The Life and Mystery of Luigi Mangione

A pizza order, a thank you, or a death threat — Giuseppe Mantova didn’t know which awaited him as he answered the call the Wednesday evening before Christmas. The phone at Vito’s Pizza had been ringing more than usual that week, thanks to an illustration Mantova’s 30-year-old daughter had taped above the cash register of Luigi Mangione as a saint, wearing an emerald-green robe with a sun haloed behind his dark hair. “You’re supporting a criminal,” a woman on the other end of the line told Mantova.

“I’m not coming to your place anymore.” “Fine, don’t come!” the 64-year-old replied in his heavy Italian accent, and hung up. Vito’s sits in a strip mall in Towson, Maryland, the hometown of Mangione, who’d been arrested weeks earlier in connection with the early-morning murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York City street.



News of the crime rocked the Baltimore suburb where Mangione grew up, back when Mantova knew him as just another teenager who came in after school to order a chicken-parm slice. Mantova’s daughter tells me she taped up the illustration as a statement against the “corrupt health care system in America.” After a customer posted a photo of the St.

Luigi display on social media and it went viral, Mantova and his employees were bombarded with calls. Some echoed the woman’s sentiments, accusing Mantova of supporting murder. One man called with a death threat.

But along with the angry calls and Facebook messages, Vito’s has been praised and thanked for hanging the illustration. Some callers want to talk about their negative experiences with health-insurance claims and denials. Some say they know Mangione personally; a supposed family friend from California and a college classmate from Chicago both called, wanting to pay for pizzas that Mantova could hand out to people in the restaurant for free.

(Mantova turned them down but thanked them for the offer.) In January, I visit the bustling shop, decorated with large photographs of the Italian coastline on the race-car-red walls and lined with squeaky, beige pleather booths. Italian music blares from the speakers.

St. Luigi is no longer looking over the restaurant — the owner of the strip mall asked Mantova to take down the printout because of too many complaints. As Mantova throws a slice with pepperoni into the oven, I ask why the restaurant had kept it up for so long in spite of the stir.

“Insurance is very expensive; they charge too much,” Mantova says in Italian. He tells me about his own negative experiences with his insurance company, especially while trying to get an MRI covered. So, he was happy to post it.

The national conversation about Mangione has made its way to him as he sits in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, where he receives about five to 10 letters a day. In his only statement since his arrest, released through his attorneys in February, he wrote: “I am overwhelmed by — and grateful for — everyone who has written me to share their stories and express their support. Powerfully, this support has transcended political, racial, and even class divisions, as mail has flooded MDC from across the country, and around the globe.

While it is impossible for me to reply to most letters, please know that I read every one that I receive.” The first look at the killer came from grainy security footage — a person dressed in all black with a gray backpack, gun aimed squarely at Thompson’s back in the predawn light of Dec. 4.

Another photo of the suspect showed them at Starbucks, black mask pulled tightly over their nose and mouth. The next day, there was an image released of a young person caught on a hostel’s security camera with a hood over their head, flashing a big smile at someone beyond the photo’s frame. Then came a photo of the suspect in the back of a cab with a blue medical mask, hood up, thick eyebrows framing dark eyes.

Related Content Eco-Radical, Singer, Criminal, Cult Leader: Inside Carbon Nation How to Watch the New Luigi Mangione Documentary Without Cable Luigi Mangione Makes First Public Statement, Launches Website 'Brilliant, Lost, Damaged': Inside the Tragedy of Liam Payne The crime was shocking — as were the reverberations that spread across the country afterward. The bullet casings had the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” written on them, echoing a common phrase used by critics of the insurance industry to describe its claims-handling practices. This wasn’t a random victim — the bullets seemed to indicate that Thompson was targeted because of his work.

And as a nationwide manhunt began, the conversation was not about murder in plain sight or vigilantism, but Americans’ frustrations with their health care. People spoke out about how only the wealthy in America can access proper care, about family members who’d gone through grueling medical procedures only to be buried in debt, about loved ones who’d died of cancer and other fatal diseases after their insurance denied coverage for treatment. “This support has transcended political, racial, and even class divides,” reads Mangione’s only public statement.

Finally, on Dec. 9, a name was released. The primary suspect was Mangione.

The details made public about the 26-year-old only exacerbated the frenzy around the crime. This was not a person living on the fringes of society, as we normally think about those suspected of political violence — Mangione was from a respected, wealthy family, someone who went to elite schools and was generally well-liked. So, what happened? What could have caused this young man with seemingly every opportunity in the world to be accused of something so extreme? Like the customers in that Maryland pizza parlor, the public has grafted their own experiences, biases, and political views onto the scraps of Mangione’s background that have been reported so far.

He became a sort of twisted Rorschach test: It was his chronic pain, it was his schooling, it was his politics. But who is Luigi Mangione, really? And how did he become the most debated and polarizing murder suspect in recent history? A few miles away from Vito’s Pizza, Mangione grew up as the youngest of three in a large four-bedroom brick home on a quiet cul-de-sac in Towson. He lived with two older sisters, MariaSanta and Lucia, and his parents, Louis and Kathleen, and often got together with his dozens of cousins.

