are powerful and dangerous, and why people who have tell them professionally should not only be paid, we should be paid a protection fee.

Which brings us to Luigi Mangione. Twenty-six, Italian-American, photogenic, allegedly the vigilante who stalked and killed a CEO in Manhattan last week, and definitely the main character of the the dog-end days of our democratic winter.

Considered purely from a narrative as opposed to an ethical point of view, the pacing of this story has been phenomenal. First, we heard that Brian Thompson, the CEO of notoriously heartless insurance firm United Healthcare, had been shot dead in New York. Then we heard that that this was a politically motivated killing. Then we heard that the killer was still on the run - although he had been caught on camera pulling down his mask to flirt with a hostel desk clerk.

Yes, I know. I personally pitched a beat like this in a writers’ room six months ago and was told to come up with something fresher. It’s a cliché because swaggering young criminals having been fucking up in predictable ways for centuries, and the security footage of the suspect shows him flashing the sort of smile that has definitely persuaded past-me to make poor life choices. By the time I woke up, my girl-support groupchats were melting down over the nice smile on the alleged assassin, which says a lot about why girl-support groupchats are necessary in the first place.

Then he was caught and identified, and he turned out to have big brown eyes and a cracking jawline, and the internet lost its goddamn mind.

Mangione appeared in court today after spending almost a fortnight as the main character around the world. People are still scrawling his name on walls and tattoos and t-shirts and flooding their feeds with tribute videos, pumping out deranged horny fanfiction, poring over every facet of his digital footprint and swearing blind that he was with them on the 4th of December between 6 and 11 am. And the enthusiasm wasn’t just coming from the usual suspects. The little sliver of the left that’s always salivating over imaginary violence and justifying its own inertia by refusing to countenance any resistance short of armed revolution is the most predictable and least interesting part of the fandom. But Mangione has fans across the political spectrum. Unlike the many, many other angry young men with guns who have committed acts of public murder in recent memory, this one seems to have tapped into a thrumming vein of popular resentment.

Stories of populist criminals and ‘social bandits’, according to historian Eric Hobsbawm, persist because, “everyone has personal experience of being unjustly treated by individuals and institutions and the poor, weak and helpless have it a lot of the time. And insofar as the myth of the bandit represents not only freedom, heroism and the dream of a general justice, but more especially personal insurgence against personal injustice…the idea of the individual justicer survives, particularly among those who lack the collective organizations which are the main defense against such wrongs.”

The term Hobsbawm is missing here is fandom.

Fandom, like sex, is often political and rarely politically correct. Mangione himself seems unnervingly ordinary. He’s not - thank goodness - a career activist or an anarchist militant. Everyone is excused from playing purity politics with this one. One of the prerequisites for folk heroism, according to Hobsbawm, is the idea of an average citizen pushed beyond the law by personal injustice. Mangione’s manifesto - he had one, of course - tells an anguished story about a young man watching his mother suffer relentless, excruciating pain as insurers refused her care. His fans have their own theories.

For research purposes, I spent an enjoyable evening on A03, the biggest fan-fiction repository, and one of the best places to take the temperature of the collective head when it’s running a fever. Many, many people have clearly spent weeks doing nothing but bash out frenzied fantasies where Luigi Mangione commits various acts of intermittently erotic sedition. Pick your poison. As long as a lonely pervert somewhere in the world can imagine it, you can read it. Mangione appears alongside Batman, Deadpool and a lot of anime heroes I’m too ignorant to identify. The overall tone is ridiculously horny and relentlessly political. Fanfiction is there for people to live out fantasies that aren’t. Surprisingly, for every story where you’re the hostel clerk getting swept off your feet and over the desk by this dashing young savage, there’s at least one where he just does a big speech about capitalism and describes the coming revolution.

Which seems to be what a lot of lonely perverts all over the world actually want. I can’t personally comment on the thirst trap of it all, because my heart still belongs to Jack Sheppard like it has since I was twelve and saw a daytime documentary when I was home sick from school. I know he was a bad lad who probably had awful teeth and has also been dead for three centuries. Like Britney says - it’s not rational, it’s physical.

