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On the fifth of December 2024, a major newspaper published the headline “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The article went on to state that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back 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 stated: “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 good-looking, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate 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 the district attorney seeking the death penalty. So who is Mangione? And what drove the alleged crime? These are the questions 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, 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 arrested, Luigi had a list of nearly three hundred titles on a reading platform”. Their subject matter ranged from climate change to masculinity, along with a “focus on his own personal growth, both body and mind”. Additionally, Richardson sifts through his communications with online personalities and authors as well as his many posts on social media. These primary sources, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead render him an unclear character. Richardson attempts to explain this by suggesting that “Luigi’s mystery, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old deceiver’s charm”. Throughout the book, Richardson tries to frame 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 “depose”, etched on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the phrases sometimes used by health insurance companies to deny coverage. He looks at the indication Mangione suffered from a long-term spinal issue, which might have provided motive for an attack, but discovers no confirmation; instead, what meaning there is seems to rest in Mangione’s philosophical dread about the world around him, one where “the pace is quickening 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 destroy us, or both.

Missing Pieces

Conspicuous by their absence from the book are interviews with the key individuals. Richardson asked, of course, but never expected time with Mangione himself. And his family stated explicitly that they had decided against speaking to the press in prior to the trial. Another flashing-yellow omission is any detailed data about the deceased, Thompson, though we learn that under his leadership, from the early 2020s, UHC profits 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 obvious sympathy for him gives the reader the disturbing feeling of having been exposed to a veiled endorsement of an assassination. In the book’s closing remarks, Richardson delivers his mythical interpretation: “We’ve entered a era of stories, the mad king, the beast in the labyrinth and the naked leader.” In that fable “outlaw heroes come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in periods of unrest, when the people are suffering 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 mention of myths, Robin Hoods, heroes or monsters will not be admissible as evidence in defence of this handsome young man with a “jawline … and lips … out of a Caravaggio painting” facing judgment for murder.