Even when playing as a kid, Mangione was analytical and science-oriented. Once, he and a group of friends drew pictures of their dream homes. While everyone else sketched large, intricate mansions with swimming pools and multicar garages, Mangione’s was different: a small, square box with four identically-sized rooms.

“It was everything I needed. Nothing more, nothing less,” Mangione later recounted in a Reddit post. “They thought I was weird.

I thought their mansions were full of lots of bullshit. I suppose I’ve always been hyper-obsessed with efficiency, and I’ve never been very materialistic.” Lou and Kathy both came from large families that were well-respected and had deep ties to Baltimore’s Italian American Catholic community.

Kathy, who owns a boutique travel company, was one of eight children in the Zannino family, which owns and operates the Charles S. Zannino Funeral Service. Lou, one of 10 children, was raised to help take over his family’s businesses — his parents, Nicholas and Mary Mangione, built their wealth off construction, commercial real estate, assisted-living facilities, and a radio station, all family-run.

“They’re great, great quality people,” says a friend of Mangione’s parents who asked that his name not be published to protect the family’s privacy. “They’ve done so much for their community. Mr.

Nick made it from nothing. Capitalism runs through their veins.” Nick, Mangione’s nonno, was a pillar of the Italian American community.

The son of a Sicilian immigrant, he grew up in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood. He started off laying bricks as a contractor and worked to become a successful entrepreneur — a local restaurant owner remembers him giving opportunities to other Italian Americans with his businesses, including golf courses and health facilities. When he bought Turf Valley Resort in a Baltimore suburb, Nick told a local reporter he faced discrimination from people who accused him of earning his money from Mafia connections, which he denied.

The Mangiones eventually moved to the suburbs with their large family, but Nick and Mary often returned for events at St. Leo the Great Roman Catholic Church. “They left physically, but they were [often] here to support festivals, events.

When the church was in need, they’d support it monetarily,” says Giovanna Blattermann, a 78-year-old Little Italy cafe owner and hairstylist who used to set family matriarch Mary Mangione’s hair in rollers. Mangione’s mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins often played in the local bocce league with Blattermann. Occasionally, Mangione would sub in for his older cousin Michael, who Blattermann says looks like Mangione’s twin.

“He was a good kid,” she says of Luigi. Attorney Thomas Maronick Jr. was the Saturday host of an independent talk show that ran for 20 years on the Mangiones’ radio station, WCBM, which leans conservative and has had hosts like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh in its lineup.

Before Luigi, the most well-known of the family grandchildren was Nino, a 38-year-old Maryland state delegate who is a Donald Trump supporter. (Mangione’s parents donated to both Republicans and Democrats. Luigi’s 2016 Pennsylvania voter registration didn’t declare a party.

) “They’re viewed very favorably,” Maronick says of the Mangiones. In 1960, the family created the Mangione Family Foundation, which has donated to local philanthropies including the Baltimore Opera Company, the Association of Italian American Charities, and Associated Jewish Charities. They were on the board of trustees at Loyola University Maryland, and the university’s fitness center is named after the Mangione family.

Through a family representative, the Mangiones declined to participate in this story; through his attorneys, Luigi declined, as well. “They seem to have a lot of clout, [and] to treat people well,” Maronick says. “My sense is that this is very difficult for them.

” In Northern Baltimore, in the affluent neighborhood of Roland Park, the Gilman School sprawls across 57 acres dotted with cherry blossoms. Boys in ties and button-downs shuffle between the grand white-columned buildings on campus. The school’s motto, known as the “Gilman Five,” is emblazoned across the dining hall in large silver letters: Honor, Integrity, Respect, Humility, Excellence.

In Baltimore, Gilman is more than just an institution — it’s an identity. The nearly $40,000-a-year, all-boys school has a reputation for being one of the most competitive private schools in the area, with alumni who have gone on to become politicians, business moguls, and professional athletes. It’s impossible to talk to anyone in Baltimore about Mangione without them bringing up that he was a Gilman valedictorian.

“Luigi was in this crew of kids you knew were going to do groundbreaking science research.” Mangione’s sisters and many of his cousins went to Catholic private schools in the Baltimore area. Mangione attended a Catholic elementary school, Sister Bernadette, but diverged from the rest of his family by joining Gilman in sixth grade.

“It was unusual that he went to Gilman coming from his family,” says Steve, a Gilman teacher of Mangione’s who asked to use a pseudonym. “I think [Luigi’s parents] understood how precocious he was as a student, as a science kid. Every family in this area knows that if you’ve got a superb kid, and you want them to go to a really good college, you send them to Gilman.

” Mangione may have been a name prominent in Baltimore’s Italian American community, but it carried no cachet with the Gilman crowd. “He had a lot of money, but it wasn’t culturally relevant at Gilman, because everyone has a lot of money,” says James, a former student in Mangione’s grade who asked to use a pseudonym and has previously not spoken to the press. “If you ask me to rank my class in wealth, he would not have been high.

” The social hierarchy of Gilman students wasn’t just about money — although the popular kids were often spotted driving around in the newest luxury cars and partying at multimillion-dollar homes — it was about lineage. The most popular boys, who had fathers and grandfathers who’d gone to Gilman, and started there as preschoolers, had it easier socially than kids like Mangione, who joined later. And in a town where lacrosse is king, Mangione played soccer and wrestled.

