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On the fifth of December 2024, a leading publication ran the front-page story “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The report went on to state that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a assailant who then walked coolly away”. The daytime killing was truly cold and shocking. But many Americans had a different response: for those who had been denied health insurance or struggled with medical bills, the news felt like a release. 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 fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on criminal counts of murder, with the district attorney seeking the capital punishment. 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.

The Making of a Subject

A journalist for Esquire magazine, Richardson spent years researching the communities that exist in the hidden parts of the internet, writing stories about people “cursed with realistic fears 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 nearly three hundred titles on Goodreads”. Their subject matter covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “focus on his own self-improvement, both body and mind”. Furthermore, Richardson sifts through his communications with online personalities and authors as well as his many posts on digital networks. These primary sources, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead render him an amorphous figure. 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 profoundly worried 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 – “delay”, “refuse” and “remove”, etched on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the terms occasionally employed by medical insurers to reject claims. He looks at the evidence Mangione suffered from a long-term spinal issue, which could have been a reason for an attack, but discovers no confirmation; instead, what meaning there is seems to lie in Mangione’s philosophical dread about the world around him, one where “the pace is quickening 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 dominate, or destroy us, or both.

Missing Pieces

Notably missing from the book are conversations with the principal actors. Richardson made requests, but did not anticipate time with Mangione himself. And his family made it clear that they had decided against speaking to the media in advance of the trial. Another glaring gap is any significant information about the deceased, Thompson, though we learn that under his guidance, from 2021 to 2023, UHC profits rose significantly.

Ambiguous Findings

By the conclusion, the audience has no clear understanding of Mangione’s character or what might have motivated his alleged crimes. Worse still, Richardson’s obvious sympathy for him gives the reader the disturbing feeling of having been privy to a veiled endorsement of an targeted killing. In the book’s closing remarks, Richardson delivers his fairytale assessment: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the mad king, the monster in the maze and the emperor without clothes.” In that tale “Robin Hoods come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in times of social turmoil, when the population is in pain and everything is confusing anymore.”

One thing is certain: as Mangione’s legal representatives works to have accusations that could lead to the ultimate sentence dismissed, any reference of myths, folk heroes, 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.