🔗 Share this article

On the fifth of December 2024, a leading publication ran the headline “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The report 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 numerous US citizens reacted differently: for those who faced insurance rejections or faced exorbitant healthcare costs, the news felt like a release. Social media blew up. 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 maximize profits on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus with a master’s in computer science, was apprehended at a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He faces court proceedings on criminal counts of murder, with prosecutors seeking the capital punishment. So who is Mangione? And what drove the accused offense? These are the questions John H Richardson attempts to answer in an inquiry that delves into wider topics, too.

Understanding the Person

A writer for a major publication, Richardson spent years researching the groups that exist in the hidden parts of the internet, producing articles about people “cursed with realistic fears about an end-times scenario”. To uncover “the making” of his subject, Richardson first examines Mangione’s extensive reading. We learn that “[when] he was arrested, 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 personal growth, both physical and mental”. Furthermore, Richardson analyzes his correspondence with influencers and authors as well as his many updates on digital networks. These original materials, intended to depict a picture of Mangione, instead present him as an amorphous figure. Richardson tries to justify this by suggesting 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 archetypal terms.

Mangione is deeply anxious 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 “depose”, engraved on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the terms sometimes used by health insurance companies to reject claims. He looks at the evidence Mangione suffered from a long-term spinal issue, which could have been a reason 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 “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 take control, or destroy us, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

Notably missing from the book are conversations with the principal actors. Richardson asked, of course, but did not anticipate access to Mangione himself. And his family made it clear that they had chosen not to talk to the media in prior to the trial. Another glaring gap is any significant information about the deceased, Thompson, though we learn that under his guidance, from 2021 to 2023, UHC profits rose significantly.

Ambiguous Findings

By book’s end, the reader has little insight of Mangione’s character or what might have motivated his alleged crimes. Worse still, Richardson’s obvious sympathy for him gives the reader the disturbing feeling of having been exposed to a veiled endorsement of an targeted killing. In the book’s final lines, Richardson presents his mythical interpretation: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the mad king, the beast in the labyrinth and the emperor without clothes.” In that fable “outlaw heroes come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in periods of unrest, when the population is in pain and nothing makes sense 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, heroes or monsters will not be admissible as evidence in support for this attractive individual with a “features reminiscent of classical art” soon to be on trial for murder.