There were the socially elite and then there was “the group of true geniuses,” as James calls them, who were there for the school’s top-tier academics. “Luigi was in this crew of kids that you knew were going to an Ivy and were going to do groundbreaking science research,” James says. “But Luigi was the only one [of them] you could shoot the shit with.

Once you got him talking, he had all of the kind of suave, cool-guy vibes.” “It was very Gossip Girl, and Luigi was kind of like Dan,” James says of the TV character who came from a different social strata than his private-school classmates. “I don’t want to put words into his mouth, but I always got this feeling that he was really interested in having more of a social life than he had.

” Mangione spent a lot of his time at the robotics lab in Gilman’s science building. Once, the boys in the AI club got together at the lab to work on their robot, called Hound Bot, ahead of a competition in Virginia the next day. Hari Menon, who was a sophomore in the club when Mangione, a senior, served as its co-president, recalls that in spite of their efforts, their robot didn’t work.

So, Mangione took the lead and suggested going to one of their houses to order pizza and pull an all-nighter. He told the group, “All right, guys, we’re kind of fucked right now, but it’s OK, we’ll figure it out,” says Menon. “He was always keeping everybody’s energy up.

” In high school, Mangione would get to school in the morning at seven to study before classes started. “Luigi was always chasing perfection, because that was his identity: being smart,” says former teacher Steve, who always thought Mangione would grow up to work in a science lab or build AI models. His classmates say he was the kind of kid who’d complain about getting a 98, even when talking to a student ecstatic about getting a 92.

There was an arrogance to him, remembers James. Classes at Gilman were structured more like college courses. As a 10th grader, Mangione would have been reading books by philosophers like Marx, Lenin, and Kant.

One teacher Mangione connected with taught a course about U.S. history through the lens of class conflict.

The students read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, about America from the perspective of marginalized communities. In addition to history, Mangione’s interest in video games led him to focus on coding and technology, especially AI and how technology influences society, a subject he addressed in a March 2016 school-assembly speech. “Today, I will be talking to you about the future, about topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence to human immortality,” Mangione said from the podium in his navy blazer and blue tie.

“Likely, you’ll dismiss all this pretty quickly as interesting but just science fiction, or worse, you might simply think I’m crazy. But I’m confident I can convince you not only of my sanity, but also that the next hundred years of our future are going to be unlike anything humanity has ever seen before.” Mangione said in the speech that because of tech advances, “a revolutionary near-future isn’t unbelievable, it’s actually the only logical concl­usion.

” He talked about the concept of “the singularity” — the notion that AI will eventually take over humans — but urged optimism. “Be excited for what the future holds for us,” Mangione told the sea of boys. “We may have been born into one of the most exciting times on Earth, regardless of the singularity.

We might not recognize it in our day-to-day lives, but the world is changing fast.” After graduating from Gilman, Mangione took his interest in science and technology to the University of Pennsylvania. He majored in artificial intelligence and minored in mathematics at the Ivy League engineering school.

His coursework was rigorous, and he later wrote that he felt like he was putting in twice the amount of work he did at Gilman without as much reward. He also struggled with health issues that made studying difficult, including back pain when he sat for long periods of time. He later wrote in a social media post that he suffered from isthmic spondylolisthesis, a condition common among weight lifters and gymnasts where repetitive extension can cause a bone in the spine to slip out and apply pressure on the vertebra below.

“It often occurs from either a single injury or repetitive injuries early on in your teens to early adulthood,” says Dr. Derrick Umansky, an expert in neurosurgery who has not treated Mangione. Back pain in young people is often not immediately investigated, Umansky explains, leaving it to worsen until a patient gets imaging done and eventually a diagnosis of spondylolisthesis.

Mangione also dealt with brain fog, which he sometimes suspected was due to a Lyme disease diagnosis when he was a teen. The symptoms worsened his freshman year, which had a significant impact on his life at Penn. People experiencing brain fog often talk about poor attention span, feeling drained, confused, and having difficulty remembering things.

“It’s a vague term, like ‘fatigue,’” says Dr. Reena Mehta, an allergist who has not treated Mangione. It’s not a medical diagnosis, she explains, but a set of symptoms that can be caused by a variety of factors.

Brain fog is still being studied, and Mehta says she often sees patients who have visited numerous doctors in a search for answers. “By the time they come to me, they’re so frustrated because they’ve seen so many people, and they’re like, ‘Everybody just calls me crazy or blows me off and says it’s in my head.’” “Luigi was always chasing perfection, because his identity was being smart.

” In the spring of 2017, Mangione joined Phi Kappa Psi, a fraternity known for attracting studious young men. Their pledging involved drinking alcohol heavily twice a week, Mangione would later describe under the username Mister Cactus, the Reddit account associated with him. He wrote that the drinking and lack of sleep exacerbated his brain fog.

He also had stomach pain, digestive issues, and impaired vision, all of which seemed to worsen during this time. “I simply wasn’t able to recover from a week of disturbed sleep,” Mangione wrote. “It’s absolutely brutal to have such a life-halting issue, especially since the issue itself wears down the critical/logical thinking mind you’d usually use to tackle it .

.. Struggling to understand lectures and homework is difficult, but having the same level of difficulty when trying to watch YouTube or read an interesting book is even worse.

