LUIGI

An impressionistic portrait of the young man accused of killing a health insurance mogul.

Luigi Mangione has not been tried, at this writing, for his alleged murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in December 2024. This book by journalist and author Richardson would therefore seem to be premature, although it does contain some useful background information. For one, by Richardson’s account, if Mangione committed the crime of which he’s accused, then it might be the only murder in known history that can be ascribed to a book club—one that picked Theodore Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, otherwise known as the Unabomber Manifesto, for discussion. By the author’s account, too, though Mangione didn’t accept every bit of Kaczynski’s analysis of the woes of the world, he took enough of it to heart to ask the inevitable question about what’s to be done—and to whom. “This is a book about getting to that reaction,” writes Richardson. “It’s about Luigi and his kindred spirits. It’s about the dark magic in extreme measures.” Kaczynski himself, whom Richardson interviewed, appears to have been one such kindred spirit. Another, also interviewed, was the activist Rod Coronado, who “sank two whaling ships in 1986” and then, after serving a five-year prison term, picked right back up where he started. Coronado, however, eschews violence; not so fellow traveler Zach, who reasoned that “nobody in this country’s gonna respect any kind of peaceful movement…everybody here understands violence.” One oddity about the Thompson killing is that it immediately elevated Mangione to folk-hero status; who, after all, hasn’t been through the health insurance wringer? Yet Mangione also emerges from Richardson’s narrative as a very intelligent but confused man who accepted some bad ideas as he “searched for new structures of meaning to stabilize our unsettled world.”

Diffuse, but of some interest to those who’re following the Mangione case as it moves toward resolution.