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On the fifth of December 2024, a leading publication ran the headline “Insurance CEO Shot Dead In Manhattan”. The article went on to state that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then calmly departed the scene”. The daytime killing was truly 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 comment 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 designed to increase earnings on your health.”

Less than a week after, Luigi Mangione, a handsome, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a graduate degree in computing, was apprehended at a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on federal and state charges of murder, with the district attorney seeking the capital punishment. So who is Mangione? And what might have motivated 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 lurk in the dark corners of the internet, producing articles about people “cursed with realistic fears about an end-times scenario”. To uncover “the making” of his subject, Richardson first examines Mangione’s extensive reading. We learn that “[when] he was taken into custody, Luigi had a list of nearly three hundred titles on a reading platform”. Their content covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “emphasis on his own self-improvement, both body and mind”. Additionally, Richardson sifts through his correspondence with online personalities and authors as well as his many posts on social media. These original materials, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead render him an amorphous figure. Richardson attempts to explain this by proposing that “Luigi’s elusiveness, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old deceiver’s charm”. Here, as elsewhere, Richardson tries to frame his subject in symbolic roles.

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 uses as a clue three words – “delay”, “deny” and “depose”, 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 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 never expected 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 glaring gap is any detailed data about the deceased, Thompson, though we learn that under his guidance, from the early 2020s, UHC profits increased by 33%.

Ambiguous Findings

By the conclusion, 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 gives the reader the disturbing feeling of having been exposed to a subtle approval of an assassination. In the book’s closing remarks, Richardson presents 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 tale “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 certain: as Mangione’s defence team 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.