” Still, Mangione was social and was known as a friendly, charming student. After Mangione’s arrest, one friend told Business Insider , “I would set my sister or friend up with him. Just knowing his personality, I would completely trust him.

Even knowing what I know now, if he 100 percent did it, I would feel completely safe being alone in a room with him.” In May 2019, a Penn Facebook account called “Penn Crushes” tagged Mangione, writing, “Hot damn. Are you single? You make us engineers have hope!” He replied, “Despite all my best efforts .

.. yup still single.

” Mangione’s friends from high school said he dated very casually at Gilman, and his postcollegiate Tinder profile said he was interested in meeting women. After his junior year, Mangione went to Stanford University to be a counselor for an AI summer program for gifted high school students. Mangione had attended the same camp when he was a rising senior at Gilman, and had stayed in touch with friends he met there.

Mangione’s friend David (who requested a pseudonym) says he was one of the most popular people in their group, so beloved that the others made their names “I love Luigi 1,” “I love Luigi 2,” “I love Luigi 3,” etc., in their Facebook group chat. David says Mangione was always good-natured about the attention.

As a camp counselor, he was popular, too. One of his students wrote on Reddit that they had a Discord channel that was dedicated to talking about him. His senior year at Penn, the Covid pandemic hit, emptying out the campus, so Mangione missed the final few months of college with his friends.

In May 2022, he returned to the Penn campus with his family, who watched him walk across the stage. Despite nearly dropping out because of his health challenges, Mangione completed a program that allowed him to get both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in four years, and graduated from Penn with honors. “He was such a thoughtful and deeply compassionate person,” said a Hawaii friend.

Later that year, Mangione would sit on the sand with his friends at Magic Island, a peninsula of Oahu that juts out into turquoise water. Mangione had moved to Hawaii after graduation, determined to focus on his health. For his first six months there, Mangione’s home was Surfbreak, a co-living space marketed to digital nomads.

He worked remotely as a data engineer at the online car-buying platform TrueCar. He spent his free time hiking, stargazing, and reading. He was known for getting around on his bicycle, and walking his friends home at night.

When Mangione first moved to Hawaii, he’d tried surfing, but injured himself and experienced sciatica, pressure on a nerve in his lower back. A few weeks later, he slipped on a piece of paper, and couldn’t put any weight on his right leg for a week. Previously, Mangione only had back pain when standing for too long, but now he ached daily, and eventually began having nerve pain and numbness in his groin and down his right leg.

“Stuck being sedentary when you’re an energetic person and used to being so active is one of the worst aspects of sciatica,” Mangione wrote on social media to someone who had described experiencing similar pain. He told the user he’d switched from weight lifting and martial arts to yoga to help with his own pain. His yoga teacher, Dorian Wright, says he modified Mangione’s practice to help with his lower-back pain.

In October 2022, Mangione moved into a two-bedroom Honolulu high-rise apartment with a roommate, who described him on Reddit last year as a “truly amazing and caring guy.” He kept in touch with the friends he’d made at Surfbreak by starting a book club with R.J.

Martin, Surfbreak’s founder and a former college professor, and Jackie Wexler, a fellow Penn alum Mangione met on Oahu. “He was just such a thoughtful and deeply compassionate person at everything he did,” Wexler told Civil Beat, Hawaii’s nonprofit news organization . They read books like The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, by Steve Stewart-Williams; Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell; and What’s Our Problem?, by internet writer Tim Urban.

But ultimately, says Danny, a friend of Mangione’s and a member of the book club, who asked not to use his last name, “it was just an excuse to get together for sunset.” At the end of February 2023, Mangione messaged a former Gilman classmate saying he’d quit TrueCar recently in order to “spend more time reading and doing yoga.” He added, “Data engineering paid super well but was mind-numbingly boring.

” Martin has claimed in interviews that Mangione’s back was so bad by then that it interfered with his sex life. But Mangione’s roommate from that time wrote on Reddit that he spent more time with Mangione than Martin and doesn’t remember him referencing any such problems. Danny also says he never heard that complaint from Mangione.

Either way, Mangione’s back issues were debilitating enough that he decided to move forward with a spinal fusion, briefly traveling home to the East Coast for the surgery in July of that year. It’s unclear what health plan Mangione was on during his surgery and recovery, but a UnitedHealth Group representative tells me neither Mangione nor his parents have ever been insured by the company. Seven days after the surgery, Mangione felt he was making such good progress that he stopped taking pain medications.

Three months later, he claimed he hadn’t had a bad day since, posting an X-ray of his back on X. “The surgery wasn’t nearly as scary as I made it out to be in my head,” he wrote to reassure someone on the spondylolisthesis, or “spondy,” Reddit. “Remember that the human body is supposed to exist in a pain-free state.

Constant pain means something is wrong. Even with metal in my back, I’m not in pain.” His book club had fizzled when Mangione left the island in July, but one of the last books they’d read was the 35,000-word manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, who killed three people and injured 23 others between 1978 and 1995 in an effort to bring attention to technological abuse and how it reduces quality of life.

Martin had jokingly suggested reading the manifesto, and one book-club member recalls the conversation around it being casual and light. Months after discussing it with his friends, in February 2024, Mangione wrote up his review of the manifesto on Goodreads. He called Kaczynski an “extreme political revolutionary” as well as a violent individual who maimed innocent people and was rightfully imprisoned.