Fandom, like sex, is often political and rarely politically correct. People like what they like, and there’s not much stopping them, particularly not with scolding. For everyone bold enough to have personally posted and shared Luigi Mangione memes and tribute videos and novelty merchandise and ironic singles there are many more who are wetting themselves in private because they won’t end up on a watch list. Because the anti-woke brigade, who are hopelessly pickled in the perverse logic of gotcha politics, will make up a leap on any chance to condemn the most mild-mannered Democrat as a depraved communist for displaying an improper emotion. I would note that few conservatives have had the guts to directly disown Mangione himself. As far as anyone can tell from the frenzy of fannish sleuthing through his digital footprint, the alleged assassin is not on the far right or the far left. He seems to think healthcare CEOs are ‘parasites’ who ‘had it coming’, but he also has some wacky ideas about birthrates and reposts Peter Thiel. He seems, in other words, like the ordinary sort of gently bevelled edgelord you can find in any college bar. Nobody recruited him. Ideologically, he was not an extremist, although allegedly deciding to stalk and shoot a C-suite executive is fairly extreme.

Yet again, two wrongs make a mess.

Meanwhile, what remains of the liberal establishment has pursed its collective lips, dusted off its puritan reflexes and told everyone who dared treat this as less than a tragedy that they are bad and wrong and heartless. Somehow, I’m still surprised by my own team’s capacity to answer come at the zeitgeist with the emotional intelligence of a sausage roll. And yet -

I have never in fifteen years of political journalism used the phrase ‘virtue signalling’, but I’m seeing it now from people who I know can do better than shaming others for failing to produce the correct affect. The history of class society is the history of a wealthy few demanding piety and virtue from the poor and sick and desperate -without for a moment holding themselves to the same standards or even imagining that they should.

In 18th-century London, people thought that God was rewarding the rich for good behavior. By extension, the hundreds of thousands of destitute men and women and children packing the filthy slums had been born morally deficient and should accept their lot. What social order there was depended on that lie. The idea of escaping your circumstances was an outrage against common decency. It must have been glorious to watch Jack Sheppard do it over and over again.

A good story lets you feel things you’re afraid to think. I was absolutely obsessed with the Jack Sheppard story when I first heard it in my early teens. I was at least as miserable and trapped as any other prepubescent girl, and for some reason, the idea of someone who never had to behave and just kept on getting away dug its fingers into the tender parts of my imagination.

Did you know that more than twenty thousand people are shot dead in the United States every year? Twenty thousand. That’s homicides, not counting suicides and accidents involving guns. It is extremely normal for people to be murdered with a firearm in New York city. The political tenor is the only thing that makes this particular act of violence at all shocking - and the shock is in its deliberate retort to violence that is otherwise extremely normal. The US healthcare system is necropolitics on nightmare mode. It turns sick people into supplicants begging for their lives from an army of bureaucrats armed with bloodless spreadsheets paid to decide who gets to live and who will be left to die.

It is an entirely modern barbarism. And even as legacy outlets and elected officials solemnly condone the assassination of Brian Thompson, the moral reckoning is underway. Soon after the shooting, social media pounced on another insurance company, Anthem Blue Cross, which had recently announced a decision to stop paying for anesthesia meaning patients would have to decide between bankruptcy and going under the knife without pain relief.

The company quickly walked back the policy while claiming they had never had it in the first place. They would never make frightened patients go under the knife without pain relief. That would be disgusting. Just like it’s disgusting to make a dead child’s parents pay thousands for the privilege of having her organs donated. Just like you and I would never heart-react a TikTok video that sets a montage of CEOs to the Cell Block Tango.

But sometimes structural violence is obvious to everyone. I have heard Americans of every ideological background mutter that it shouldn’t be allowed. Almost all of them have personal experience of being hurt and humiliated, completely lawfully, by health insurance companies. The obvious unfairness breeds a helpless, collective fury. Someone ought to do something.

People also thought this about the justice system in eighteenth century England, which was a chaotic rolling factory of human carnage. Here’s what happened: in the early years of industrialisation, the rural poor were driven off the land in their millions. Cities began to overflow with desperate, destitute people who had no legitimate way of making a living. Crime was rampant. Rich people started to panic. Hundreds of new laws were brought in to protect private property. Even trivial offences were punishable by death: you could be hanged for murder, but you could also be hanged for vandalism, or poaching, or impersonating a pensioner, or just sneaking about looking suspicious. These laws were known as the Bloody Code, and over the following century, hundreds of thousands of were sent to jails like Newgate as a flimsy peace was built on a pile of corpses. The prisons themselves were plague-ridden hellpits that you were likely to die of violence or gaol fever before your date with the hangman. The system was transparently broken.

