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On December 5, 2024, a leading publication published the headline “Insurance CEO Shot Dead In Manhattan”. The article then noted that Brian Thompson was “fatally wounded from behind in Midtown Manhattan by a assailant who then walked coolly away”. The murder in broad daylight was truly cold and shocking. But many Americans 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 should live or perish. 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 good-looking, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus 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 capital punishment. So who is Mangione? And what drove the accused offense? These are the issues John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an inquiry that delves into wider topics, too.

Understanding the Person

A writer for a major publication, Richardson devoted considerable time to studying the groups that lurk in the dark corners 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 wide-ranging book list. We learn that “[when] he was arrested, Luigi had a list of 295 books on a reading platform”. Their content ranged from climate change to masculinity, along with a “emphasis on his own self-improvement, both body and mind”. Additionally, Richardson analyzes his communications with influencers and authors as well as his many posts on digital networks. These primary sources, intended to depict a picture of Mangione, instead present him as an amorphous figure. Richardson tries to justify this by suggesting that “Luigi’s mystery, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old trickster magic”. Here, as elsewhere, Richardson tries to frame his subject in symbolic roles.

Mangione is profoundly worried about the world around him, one where ‘change is rapid 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 “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 indication Mangione suffered from a chronic back condition, 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, sliding faster and faster to the edge”; a world where the general belief 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 access to Mangione himself. And his relatives stated explicitly that they had chosen not to talk to the press in advance of the trial. Another flashing-yellow omission is any significant information about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his guidance, from the early 2020s, company earnings rose significantly.

Ambiguous Findings

By the conclusion, the reader has little insight of Mangione’s character or what might have motivated his accused actions. Worse still, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him gives the reader the disturbing feeling of having been exposed to a veiled endorsement of an assassination. In the book’s final lines, Richardson delivers his mythical interpretation: “We’ve entered a era of stories, 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 nothing makes sense anymore.”

One thing is certain: as Mangione’s defence team works to have charges that could lead to the death penalty thrown out, any reference of fables, folk heroes, champions or monsters will not be admissible as evidence in defence of this handsome young man with a “features reminiscent of classical art” soon to be on trial for murder.