“It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as a manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” Mangione wrote. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.” Mangione also quoted another reader’s passage about Kaczynski’s manifesto, which he found “interesting.

” The reader posted online about corporations harming the environment and claimed peaceful protests were too often ignored, arguing that violence was a valid form of self-defense. “When all other forms of communication fail,” reads the passage, “violence is necessary to survive.” In February 2024, Mangione texted a friend from the Stanford artificial-intelligence summer program that he was going to miss their annual reunion.

“I’m going backpacking for awhile,” he wrote before setting off for a trip throughout Asia with nothing more than his Tortuga-brand bag. “Perhaps the ultimate vessel for minimal, efficient living — surpassing even a tiny square home — is a single backpack,” Mangione wrote in the Reddit thread for Onebag, a community of people who travel light for philosophical reasons. “The constraint of a single bag is a useful practice in intentionality, and it’s a good reminder that we’re able to go long periods of time without needing many things.

” He hopped around to different countries, sometimes traveling by motorcycle. On Feb. 25, Mangione had dinner and drinks in Tokyo with Japanese professional poker player Jun Obara, who’d overheard him struggling to order.

“He was very friendly,” Obara told NBC . In April, while visiting Thailand, Mangione befriended two travelers at a Muay Thai fight in Krabi, and reportedly traveled with them to Bangkok. They claimed that Mangione visited a shooting range during his trip — a popular activity for tourists there.

He also complained about back pain, they said, and turned down going on a hike. (When asked about these details, a rep for Mangione’s legal team declined to comment on his behalf.) That spring, Mangione traveled through Japan, stopping at Mount Ōmine, a mountain women are prohibited from climbing.

Mangione texted a friend that it was “peak misogyny” but gave him a chance to “stop getting distracted by women lol.” On April 27, he sent an audio message to a friend about how he wanted to “zen out” in the tiny villages on the sides of cliffs in Japan’s Nara region. “It’s super lush; there’s this beautiful river that cuts through the gorge,” he said in audio reviewed by The New York Times .

“I want to stay here for like a month and just meditate and hot-spring and do some writing.” During that time, Mangione continued to interact with the “spondy” back-pain community on Reddit, encouraging members to stand up for themselves if they wanted spinal surgery. “Tell them you are ‘unable to work’/do your job,” he wrote.

“We live in a capitalist society. I’ve found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it’s impacting your quality of life.” As Mangione traipsed through Asia, there was one place he returned to again and again: the internet.

Since he was young, it had been a place where he sought community, whether by playing video games, exchanging back-pain woes on subreddits, or earnestly journaling about his backpack. But in the spring of 2024, he began pulling away from family and friends in real life, while reaching out online to male writers and personalities he admired. One of those writers was Tim Urban, the popular blogger and illustrator who draws stick figures and writes long posts about artificial intelligence, procrastination, and cancel culture for his site, Wait But Why.

Elon Musk praised Urban’s book about political polarization, What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies, which Mangione once tweeted would go down in history as “the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century.” Urban’s book posits that people in the U.S.

have lost the ability to communicate because of “political tribalism.” He criticizes both “Trump Republicans” and “Social Justice Fundamentalism,” the latter of which, he says, “enforces strict conformity.” Mangione had reached out to Urban in January 2024 to say he appreciated his viewpoints, and Urban told The New York Times they had a “healthy-seeming interaction” in April.

Urban says the people Mangione appears to have admired have a basic message in common: “Free speech is good and discourse is good, and the typical style of radical politics is not productive.” “We live in a capitalist society,” Mangione wrote last year on social media. Also that April, Mangione began emailing with Gurwinder Bhogal, another popular centrist internet writer who decries political tribalism.

Mangione subscribed to Bhogal’s Substack about how tech manipulates society. “Japan is peak NPC-ville,” Mangione wrote in an April 16 email to Bhogal. “Scary lack of free will in this country.

” NPC stands for non-player character and is used as a derogatory term to describe those who are automated in their behavior and mindless in their belief systems, as if they are controlled by a computer game. In his email, Mangione talked about seeing a man having a seizure on the street in Japan and running to a nearby police station. “They followed me to help, but refused to walk across any empty streets if the stoplight was red, even while the guy was seizing on the ground,” he wrote.

Bhogal had blogged about so-called NPCs being on the rise because of how tech companies and algorithms shape human behavior: “Step into social media and you’ll see the same groups of people getting outraged by the same kinds of things every single day, like clockwork.” On May 5, the day before his 26th birthday, Mangione had a video call with Bhogal, a perk he’d earned by paying $200 to become a founding member of Bhogal’s Substack. They spoke for two hours.

Bhogal’s recollection of their conversation — their only call — offers the most detailed public account of Mangione during the months leading up to his arrest. (When asked if Bhogal’s representation of the call was accurate, Mangione’s attorneys declined to comment.) During the call, Bhogal tells me, he got the sense Mangione had been feeling alienated.

“He said to me a couple of times that the people around him were not on the same wavelength as him,” Bhogal says. “He was interested in improving himself and the world, but felt that both the self-improvement and world-improvement spaces were rife with charlatanry, woke virtue-signaling, and other forms of posturing. He was interested in practical solutions and wanted to be part of a community that made change in rational, evidence-based ways.