A reckoning was due.

Some early Jack Sheppard fan art from the 1840s. Here we see Jonathan Wild (boo!) trying to arrest Sheppard at his mother’s funeral like the heartless corpo villain he is. This did not happen in real life, although it does happen in Andor.

The point of a folk hero is not to answer unfairness with unfairness. To shine a blacklight on the moral hypocrisy of power. Highwaymen were popular in the 18th century not because they were cool and swashbuckling, and they definitely weren’t known for giving to the poor. They were popular because they explicitly robbed the rich, and the rich were, at that point, robbing the hell out of everyone else within the indulgent remit of laws they wrote. Highwaymen gave them an exclusive opportunity to see how they liked it, and that was more than enough.

Throughout recorded history, killers and thieves become folk-heroes when injustice becomes law. Political protesters, rebel leaders and religious martyrs all get their moment in the big story of a species trying to civilise itself, but folk heroes break the moral and social code as well as the law. They are thugs and gangsters and bandits. They rob and rape and murder. They don’t faff about with conventional morality or common decency, and people love them not in spite of those things, but because of them. Because they answer violence with violence.

Is it high-minded? No. Will it change anything? Probably not. A predatory corporation can replace its executives easily, like an inverse hydra with a hundred assholes.

Is it terrorism?

Luigi Mangione was charged today with ‘first-degree murder as an act of terrorism’. But most of us watching these events unfold are conspicuously unterrified about what happened to Brian Thompson happening to us. Thompson was a very, very wealthy man who was responsible for company policies that deliberately refused coverage to desperately ill people - using a strategy known informally as deny, delay, defend. Those words were found etched on the bullet casings near where Brian Thompson was shot, because Gen Z really doesn’t have much time for subtext. What Mangione lacked in ideological purity he more than made up for in theatrics.

Allegedly.

Speaking of theatrics, Jack Sheppard’s partner-in-crime was an extremely violent individual called ‘Blueskin’ Blake. I know that sounds contrived, but I’m not responsible for eighteenth-century criminal naming conventions. Anyway, Blueskin Blake and Gentleman Jack (yes I know) had a nemesis: the corrupt Thief-Taker General, Jonathan Wild. When he wasn’t catching criminals, Wild ran a vast criminal enterprise. Sheppard and Blake had refused to join it, and probably paid the price. In court, Wild reportedly sneered at Blake as he was sentenced to death.

At which point, Blake broke free from his guards, pulled a knife from somewhere - and cut Wild’s throat right there in the courtroom.

Pandemonium! Blood and chaos! People in weird wigs freaking out everywhere! The line between fact and fiction blurs fast when it comes to folk heroes, but that part actually happened. And Sheppard, who was in a jail cell nearby, used the commotion to escape. Again. For a fourth and final time.

It took a century of work by dedicated activists, including Charles Dickens - before the Bloody Codes were reformed. Jack Sheppard was not one of those activists. Folk heroes rarely are, although they are often the cause of activism in others. Sheppard was not an ideologue or a martyr. He was a scrawny, thieving kid from a Bishopsgate workhouse who just didn’t want to die in jail. And he almost managed it.

They caught him again, of course, and this time they made sure he went to the gallows. On the way to Tyburn, crowds of admirers packed the streets. They even let Sheppard stop for a beer with his fans. He had reasons to be cheerful: he probably knew that some friends were waiting to cut his noose and spirit him away. He was, as mentioned, a small man, and he stood a fair chance of holding out for fifteen minutes without strangling.

It was a decent plan. It might even have worked.

But on the day, two hundred thousand people turned up to watch the execution. And a rumour went around that the authorities planned to take the body away and sell it for medical experiments. The mob of mourners rushed to protect their fallen hero from further indignity. And there was a struggle. And by the time Jack Sheppard’s friends got to him, the crowd had torn him apart. He might have been still alive at the time.

