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On December 5, 2024, a leading publication published the headline “Insurance CEO Shot Dead In Manhattan”. The article went on to state 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 chilling and disturbing. But numerous US citizens had a different response: for those who faced insurance rejections or faced exorbitant healthcare costs, the news felt cathartic. Social media blew up. 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 AI algorithm the insurance company created to increase earnings on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a handsome, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a graduate degree in computing, was apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on criminal counts of murder, with prosecutors seeking the capital punishment. So what is his background? And what might have motivated the alleged crime? These are the issues John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an investigation that delves into wider topics, too.

Understanding the Person

A journalist for Esquire magazine, Richardson spent years researching the groups that exist in the hidden parts of the internet, producing articles about people “plagued by genuine concerns 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 arrested, 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 personal growth, both physical and mental”. Additionally, Richardson analyzes his correspondence with influencers and authors as well as his many updates on social media. These primary sources, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead present him as 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 tries to frame 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’

The Meaning Behind the Crime

As for “the meaning” of the title, Richardson takes as his lead three words – “delay”, “refuse” and “remove”, engraved on the ammunition left behind at the crime scene. These are the phrases sometimes used by medical insurers to reject claims. He looks at the indication Mangione had a long-term spinal issue, which might have provided motive for an attack, but finds no proof; instead, what meaning there is seems to lie 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 consensus seems to be that AI is going to eventually either take control, or destroy us, or both.

Missing Pieces

Conspicuous by their absence from the book are interviews with the key individuals. Richardson asked, of course, but never expected time with Mangione himself. And his relatives stated explicitly that they had chosen not to talk to the media in advance of the trial. Another glaring gap is any significant information 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 personality or what might have motivated his accused actions. More troubling, Richardson’s obvious sympathy for him gives the reader the uncomfortable impression of having been privy to a subtle approval of an assassination. In the book’s final lines, Richardson presents his fairytale assessment: “We’ve entered a era of stories, the mad king, the monster in the maze and the emperor without clothes.” In that fable “Robin Hoods 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 defence team works to have charges that could lead to the ultimate sentence thrown out, any mention of myths, Robin Hoods, heroes or monsters will not be admissible as evidence in defence of this handsome young man with a “jawline … and lips … out of a Caravaggio painting” soon to be on trial for murder.