Mangione: The Story Behind the Story by John H Richardson – Sympathy for a Devil?

On the fifth of December 2024, a leading publication published the headline “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The report then noted that Brian Thompson was “fatally wounded from behind in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then walked coolly away”. The daytime killing was indeed both cold and shocking. But numerous US citizens reacted differently: for those who faced insurance rejections or faced exorbitant healthcare costs, the news felt like a release. Online platforms erupted. One post read: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who should live or perish. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company created to increase earnings on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a handsome, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a master’s in computer science, was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He faces court proceedings on federal and state charges 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 attempts to answer in an investigation that explores broader themes, too.

Understanding the Person

A writer for a major publication, Richardson spent years researching the communities that exist in the hidden parts of the internet, producing articles about people “plagued by genuine concerns about an end-times scenario”. To reveal “the making” of his subject, Richardson first reviews Mangione’s wide-ranging book list. We learn that “[when] he was taken into custody, Luigi had a list of 295 books on a reading platform”. Their content ranged from climate change to masculinity, along with a “emphasis on his own personal growth, both body and mind”. Furthermore, Richardson analyzes his correspondence with influencers and authors as well as his many posts on social media. These original materials, intended to depict a picture of Mangione, instead present him as an amorphous figure. Richardson tries to justify this by proposing that “Luigi’s elusiveness, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old deceiver’s charm”. Here, as elsewhere, Richardson attempts to cast his subject in symbolic roles.

Mangione is deeply anxious about the world around him, one where ‘everything is accelerating whether we like it or not’

Interpreting the Incident

As for “the meaning” of the title, Richardson uses as a clue three words – “delay”, “refuse” and “remove”, engraved on the ammunition left behind at the crime scene. These are the terms sometimes used by medical insurers to deny coverage. He examines the indication Mangione suffered from a chronic back condition, which might have provided motive for an attack, but discovers no confirmation; instead, what significance there is seems to lie in Mangione’s existential anxiety about the world around him, one where “the pace is quickening whether we like it or not, moving rapidly to the edge”; a world where the general belief seems to be that AI is going to ultimately either take control, or destroy us, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

Conspicuous by their absence from the book are conversations with the principal actors. Richardson made requests, but never expected access to Mangione himself. And his family stated explicitly that they had chosen not to talk to the press in advance of the trial. Another glaring gap is any significant information about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his leadership, from the early 2020s, UHC profits rose significantly.

Ambiguous Findings

By book’s end, the audience has no clear understanding of Mangione’s personality or what could have driven his accused actions. Worse still, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him gives the reader the disturbing feeling of having been privy 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 “Robin Hoods come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in periods of unrest, when the people are suffering 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 death penalty thrown out, any reference of myths, folk heroes, champions or villains will not be admissible as evidence in defence of this attractive individual with a “features reminiscent of classical art” soon to be on trial for murder.