🔗 Share this article

On December 5, 2024, a leading publication published the front-page story “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The article went on to state that Brian Thompson was “fatally wounded from behind in Midtown Manhattan by a assailant who then calmly departed the scene”. The murder in broad daylight was truly chilling and disturbing. But many Americans reacted differently: for those who faced insurance rejections 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 artificial intelligence system the insurance company created to increase earnings on your health.”

Less than a week after, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus with a master’s in computer science, was arrested at a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He faces court proceedings on federal and state charges of murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. So who is Mangione? And what drove the alleged crime? These are the issues John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an investigation that delves into wider topics, too.

The Making of a Subject

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 uncover “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 covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “emphasis on his own self-improvement, both physical and mental”. Additionally, Richardson analyzes his correspondence with online personalities and authors as well as his many posts on social media. These original materials, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead render him an unclear character. Richardson tries to justify this by proposing that “Luigi’s elusiveness, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old trickster magic”. Throughout the book, Richardson attempts to cast 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’

The Meaning Behind the Crime

As for “the meaning” of the title, Richardson uses as a clue three words – “postpone”, “refuse” and “remove”, engraved on the ammunition left behind at the crime scene. These are the terms sometimes used by health insurance companies to deny coverage. He examines the evidence Mangione had 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 consensus seems to be that AI is going to ultimately either dominate, or destroy us, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

Conspicuous by their absence from the book are interviews with the key individuals. Richardson asked, of course, but did not anticipate access to Mangione himself. And his relatives stated explicitly that they had chosen not to talk to the press in prior to the trial. Another glaring gap is any significant information about the deceased, Thompson, though we learn that under his leadership, from 2021 to 2023, company earnings increased by 33%.

Unclear Conclusions

By book’s end, the reader has no clear understanding of Mangione’s personality or what could have driven his alleged crimes. More troubling, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him gives the reader the disturbing feeling 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 era of stories, the insane ruler, the monster in the maze and the naked leader.” In that tale “outlaw heroes come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in periods of unrest, when the people are suffering and nothing makes sense anymore.”

One thing is clear: as Mangione’s legal representatives continues in its attempts have accusations that could lead to the ultimate sentence dismissed, any mention 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.