” Mangione had voiced in social media posts that he wasn’t happy with either of the leading presidential candidates — Trump or Joe Biden. With Bhogal, Mangione reiterated that stance, but said he liked some aspects of then-long-shot candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

, without specifying. Bhogal says that Mangione came across as anti-tribalist, anti-DEI, pro-free speech, pro-equality, and anti-consumerism. Mangione’s opposition to corporate greed was not mentioned in the context of health care, Bhogal says, but rather in the realm of technology and algorithms.

(Outside of a passing comment that Mangione made about Bhogal being lucky to live in the U.K. when it comes to health care, the topic didn’t come up.

) Bhogal remembers Mangione saying he felt like tech giants were polarizing society to increase their profits, that he felt manipulated by rage bait and sensationalist media, and asked Bhogal for advice on curating his social feed. “He didn’t like that people were being pushed into echo chambers.” “He didn’t like the fact that people were being sort of pigeonholed, pushed into these boxes, into these echo chambers,” Bhogal says.

“This was leading to alienation, because people were not really connecting with even their own families sometimes, you know, because they have different political views.” Throughout the spring and into summer, Mangione kept active on X, telling political journalist Nate Silver he supported term limits and retweeting the controversial neuroscientist podcaster Andrew Huberman and a speech by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. He was also a fan of Jonathan Haidt, and reposted the author’s promotions of his book The Anxious Generation, about how smartphones impact childhood mental health.

While traveling in Mumbai in May, Mangione met up with Jash Dholani, an Indian author and internet personality. Mangione had previously tried to buy 400 copies of Dholani’s e-book Hit Reverse: New Ideas From Old Books, but the transaction was flagged and rejected, so he bought a single copy. “We discussed his travel experiences and the conversation seemed normal,” Dholani later tweeted about the hourlong interaction.

Mangione, once very active on Reddit, made his final post on the platform on May 25. In a subreddit dedicated to the Una­bomber, he shared a video called “Streaming Overdose 2024, China.” It depicted people staring into their phone screens, livestreaming them­selves.

While Mangione traveled last summer, he lost touch with many of his friends and family in the U.S. In July, a childhood friend reached out to ask Mangione if he was still going to be a part of his upcoming wedding, which was to be held at Hayfields Country Club, one of the clubs the Mangione family owned.

Mangione had been unresponsive to his friend’s texts but eventually got in touch on July 9, law enforcement confirms, sending a detailed message that nobody understood him and life had become difficult. The friend didn’t hear from him again after that. A month later, on Aug.

31, one of Mangione’s neighbors saw him moving out of his Honolulu apartment. The property manager told Hawaii’s local news channel KHON that Mangione didn’t provide an explanation for why he was leaving. The next month, Mangione quietly dropped out of the Penn alumni WhatsApp group he’d joined when he first moved to the island.

Despite her son’s lack of contact, one friend of Kathy’s says when he asked where her son was, Kathy answered, “Luigi’s such a genius, he wants to do his own thing and has moved to Hawaii.” But behind closed doors, members of the Mangione family were reaching out to friends from different parts of his life in an attempt to contact him. “Have you heard anything from [Luigi] in the past couple months?” Mangione’s cousin asked one of Luigi’s Gilman classmates on Sept.

21. “Or know anyone who has?” On Oct. 30, a friend asked Mangione on X if he was OK.

“No one has heard from you in months and apparently your family is looking for you,” he wrote in a public message. Another friend tweeted at him in November saying, “Know you are missed and loved.” On Nov.

18, Kathy filed a missing persons report in San Francisco, where TrueCar, at which she thought Luigi still worked, had an office. She told police officers she’d last spoken to her son in July. When police investigated, they discovered the company had closed its office in the city.

The only evidence they found connecting Mangione to San Francisco was a bank withdrawal there in August. The first investigator assigned to the case, Sgt. Joe Siragusa, had a long conversation with Kathy, who also connected him to the friend whose September wedding Mangione had missed.

The friend claimed Mangione had grown apart from his friends and family, had undergone a back surgery that had changed him physically and mentally, and had been microdosing mushrooms, which the friend believed had affected him mentally, as well, according to Siragusa’s notes. (The friend didn’t respond to interview requests. Mangione’s legal team declined to comment.

) During the first few days of December, Kathy and Lou told family friends they’d completely lost contact with Luigi and had no idea where he was. Distraught, Kathy continued to call the San Francisco Police Department asking for updates on the case. Police couldn’t find any new phone numbers or addresses, so it seemed to them like Mangione had intentionally disappeared.

In the early morning hours of Wednesday, Dec. 4, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson left the Luxury Collection Hotel in midtown Manhattan. He was in New York for the company’s annual investor conference, scheduled to begin at 8 a.

m. one block away. As Thompson reached the entrance of the Hilton, a masked person in a black hooded windbreaker and gray Peak Design backpack crossed the street and came up behind him.

Around 6:45 a.m., the assassin raised a partially 3D-printed gun and shot Thompson three times in the back and leg.

