The Moment That Showed Luigi Mangione is Bigger Than Trump

During the porn star hush money case, one or two dozen members of the public would line up in the dimly lit hallway outside the 15th-floor Manhattan courtroom for a chance to watch the proceedings.

That was on days when porn star Stormy Daniels or onetime fixer Michael Cohen testified.

On some days, when the only draw was Donald Trump, there were no spectators at all.

But several hundred people filled the hallway outside that same courtroom Friday afternoon, hoping to see Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Midtown sidewalk two months ago. All but a few in the crowd were young and female. One of them sported a red and white scarf with the message ”Free Luigi.” Their voices combined to an excited buzz, as if they were teen fans hoping to see a pop idol.

“We’re here to keep spreading Luigi’s message,” a young woman said.

Among them was Chelsea Manning, the ex-soldier and transgender woman who served seven years for leaking classified material.

“I’m just expressing my Sixth Amendment rights,” Manning said.

The courthouse gloom then suddenly filled with cheers. A figure in a black suit had stepped off an elevator, and the crowd immediately recognized her as Karen Friedman Agnifilo, their hero’s lead defense attorney.

Friedman Agnifilo had spent much of her career as a prosecutor, and served as chief assistant district attorney in this same building. She had previously been deputy chief of the Sex Crimes Unit. She had also worked with the Homicide Investigation Unit, the Family Violence and Child Abuse Bureau, and the Asian Gang Unit. Neither she nor Trump’s lawyers nor any other attorneys in recent memory had received such a welcome in this building.

Friedman Agnifilo’s shoes clicked evenly on the floor as she continued into the courtroom. She turned left toward the defense table where she would have turned right in her days as a prosecutor. The press had been admitted first, which left room at the back for only two dozen fans, three of them male. They entered silently and remained so as the big moment came.

Mangione arrived on the 15th floor through the same black-tinted double doors at the end of the hallway that Trump had used. He was model handsome, and had this been a fashion shoot, you might have said he really knew how to wear those shackles and a heavy bulletproof vest over his green sweater and off-white shirt.

Not that there was anything preening or strutting about him. He was simply composed under what had to be extremely stressful circumstances. The hush deepened among those who had cheered Friedman Agnifilo a few minutes before. Some continuing shouts either from the far end of the hallway or the street reached the courtroom, but those inside continued to bear silent witness.

The Dec. 4, 2024, killing of Thompson as he headed for an investors’ meeting shined a light on an anger against health insurers that was of surprising breadth and intensity. One thing Mangione shares with Trump is an instinct for rousing pervasive, but unexpressed, grievance into fury. People who normally decried violence of any form said they did not really believe in killing, but…

Yet these supporters in the back rows, and the many who did not get into the courtroom, were generally too young to have health insurance issues. They may have older family members who were denied care, but their devotion to Mangione does not seem to arise from personal health insurance horrors. They appear to be people in need of a hero, and for them that was certainly not going to be the president who had sat in the same spot at the defense table now occupied by Mangione.

Friedman Agnifilo began by asking Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Gregory Carro to order the shackles removed. She reported that he was never in chains during the many times she visited him at the Manhattan Correctional Center.

“He’s a model prisoner,” she reported.

“For security reasons, I’d like him cuffed,” the judge said.

The shackles stayed on, and an observer able to peer under the table noted that the ankle cuffs rested on bare skin between his light colored chinos and his brown leather loafers. There would be much online talk later that the hero wore no socks—as if that purported fashion crime were more acceptable than homicide.

One purpose of the hearing was to check how the prosecution was progressing in turning over the voluminous evidence to the defense. Friedman Agnifilo told the judge that New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD chief detectives had appeared in an HBO documentary that week—“hair and makeup done”—and discussed evidentiary materials that the defense had not yet received. That included a purported manifesto that an actor had read aloud as if he were Mangione.

“It doesn’t sound anything like him by the way,” Friedman Agnifilo added.

At another point in the hearing, there was discussion whether Mangione should be moved to state custody. He is now being held by federal authorities, which also intend to bring charges connected to the killing.

“They’re still deciding whether to seek the death penalty against Mr. Mangione,” Friedman Agnifilo said. “That obviously is a very important matter.”

The judge said he was under the impression that Mangione had consented to being lodged in the federal facility.

“When they’re holding the death penalty over your head, you have no choice but to consent,” Friedman Agnifilo said.

The matter went unresolved, and Mangione remained in federal custody when the time came for him to be led back out of the courtroom. The supporters in the back rows seemed profoundly sobered by the sight of this beautiful young man in trouble so deep it could end his life.

Some of the people who had failed to get into the courtroom had joined a few dozen protesters in the park across from the courthouse. At least one of them, a 42-year-old man from the Bronx who would only give his first name, Church, had a health insurance grievance.

“My partner can’t walk and she has waited three months for an MRI,” he said as he sat on a folding chair before a sign reading: ”Health Care Reform Now. We Are Dying.”

Two trucks with “Free Luigi” on the side had been cruising around the courthouse. One of them passed with a rendering of him as a haloed Christ on the back.

But no talk was heard either in the park or up on the courthouse’s 15th floor of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal report that UnitedHealth Group was being investigated for raking in billions of dollars in Medicare Advantage payments for questionable diagnoses, even as it was an industry leader in denying claims. The investigation is civil, but you have to wonder why there is no criminal probe in such multi-billion-dollar cases when people not of the executive class arrested for minor theft are brought in handcuffs before a judge in the arraignment part of the courthouse.

Mangione and Friedman Agnifilo are due back in court on June 26. They should by then have the material an actor read aloud on HBO, as if Mangione enjoyed no presumption of innocence.