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On the fifth of December 2024, a leading publication published 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 assailant who then walked coolly away”. The murder in broad daylight was truly chilling and disturbing. But numerous US citizens reacted differently: for those who had been denied health insurance or struggled with medical bills, the news felt cathartic. 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, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a graduate degree in computing, was apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on criminal counts of murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. So who is Mangione? And what might have motivated the alleged crime? These are the questions 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, 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 taken into custody, Luigi had a list of nearly three hundred titles on Goodreads”. Their subject matter covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “emphasis on his own self-improvement, both body and mind”. Furthermore, Richardson sifts through his correspondence with online personalities and authors as well as his many updates on digital networks. These primary sources, intended to depict a picture of Mangione, instead render him an amorphous figure. Richardson attempts to explain this by suggesting that “Luigi’s elusiveness, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old trickster magic”. Here, as elsewhere, Richardson attempts to cast 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 uses as a clue three words – “delay”, “refuse” and “remove”, etched on the ammunition left behind at the crime scene. These are the terms occasionally employed by medical insurers to deny coverage. He examines the indication Mangione suffered from a long-term spinal issue, which might have provided motive for an attack, but finds no proof; 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 consensus seems to be that AI is going to eventually either take control, or eliminate humanity, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

Notably missing from the book are conversations with the principal actors. Richardson made requests, but never expected access to Mangione himself. And his family made it clear that they had decided against speaking to the media in advance of the trial. Another flashing-yellow omission is any significant information about the deceased, Thompson, though we learn that under his leadership, from 2021 to 2023, UHC profits rose significantly.

Unclear Conclusions

By the conclusion, the audience has little insight of Mangione’s character or what could have driven his accused actions. More troubling, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him creates the uncomfortable impression of having been privy to a veiled endorsement of an assassination. In the book’s closing remarks, Richardson delivers his fairytale assessment: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the mad king, the beast in the labyrinth and the naked leader.” In that tale “Robin Hoods come with a appealing vow … They arrive in periods of unrest, when the people are suffering and everything is confusing anymore.”

One thing is certain: as Mangione’s defence team continues in its attempts have charges that could lead to the ultimate sentence thrown out, any reference of fables, folk heroes, heroes or monsters will not be admissible as evidence in support for this handsome young man with a “jawline … and lips … out of a Caravaggio painting” soon to be on trial for murder.