Thompson collapsed to the ground, and the masked shooter ran down an alley between West 54th and 55th streets before hopping on an e-bike and riding uptown toward Central Park. Two and a half hours later, police in Maple Grove, Minnesota, arrived at the house of Paulette Thompson, Brian’s estranged wife and mother of their two children, to let her know the 50-year-old executive had been killed. A national manhunt ensued, as law enforcement released video and images of the masked suspect.

Social media exploded into debates about the health-insurance industry, with many people saying UnitedHealthcare has a reputation for excessive claim denials. (A rep for UnitedHealthcare flatly denies this, saying, “We ultimately pay 98 percent of all claims received that are for eligible members. For the two percent of claims that are not approved, the majority are instances where the services did not meet the benefit criteria.

Only 0.5 percent of claims are not approved based on clinical evidence and patient safety.”) The public’s frustration with the American insurance industry and CEOs morphed into an unprecedented and unsettling celebration of a person accused of murdering a man in cold blood — a disturbing snapshot of a fractured society.

“Wanted” posters of other health care chief executives appeared around New York. People online gushed about how attractive the suspect was, and some X users offered to help hide him in their homes. There was talk of a hotline executives could call if they feared for their lives.

Corporate leaders amped up security, shielding their identities on websites, and sending emails about flying exclusively on private jets. When San Francisco Police Sgt. Michael Horan looked at the smiling suspect in one of the security photos released, he remembers thinking to himself, “Somebody’s going to recognize that guy.

” That same day, Horan’s partner, Siragusa, asked him to take a look at a missing-persons case, a former Ivy League student from Baltimore named Luigi Mangione. “This one’s weird,” Horan remembers Siragusa saying as he dropped off the case file. “This guy completely went off the grid in July.

” Horan dove in, scrolling through tagged photos of Mangione on his Instagram. Then he realized something: That smile. Those eyebrows.

They looked familiar. He pulled up the surveillance photo on one of his monitors, and Mangione’s Instagram on the other. “Oh, my God,” he remembers thinking.

Horan took the suspicion to his colleagues and supervisors, and then called the New York FBI agent handling the Thompson case. “I’m sorry to bother you with this,” Horan recalls saying. “We’re over in San Francisco, but I want to give you this info.

” That weekend, an assassin look-alike contest was held in New York’s Washington Square Park, and the FBI interviewed the Mangione family. On Sunday, Dec. 8, Kathy and Lou went to church services in Little Italy.

Others who attended say they couldn’t tell by the couple’s behavior that anything was amiss. The next day, Mangione was taken into custody at a McDonald’s restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Investigators say he was detained with the fake ID he gave at the hostel, a backpack containing a partially 3D-printed gun, bullets, a spiral notebook, and a 261-word letter to the FBI.

The handwritten letter, which many media outlets refused to publish but was posted by independent reporter Ken Klippenstein to his Substack, allegedly began: “To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife or traumas but it had to be done.

Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.” The letter reportedly goes on to detail issues with the health care system, including UnitedHealthcare, and to decry corporations that “abuse Americans for immense profit ..

. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play,” the letter reads. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.

” On Dec. 10, as Mangione was being escorted into Pennsylvania court for an extradition hearing, he turned to shout at the press lined up snapping photos and video. His words were muffled, but his legal team confirms his statement: “Your coverage of this event is completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience.

” Over the past four months, Mangione has made headlines around the world. Graffiti supporting him popped up in the South of France; the underground London music scene displayed his photo behind DJ sets; Saturday Night Live teased the people thirsting over his abs; to “Luigi” someone became a synonym for “to kill.” Back in Mangione’s hometown, the conversation was one of disbelief.

Within minutes of his name being released as the shooting suspect, his Gilman classmates’ cellphones started blowing up. “Did you see the news?” “OMG, Luigi?!” “I can’t believe it.” That month, at Gilman, a student pointed to Mangione’s name displayed in gold lettering alongside the other valedictorians in the lobby.

“Are we going to take that down?” he asked a teacher standing nearby. “I hope not,” the teacher said. “He’s still a part of Gilman history.

” “No one has heard from you in months, and your family is looking for you,” a friend wrote on X. In Little Italy, residents were stunned and crestfallen to hear a Mangione was arrested for the crime. “Everybody was dumbfounded,” says Arthur Gentile, a longtime resident.

“Nobody could believe it. It’s sad.” The extended Mangione family went on lockdown, maintaining a tight circle of trust.

His parents stopped opening their mail. His sisters deleted their social media accounts. Friends dropped off baked goods at their home.

“We only know what we have read in the media,” the Mangione family said in a statement released Dec. 9. “Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest.

We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson, and we ask people to pray for all involved. We are devastated by this news.” Mangione’s legal team declined to comment when asked if he’s been in touch with his family since his incarceration.

Those who’ve known the Mangiones couldn’t imagine that someone in the family would be accused of such a violent and brazen crime. “He’s stained their name,” says a friend of the family. “And they’ve done so much for the community.

My heart bleeds for them.” In Little Italy, some I spoke with blamed his Ivy League education. Blattermann, the cafe owner, was especially insulted by a Penn professor who called Mangione the “icon we all need and deserve.

” “That’s telling,” Blattermann says. “What are you infusing their brains with?” (The professor retracted her statement and apologized after an uproar.) Blattermann sees the crime as a tragedy for both the Mangione and Thompson families.

