Mangione: The Story Behind the Story by John H Richardson – Understanding a Criminal?
On the fifth of December 2024, a leading publication ran the front-page story “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The article went on to state that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then calmly departed the scene”. The daytime killing was truly cold and shocking. But many Americans had a different response: for those who had been denied health insurance or struggled with medical bills, the news felt cathartic. Online platforms erupted. One comment stated: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to increase earnings on your health.”
Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a handsome, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus with a master’s in computer science, was apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on criminal counts of murder, with prosecutors seeking the capital punishment. So who is Mangione? And what might have motivated the accused offense? These are the issues John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an inquiry that explores broader themes, too.
Understanding the Person
A journalist for Esquire magazine, Richardson devoted considerable time to studying the communities that exist in the hidden parts of the internet, writing stories about people “cursed with realistic fears about an apocalyptic future”. To reveal “the making” of his subject, Richardson first reviews Mangione’s extensive reading. We learn that “[when] he was taken into custody, Luigi had a list of nearly three hundred titles on a reading platform”. Their content covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “focus on his own self-improvement, both physical and mental”. Furthermore, Richardson sifts through his correspondence with influencers and authors as well as his many posts on digital networks. These original materials, intended to depict a picture of Mangione, instead present him as an amorphous figure. Richardson attempts to explain this by proposing that “Luigi’s elusiveness, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old trickster magic”. Throughout the book, Richardson tries to frame his subject in symbolic roles.
Mangione is profoundly worried about the world around him, one where ‘change is rapid whether we like it or not’
Interpreting the Incident
As for “the meaning” of the title, Richardson uses as a clue three words – “delay”, “deny” and “remove”, engraved on the ammunition left behind at the crime scene. These are the terms sometimes used by health insurance companies to reject claims. He examines the evidence Mangione suffered from a long-term spinal issue, which might have provided motive for an attack, but discovers no confirmation; instead, what significance there is seems to rest in Mangione’s philosophical dread about the world around him, one where “everything is accelerating whether we like it or not, sliding faster and faster to the edge”; a world where the general belief seems to be that AI is going to ultimately either dominate, or eliminate humanity, or both.
Gaps in the Narrative
Notably missing from the book are interviews with the principal actors. Richardson asked, of course, but never expected access to Mangione himself. And his family made it clear that they had decided against speaking to the press in prior to the trial. Another flashing-yellow omission is any detailed data about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his leadership, from the early 2020s, UHC profits increased by 33%.
Ambiguous Findings
By book’s end, the audience has little insight of Mangione’s character or what might have motivated his alleged crimes. More troubling, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him creates the disturbing feeling of having been exposed to a subtle approval of an assassination. In the book’s final lines, Richardson delivers his fairytale assessment: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the mad king, the beast in the labyrinth and the emperor without clothes.” In that tale “outlaw heroes come with a appealing vow … They arrive in periods of unrest, when the population is in pain and everything is confusing anymore.”
One thing is certain: as Mangione’s legal representatives continues in its attempts have accusations that could lead to the ultimate sentence dismissed, any mention of myths, folk heroes, heroes or monsters will not be admissible as evidence in support for this handsome young man with a “features reminiscent of classical art” facing judgment for murder.