Who Is Luigi Mangione And What Set Him Off?

Back surgery was the turning point in his life

What happened to this kid?

After the shooting an image of him came to my mind. I thought he was an idealistic young lefty who had been traumatized by the death of someone close to him. I was guessing it was his mother who’d suffered because of the health care industry and after her passing he was radicalized and determined to get revenge on a capitalist system that had failed her. I had him pegged as a Bernie Sanders fan who voted for Jill Stein last time. He seemed smart enough to tie NYPD up in a game that called out the healthcare system. He seemed like a performance artist who was creating a real world piece about the emptiness of capitalism and the disposability of the people at the top of it. I thought ok this guy reads Noam Chomsky and listens to Hasan Piker. He’s a socialist who thinks he’s about to start a class revolution!

I also thought, after the shooting and the escape from New York City, he’s meticulous, thoughtful, and calculating. Someone who writes political messages on his bullets and stuffs his backpack with Monopoly money is really thinking it all through. I just knew that he’d planned an elaborate getaway. I envisioned him taking that Greyhound to a predetermined place where a truck or a motorcycle was waiting for him. He would zoom off into the distance, riding as far as possible to a cabin in the woods somewhere. There he could fade into oblivion. But then he went to McDonalds and he sat down to eat, and everything changed.

This is the prep school he attended

The real Luigi Mangione was born and raised in Maryland. He went to high school in Baltimore at Gilman School, an elite all-boys private school that sits on 57 acres. He taught himself how to code, part of his love of computer science and engineering. He was on the wrestling team, the soccer team, and ran either cross country or track. He was the valedictorian. At UPenn he got into a selective academic honor society for top-ranking students in electrical and computer engineering. According to the Baltimore Banner, Mangione comes from a very wealthy and prominent family, one of the richest in the state. His late grandfather was a multimillionaire real estate developer who owned country clubs, a conservative radio station, an assisted living company, and a chain of nursing homes around Maryland called Lorien Health Systems. He made a lot of his money from insurance companies paying him to take care of people at the end of their lives. Luigi’s father leads the family business now and his brother is a VP. The family is so deeply intertwined with the local medical industry that the Greater Baltimore Medical Center’s high-risk obstetrics department is named after the family.

Mangione’s Twitter (now shut down) showed that he likes Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson. He followed Joe Rogan, Sam Altman, Andrew Huberman, Sam Harris. He was a big fan of Tim Urban who publishes science explainers and anti-woke political writing about how polarization is bad and rationalism can save the world. He was also a fan of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. He liked Kaczynski’s quote: ‘Violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.

He recently read JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and two books about Elon Musk. He also RT’d a Musk tweet about fighting against the “woke mind virus” and RT’d an article from Big Think with the headline “Toxic Masculinity Is A Harmful Myth.” That plus liking Carlson and Peterson adds up to a lot of right wing things. Plus, a child of wealth... my spider sense is giving me possible Trumpy vibes. I think he might have voted for Trump, you guys. But who knows. CNN said he was registered as unaffiliated with any political party. Whether or not he liked Trump, he seems ideologically right wing.

For me the big question before he was caught was what radicalized him? I said, what death caused him to go into this trauma response? Right now, it seems like it was not a death, but his own painful back.

In 2022 he was in Hawaii staying in a co-living space and surfing. He really impressed many of the people he met there—a story in the Honolulu Civil Beat reported that he was “a natural leader who led a book club where members would share ideas while watching sunsets from a place called Magic Island.” He was remembered as “a thoughtful man who facilitated discussions by deeply listening.” New York Magazine quoted the owner of the co-living space: “Luigi was an incredibly thoughtful, compassionate human being. I had many long, deep conversations with him about not just the state of world affairs but things that we could do to improve society. It’s like utter disbelief that it could have possibly been him, in the sense that when you talk about just a good human, like somebody that you’d be lucky to spend time with, somebody that was just thoughtful and had a good heart, that was definitely Luigi.”

He peed on himself.

On that trip he hurt his back quite badly and found himself in immense pain. A friend told the NY Times, “His spine was kind of misaligned. He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve.” It wasn’t just about physical pain—he felt like his back issues made it impossible to live a regular life. “He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible,” his friend told the NY Times. His back problem seems to be one of the big turning points of his life.

Back surgery led to a devastating tango with even more pain and the health care industry. The Intercept noted that his online reading list was filled with books like “Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance,” and “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery,” and “Back Mechanic.” On Twitter he once posted an X-ray of a back with a surgically implanted medical device.

A friend of Mangione’s from Hawaii told CNN that his back got so bad that he ended up in bed for about a week and that “was really traumatic and difficult.” The friend also said Mangione had surgery this year that left him with screws in his body. “He sent me the X-rays,” Martin said. “It looked heinous, with just giant screws going into his spine.” He had a spinal fusion, a procedure that uses screws and rods to fuse two levels of the spine.

This year, in June or July, Mangione suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with family and friends. The New York Times said, “He had been suffering from a painful back injury and then went dark, prompting anxious inquiries from relatives to his friends: Had anyone heard from him?” The Times also mentioned a man who reached out to Mangione on Instagram in July to say that he hadn’t heard from Mangione in months. The man wrote, “You made commitments to me for my wedding and if you can’t honor them, I need to know so I can plan accordingly.” In October, according to a BBC article, someone tweeted at him saying, “Hey are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you.” On November 18, his mother reported him missing.

After a six-month period of speaking to no one, Mangione re-emerged to commit his stunning act of political violence.

In the manifesto police found in his backpack he mentioned UnitedHealthcare and condemned the healthcare industry for prioritizing profits over care. “These parasites had it coming,” he wrote. “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”

But wait what happened to the smart, crafty guy who was two steps ahead of the NYPD and leaving behind riddles? He only made it to Pennsylvania? Just a few hours away from NYC? I expected so much more. Police told CNN that he spent much of the last few days traveling between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. You spent your last moments of freedom in this life moving through small towns in the middle of Pennsylvania?

The fake ID he gave cops

I thought he would sit on the bus for as long as he could, maybe get into Texas and then try make his way into Mexico. I thought he was too smart to get caught by the police but no. He stopped to eat inside of a McDonalds. That’s how he got caught. He went into McDonalds and he sat inside to eat. A lot of people can lay eyes on you in a McDonalds. An employee called police and he was still there when they arrived. Bro, when there’s photos of you all over the news you can’t sit and chill in a McDonalds! You gotta stay in the shadows. You gotta bob and weave. I thought that was clear. But even more than that, I don’t understand why he still had the gun and the silencer with him. Are you serious?

CNN reported that the 3D printer-made gun in his backpack has, “one loaded Glock magazine with six nine-millimeter full metal jacket rounds.” He also had at least one hollow point bullet and $8,000 in American cash and $2,000 in a foreign currency. He also had a bag that would block cell phone data transmissions.

Bro you can’t walk around with a weapon with a body on it. Did you never watch the Godfather? Or, like, any movie where someone tries to escape after a murder? You gotta throw the gun in the river or the sewer as soon as you can. That is common sense, I fear. He had days to get that done and failed. (I feel like I’m talking to my teenager—"I’ve been asking you for four days now to clean up your room and throw away the gun you assassinated that guy with!”)

In many ways Mangione’s story is frighteningly normal. The system did not respect his humanity and it was so violent to him that he felt it necessary to be violent toward it. Many of us would feel like doing what he did if we went through what he went through. He just went and actually did it.