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On the fifth of December 2024, a major newspaper published the headline “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The report then noted that Brian Thompson was “fatally wounded from behind in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then calmly departed the scene”. The daytime killing was truly chilling and disturbing. But numerous US citizens 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 deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the artificial intelligence system the insurance company created to maximize profits on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a handsome, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus with a master’s in computer science, was apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on criminal counts of murder, with the district attorney seeking the death penalty. So what is his background? And what drove the accused offense? These are the questions John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an inquiry that delves into wider topics, too.

Understanding the Person

A journalist for Esquire magazine, Richardson devoted considerable time to studying the groups that exist in the hidden parts of the internet, producing articles about people “plagued by genuine concerns about an end-times scenario”. To uncover “the making” of his subject, Richardson first reviews Mangione’s extensive reading. We learn that “[when] he was taken into custody, Luigi had a list of 295 books on Goodreads”. Their content covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “focus on his own personal growth, both body and mind”. Furthermore, Richardson sifts through his correspondence with online personalities and authors as well as his many updates on social media. These original materials, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead present him as 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”. Here, as elsewhere, Richardson tries to frame his subject in archetypal terms.

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 takes as his lead three words – “postpone”, “deny” and “remove”, etched on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the phrases occasionally employed by health insurance companies to reject claims. He looks at the evidence Mangione had a long-term spinal issue, which could have been a reason for an attack, but finds no proof; instead, what meaning there is seems to lie 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 general belief seems to be that AI is going to eventually either dominate, or eliminate humanity, or both.

Missing Pieces

Conspicuous by their absence from the book are conversations with the principal actors. Richardson asked, of course, but did not anticipate time with Mangione himself. And his family made it clear that they had chosen not to talk to the media in advance of the trial. Another flashing-yellow omission is any significant information about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his leadership, from the early 2020s, company earnings rose significantly.

Ambiguous Findings

By book’s end, the audience has little insight of Mangione’s character or what could have driven his alleged crimes. Worse still, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him creates the disturbing feeling of having been privy to a veiled endorsement of an targeted killing. In the book’s closing remarks, Richardson delivers his mythical interpretation: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the mad king, the beast in the labyrinth and the emperor without clothes.” In that fable “Robin Hoods 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 continues in its attempts have accusations that could lead to the ultimate sentence dismissed, any reference of fables, Robin Hoods, champions or villains will not be admissible as evidence in defence of this attractive individual with a “features reminiscent of classical art” facing judgment for murder.