He was twenty-two.

I hope you weren’t expecting a happy ending. Incidentally, the modern use of the word ‘mob’, as in ‘mob justice,’ dates to exactly this period of history.

The type of repressed collective fury that produces folk heroes is not reasonable or rational. That’s the point. Folk heroes act out all of the unreasonable fantasies that nice people don’t let themselves have. You and I, of course, believe in the rule of law and the sanctity of life. We wouldn’t ever, ever think that the CEO of a healthcare company extracting profit from other people’s pain deserved to get gunned down in cold blood.

But for a moment, for that split second of raw roaring id before the superego grabs the wheel, we might feel that way. And that’s fine. That’s normal. I don’t believe that everything I feel ought to be immediately enshrined in policy, and nor should you, because you’re not an infant.

The rising global far right, of course, makes a virtue of emotional incontinence, and will literally elect unhinged oligarchs instead of learning to self-regulate. It’s hilarious to watch them now lining up to condemn anyone on the left who dares indulge in the smallest smirk of satisfaction over an incident like this.

Personally, I try very hard not to be selfish or petty or cruel, particularly about politics - partly because I grew up getting punished for every little slip in self-control, like a lot of people in my generation and demographic. I have learned that it’s dangerous to be unreasonable in public. And the nature of our online lives means that everything is potentially public, so it’s easiest to make sure you never get messy at all. If it seems unfair, I won’t let myself feel it. Like a lot of people, I’ve self-censored to the point where I barely recognize my own rage.

But you know what? I really hoped he’d get away.

What was left of Jack Sheppard was buried in St-Martin-in-the-Fields, but by then it was much too late. The story hung around making trouble the for authorities in a culture that was already struggling to keep a lid on popular unrest. Books and songs and plays and pamphlets which mentioned the name ‘Jack Sheppard’ were banned - which is why, when John Gay wrote his famous satire 'The Beggar's Opera', the character was called 'MacHeath.' In 1928, Bertolt Brecht updated the story for his 'Threepenny Opera’, re-imaging MacHeath as a murderous, amoral antihero.

You’ve probably heard the opening number, Mack the Knife. That one was also banned several times, especially after Black singers began to cover it, because it’s about unrepentant bloodust, and it’s also an absolute banger that makes you feel for a moment like it might be cool to stab someone. But the most important song in Brecht’s masterpiece is sung by MacHeath on the gallows. With the noose around his neck, the murderous scumbag mocks the rich and spoilt for their hypocrisy in believing they’re any better than him. It’s easy to preach proper behavior when you know where your next meal is coming from - but those who starve and suffer so that others can live in luxury are entitled to another perspective:

What keeps a man alive? The fact that millions
Are daily tortured, stifled, punished and oppressed
Mankind can stay alive thanks to your brilliance
In keeping your humanity repressed
For once you must not try to shirk the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

It’s a brutal dirge that lends itself to a certain sort of cover artist. Ladies and Gentleman: Mr Thomas Waits.

The immediate response of authority to folk heroism tends towards panic and spite. Back in the 18th century, the lasting impact of Jack Sheppard’s escapes was that London got serious about updating its prison security, rustled up the world’s first paid police force, and doubled down on shipping criminals to the colonies where their whiteness could be weaponised against a new and lucrative underclass. The euphoria of group catharsis comes at a price

But many, many people are prepared to pay it. Because it feels good when not much does. If it didn’t, Donald Trump would be in jail right now. Trump has never in his seven grasping lying decades told it like it is. He’s popular because he tells it like it feels. He told half of the American people ‘I am your vengeance’. He promised to hurt and humiliate the people they had decided they were allowed to hate, and he delivered. He’s not the only grifting populist whipping up orgiastic disaster nationalism to waft himself into high office - but as C-suite executives bump up their security, his handlers might consider exactly what it is they have unleashed. Populist violence is simple to weaponise, after all, but difficult to contain, and it doesn’t point the way you want it to forever.

*I am aware that this is the sort of article that, in stories, gets you recruited as a runner for some sort of extralegal justice agency. Any shady people reading this in the back of a black SUV should know that I’m dyspraxic, startle easily, am bad at lying and would generally prefer to stay at home arranging all my little treasures. Ta.