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On December 5, 2024, a leading publication ran the front-page story “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The article then noted that Brian Thompson was “fatally wounded from behind in Midtown Manhattan by a assailant who then calmly departed the scene”. The daytime killing was indeed both cold and shocking. But numerous US citizens reacted differently: for those who had been denied health insurance or faced exorbitant healthcare costs, the news felt cathartic. Social media blew up. 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.”

Less than a week after, Luigi Mangione, a handsome, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus with a master’s in computer science, was arrested at a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on federal and state charges of murder, with prosecutors seeking the capital punishment. So who is Mangione? And what might have motivated the alleged crime? These are the issues John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an investigation that explores broader themes, too.

Understanding the Person

A journalist for Esquire magazine, Richardson devoted considerable time to studying the groups that exist in the hidden parts of the internet, producing articles about people “cursed with realistic fears about an apocalyptic future”. To reveal “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 physical and mental”. Furthermore, Richardson sifts through his correspondence with online personalities and authors as well as his many posts on digital networks. These original materials, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead present him as 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 deceiver’s charm”. Throughout the book, Richardson attempts to cast his subject in archetypal terms.

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 takes as his lead three words – “postpone”, “refuse” and “depose”, engraved on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the phrases occasionally employed by medical insurers to reject claims. He examines the indication Mangione suffered from a chronic back condition, which might have provided motive for an attack, but discovers no confirmation; 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 consensus seems to be that AI is going to eventually either take control, or eliminate humanity, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

Notably missing from the book are interviews with the principal actors. Richardson asked, of course, but did not anticipate access to Mangione himself. And his family stated explicitly that they had chosen not to talk to the press in prior to the trial. Another glaring gap is any significant information about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his guidance, from the early 2020s, UHC profits increased by 33%.

Unclear Conclusions

By the conclusion, the reader has little insight of Mangione’s personality or what could have driven his accused actions. More troubling, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him gives the reader the uncomfortable impression of having been exposed to a veiled endorsement of an targeted killing. In the book’s final lines, Richardson delivers his mythical interpretation: “We’ve entered a era of stories, the mad king, the monster in the maze 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 clear: as Mangione’s defence team works to have charges that could lead to the ultimate sentence thrown out, any mention of fables, Robin Hoods, champions or monsters will not be allowed in court in support for this attractive individual with a “jawline … and lips … out of a Caravaggio painting” soon to be on trial for murder.