Luigi: The Story Behind the Story by John H Richardson – Understanding a Criminal?

On the fifth of December 2024, a major newspaper published the front-page story “Insurance CEO Shot Dead In Manhattan”. The article then noted that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a assailant 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 faced exorbitant healthcare costs, the news felt cathartic. Social media blew up. One comment read: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who should live or perish. That’s the job of the artificial intelligence system the insurance company created to increase earnings on your health.”

Less than a week after, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a graduate degree in computing, 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 what is his background? And what might have motivated the alleged crime? These are the issues John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an investigation that explores broader themes, too.

Understanding the Person

A journalist for Esquire magazine, Richardson devoted considerable time to studying the groups that lurk in the dark corners of the internet, writing stories about people “cursed with realistic fears about an apocalyptic future”. To reveal “the making” of his subject, Richardson first examines Mangione’s wide-ranging book list. We learn that “[when] he was arrested, Luigi had a list of 295 books on a reading platform”. Their content covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “emphasis 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 primary sources, intended to depict a picture of Mangione, instead render him an unclear character. Richardson attempts to explain this by proposing that “Luigi’s mystery, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old deceiver’s charm”. Here, as elsewhere, Richardson tries to frame his subject in symbolic roles.

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 takes as his lead three words – “postpone”, “refuse” and “depose”, engraved on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the phrases occasionally employed by health insurance companies to deny coverage. He examines the indication Mangione had a chronic back condition, which might have provided motive for an attack, but finds no proof; instead, what meaning 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, moving rapidly to the edge”; a world where the consensus seems to be that AI is going to ultimately either dominate, or destroy us, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

Notably missing from the book are conversations with the principal actors. Richardson made requests, but did not anticipate access to Mangione himself. And his relatives stated explicitly that they had decided against speaking to the media in advance of the trial. Another glaring gap is any significant information about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his leadership, from 2021 to 2023, company earnings rose significantly.

Ambiguous Findings

By book’s end, the reader has little insight of Mangione’s character or what could have driven his accused actions. More troubling, Richardson’s obvious sympathy for him creates the uncomfortable impression of having been exposed to a veiled endorsement of an assassination. In the book’s final lines, Richardson delivers his mythical interpretation: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the mad king, the monster in the maze and the emperor without clothes.” In that tale “Robin Hoods come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in times of social turmoil, when the population is in pain and everything is confusing anymore.”

One thing is clear: as Mangione’s legal representatives continues in its attempts have accusations that could lead to the death penalty dismissed, any reference of myths, Robin Hoods, champions or monsters will not be allowed in court in support for this handsome young man with a “jawline … and lips … out of a Caravaggio painting” facing judgment for murder.