Luigi: The Story Behind the Story by John H Richardson – Sympathy for a Devil?

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 “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then walked coolly away”. The daytime killing was truly chilling and disturbing. But numerous US citizens reacted differently: for those who had been denied health insurance or faced exorbitant healthcare costs, the news felt like a release. Social media blew up. One comment stated: “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 maximize profits on your health.”

Less than a week after, Luigi Mangione, a handsome, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a graduate degree in computing, was arrested at a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He faces court proceedings on federal and state charges of murder, with the district attorney seeking the capital punishment. So who is Mangione? And what drove the accused offense? These are the questions 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 spent years researching the groups that lurk in the dark corners of the internet, writing stories about people “cursed with realistic fears about an end-times scenario”. 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 ranged from climate change to masculinity, along with a “focus on his own personal growth, both physical and mental”. Additionally, Richardson sifts through his correspondence with influencers and authors as well as his many posts on social media. These original materials, intended to depict a picture of Mangione, instead render him an amorphous figure. Richardson tries to justify this by suggesting that “Luigi’s mystery, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old trickster magic”. Throughout the book, Richardson attempts to cast his subject in archetypal terms.

Mangione is deeply anxious 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 – “delay”, “refuse” and “depose”, 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 indication Mangione had a chronic back condition, which could have been a reason for an attack, but finds no proof; instead, what significance there is seems to rest in Mangione’s existential anxiety 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 eventually either take control, or destroy us, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

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 family stated explicitly that they had decided against speaking to the media in prior to the trial. Another flashing-yellow omission is any significant information about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his guidance, 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. Worse still, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him creates the disturbing feeling of having been privy to a subtle approval of an assassination. In the book’s final lines, Richardson delivers his mythical interpretation: “We’ve entered a era of stories, the mad king, the monster in the maze and the emperor without clothes.” In that fable “outlaw heroes come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in times of social turmoil, when the people are suffering and nothing makes sense anymore.”

One thing is clear: as Mangione’s legal representatives works to have charges that could lead to the death penalty dismissed, any reference of myths, Robin Hoods, champions or monsters will not be admissible as evidence in support for this attractive individual with a “features reminiscent of classical art” facing judgment for murder.