James, the Gilman classmate, says that since December he’s spent a lot of time thinking about how many young men are “on the brink” and how he has friends who he would not be surprised to hear had carried out an audacious crime. “How many back injuries are we away from acts of violence?” he says. “I think if we really knew the true extent of the issue, it would be pretty horrifying.

” In Maple Grove, Minnesota, Paulette Thompson posted a statement on her front door: “We are shattered to hear about the senseless killing of our beloved Brian. Brian was an incredibly loving, generous, talented man who truly lived life to the fullest and touched so many lives. Most importantly, Brian was an incredibly loving father to our two sons and will be greatly missed.

” On Thursday, Dec. 19, freelance photographer Alan Chin got a call from The New York Times. He was to immediately grab his camera and get to the Wall Street helipad on the East River.

Mangione was arriving from Pennsylvania and was being transported to a Manhattan courthouse. “Make sure you bring your long lens,” the editor told Chin. When Chin got to the pier, there was a line of photographers — and one face he was surprised to see: the photographer for the mayor’s office.

An official walked up to the photographers and said Mayor Eric Adams would be attending the perp walk and have a short press conference after. She assured the group of photographers jostling for their position: “Don’t worry, you’re going to get that shot. It’s going to happen right here.

” “It is unusual for the mayor, or any elected official, to be part of a perp walk,” Chin says. “They could have done this without anyone seeing it,” he adds, explaining that photographers’ angles were limited because the heliport is on a pier. “And we would not have seen any of it unless we had been on a boat.

” The walk took less than six seconds. Mangione turned the corner from the helicopter and faced the group of photographers head-on. Sporting a fresh haircut, he walked with his head up in his bright-orange jumpsuit, hands shackled in front of him, Mayor Adams in a suit walking just to his right.

The images drew comparisons between Mangione and the Joker, Superman, and even to Jesus. For Mangione’s supporters, the perp walk seemed to cement his status as a modern-day folk hero. Other social media users saw the reaction to the photos as evidence that the public lionizes light-skinned suspects while demonizing people of color.

For Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mangione’s lawyer, the entire incident was a threat to Mangione’s right to a fair trial. “He was on display in the biggest staged perp walk I have ever seen in my career,” Agnifilo said on Dec. 23 at New York State Supreme Court.

“Your Honor, he’s not a symbol. He’s somebody who is afforded the right to a fair trial. He’s innocent until proven guilty.

” At the hearing, Mangione pleaded not guilty to the 11 charges against him in New York, including first-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism. In addition to the charges against him there and in Pennsylvania, he faces federal charges involving stalking and murder through use of a firearm, which makes him eligible for the death penalty. Since then, Mangione has been held at MDC in Brooklyn, along with disgraced rapper Sean Combs and former crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried.

Mangione’s supporters have sent him so many letters he hasn’t been able to keep up with replies. On Feb. 21, a couple of months after he was detained, a protest takes place supporting Mangione and health care reform at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where he’s scheduled to arrive for a brief pretrial appearance.

I talk to three friends in their twenties about why they came out in the freezing cold. One wears a T-shirt printed with a photo of Mangione, shirtless. “I do think he’s hot, so I got this shirt,” Hunter Doradea says.

“But I wanted to come out here to support, because I want to shift the narrative to health care reform. Luigi has bipartisan support among the working class for a reason.” Doradea’s friend Fiona Miller adds, “The fact that Luigi has garnered so much attention is because everybody knows somebody that’s been fucked over by the health care industry.

There’s a lot of anger in this country and resentment toward health care CEOs, and just CEOs in general. [Americans’] rights to have healthy bodies is determined by wealth, and people are really sick of that.” Agnifilo may say her client is a person and not a symbol, but the truth is, he’s both.

As I leave the friends, I’m handed a sticker of Mangione depicted as a saint, the same one that hung at Vito’s Pizza. A woman nearby sells T-shirts with the image. Protest organizers hand out information on how to get politically engaged about health care reform.

A truck displaying St. Luigi on an LED screen drives by and the crowd erupts into cheers. Inside the courthouse, a slew of reporters are waiting for Mangione.

“Make him look sexy,” a photographer tells a videographer trying to figure out angles and lighting. “We haven’t had a folk hero in a while,” one court reporter says to another, commenting on the size of the crowd. An hour later, Mangione shuffles in, wearing a forest-green cable-knit sweater, brown loafers, and a bulletproof vest.

He holds his chin up and looks straight ahead. Agnifilo says in court that day that federal authorities are still deciding whether or not to seek the death penalty. She thinks there were search-and-seizure issues from Mangione’s arrest in Pennsylvania.

And she believes his right to a fair trial has been impacted by news articles and documentaries, which continue to make details of the case public. “I want to just bring to Your Honor’s attention my shock that the chief of detectives of the NYPD, along with the New York City mayor, had time to sit down with HBO [for a documentary] and put hair and makeup on and provide information about the arrest, the prosecution, their theory about the case, and evidence about Mr. Mangione that we have not even received,” Agnifilo says to the judge.

“This journal that they’re calling his manifesto, we have never been provided copies.” When Mangione is eventually escorted out of the courtroom, he gazes over to where his supporters sit. He scans their faces briefly, facial expression unchanged, and then is led out into the hallway.

Hours later, a photo of his cuffed, bare ankles goes viral..