Luigi: The Making and the Meaning by John H Richardson – Sympathy for a Devil?

On the fifth of December 2024, a leading publication published the headline “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The article then noted that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a assailant who then walked coolly away”. The daytime killing was indeed both cold and shocking. But many Americans had a different response: for those who had been denied health insurance 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 AI algorithm the insurance company created to increase earnings on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a master’s in computer science, was apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He faces court proceedings on federal and state charges 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 explores broader themes, too.

The Making of a Subject

A writer for a major publication, Richardson spent years researching the communities that exist in the hidden parts 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 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 content covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “focus on his own personal growth, both body and mind”. Furthermore, Richardson analyzes his correspondence with online personalities and authors as well as his many updates on digital networks. These original materials, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead render him an unclear character. 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 symbolic roles.

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 uses as a clue three words – “delay”, “deny” and “depose”, engraved on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the terms occasionally employed by health insurance companies to reject claims. He looks at the indication Mangione had 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 rest in Mangione’s philosophical dread 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 general belief seems to be that AI is going to ultimately either take control, or eliminate humanity, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

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 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 the early 2020s, UHC profits rose significantly.

Unclear Conclusions

By book’s end, the reader has no clear understanding of Mangione’s character or what could have driven his alleged crimes. More troubling, Richardson’s obvious sympathy for him gives the reader the uncomfortable impression of having been privy to a veiled endorsement of an targeted killing. In the book’s final lines, 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 fable “outlaw heroes come with a beautiful promise … 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 charges that could lead to the ultimate sentence dismissed, any mention of myths, folk heroes, champions or monsters will not be allowed in court in defence of this attractive individual with a “jawline … and lips … out of a Caravaggio painting” facing judgment for murder.