Even before police apprehended Luigi Mangione, Tik Tok users bestowed a nickname on the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson: the adjustor. The label refers to insurance adjustors who evaluate claims to determine liability and negotiate settlements. The play on words points to the intense anger that many Americans feel for a health care system that seems more concerned with generating profits than saving and enhancing lives. Now, finally, someone was taking action to even the scales. The term, and the act that inspired it, are closely tied to our present moment. Yet they also sit within a historical tradition, that of the giustiziere or “avenging executioner” that dates to the nineteenth century. The most iconic example is Gaetano Bresci, a thirty-year-old silk weaver who assassinated the King of Italy, Umberto I, on July 29, 1900.
On that day, as the king was about to depart from the Parco Reale in Monza, a city not far from Milan, where he had presided over a gymnastics contest, Bresci shot him three times. The king died within minutes. Bresci, who was born in Tuscany and later moved to Paterson, New Jersey, had returned to Italy in spring 1900. He assassinated the king as punishment for his having signed a decree imposing martial law to quell the May 1898 protests in Milan against rising food prices — before bestowing Italy’s highest military honors on the general who ordered grapeshot to be used against the unarmed demonstrators, killing hundreds. The government’s lethal response was the latest in a series of repressive measures intended to thwart efforts by industrial and agricultural workers to fight economic exploitation and force their way into a political process that had long excluded them and ignored their interests.