Luigi: The Story Behind the Story by John H Richardson – Sympathy for a Devil?
On the fifth of December 2024, a major newspaper published the front-page story “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The article then noted that Brian Thompson was “fatally wounded from behind in Midtown Manhattan by a assailant who then walked coolly away”. The murder in broad daylight was indeed both cold and shocking. But numerous US citizens had a different response: for those who faced insurance rejections or faced exorbitant healthcare costs, 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.”
Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a graduate degree in computing, 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 issues John H Richardson attempts to answer in an inquiry that explores broader themes, 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 “plagued by genuine concerns 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 nearly three hundred titles on a reading platform”. Their subject matter covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “focus on his own self-improvement, both body and mind”. Additionally, Richardson analyzes his correspondence with online personalities and authors as well as his many posts on digital networks. These primary sources, intended to depict a picture of Mangione, instead present him as 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 tries to frame his subject in archetypal terms.
Mangione is profoundly worried about the world around him, one where ‘everything is accelerating whether we like it or not’
The Meaning Behind the Crime
As for “the meaning” of the title, Richardson takes as his lead three words – “postpone”, “deny” and “remove”, engraved on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the phrases occasionally employed by medical insurers to reject claims. He examines the evidence Mangione suffered from a chronic back condition, which might have provided motive for an attack, but finds no proof; instead, what meaning there is seems to lie in Mangione’s existential anxiety 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 general belief seems to be that AI is going to ultimately either dominate, or eliminate humanity, or both.
Missing Pieces
Notably missing from the book are interviews with the principal actors. Richardson asked, of course, but did not anticipate access to Mangione himself. And his relatives stated explicitly that they had decided against speaking to the press in advance of the trial. Another glaring gap is any detailed data about the deceased, Thompson, though we learn that under his leadership, from 2021 to 2023, company earnings rose significantly.
Unclear Conclusions
By book’s end, the reader has little insight of Mangione’s character or what might have motivated his accused actions. More troubling, Richardson’s obvious sympathy for him creates the disturbing feeling of having been exposed to a subtle approval of an assassination. In the book’s closing remarks, Richardson presents his fairytale assessment: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the insane ruler, the monster in the maze and the emperor without clothes.” In that fable “outlaw heroes come with a appealing vow … They arrive in periods of unrest, when the population is in pain and everything is confusing anymore.”
One thing is clear: as Mangione’s legal representatives works to have accusations that could lead to the death penalty thrown out, any mention of myths, folk heroes, heroes or monsters will not be allowed in court in defence of this attractive individual with a “features reminiscent of classical art” soon to be on trial for murder.
