Luigi Mangione: The Joke is On Everyone

What if Mangione isn't the gunman, and what if UHC CEO Brian Thompson had announced his intention to speak uncomfortable truths about the U.S. government?

Last December 10, I posted an essay on this newsletter titled Did Luigi Mangione Want to Be Caught?

As I noted back then, on Monday, Dec. 9, 2024 at 9:00 a.m., a customer at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania purportedly noticed a young man dining in the restaurant. The young man had the same conspicuously thick eyebrows and was wearing the same black jacket and blue surgical face mask as the young man who was photographed getting into a taxi on Manhattan’s Upper West Side shortly after 7:00 a.m. on the morning UHC CEO Brian Thompson was shot in Midtown.

The customer called the local police, and two officers arrested a young man named Luigi Mangione. Following his arrest, he was found to have on his person a semi-automatic pistol, multiple fake IDs—including the fake ID used by the young man who’d checked into the Upper West Side youth hostel—and a printed manifesto about his grievances with the rapacious U.S. corporate establishment.

If Luigi Mangione is indeed the assassin of Brian Thompson, what on earth was he doing—six days later—hanging out only 280 miles from the crime scene, wearing the same clothes, and carrying multiple incriminating objects on his person? Regarding those distinct bushy eyebrows: Why didn’t he wear a stocking cap that he could have easily pulled down over them? How about trimming his eyebrows?

In other words: Did Luigi Mangione want to be caught?

Note that Mangione was valedictorian of his high school class and a graduate of the the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. I have a hard time believing he made these painfully obvious mistakes because he is stupid. Is he mentally ill?

The moment I read the first report that the NYPD’s person of interest was a young man who’d checked into a youth hostel on the Upper West Side on November 24, I had a hunch that there is something strange and questionable about this person of interest. I also had a hunch that the young man who left traces of himself on the Upper West Side would quickly be caught.

The question now is, how precisely will the NYPD prove that Luigi Mangione was indeed the same man who shot Brian Thompson? Will his DNA match DNA left at the crime scene—perhaps on the spent casings or unspent cartridges left on the sidewalk? Does the NYPD possess tracking data from his cell phone or from a city electric bike that he used?

What about the water bottle that the alleged assassin is reported to have purchased from a Midtown Starbucks? This water bottle was purportedly secured as evidence. If DNA is obtained from it, will it match Mangione’s DNA?

While the entire mainstream media has already concluded that Mangione is indeed the killer, I look forward to hearing his story and his defense, provided he wishes to tell it, and will survive his detention to do so.

Though I am prepared to be surprised by all kinds of wild stuff, I suspect he will simply say that he is not the killer and not the masked man who was photographed in the Midtown Starbucks, and that the NYPD can’t prove that he was.

Top: Luigi Mangione’s mugshot. Bottom: Alleged assassin in Midtown Starbucks.

While Mangione’s bushy eyebrows were apparently what resulted in his identification as the young man photographed getting into a taxi on the Upper West Side, it seems these same bushy eyebrows may prove to be exculpatory. Tough to say from the grainy image and different camera angle, but judging by the above image, the man photographed in the Midtown Starbucks does not have these bushy eyebrows that converge at the top of his nose.

I suspected back on December 10, and I continue to suspect now, that the prosecutor may be making a mistake by accusing Mangione of being the murderer of Brian Thompson.

I wonder if it would be more prudent to prosecute him for the crime of accomplice or accessory to murder, but not—because of lack of sufficient evidence—for murder.

It wouldn’t surprise me if, when the case goes to trial, Mangione is able to produce exculpatory evidence that he was not the gunman (captured on video) who shot Brian Thompson.

Not long after I posted my essay on December 10, I received a text from a friend who was in contact with a man who claimed to have known the slain UHC CEO Brian Thompson. The informant insisted that Thompson had recently started talking about reforming some of UHC’s business practices, especially in the nature of the company’s working relationship with the U.S. government.

This message resonated with me, because I noticed that, shortly before his death, Thompson was a subject of two U.S. government investigations alleging various federal violations.

I also noticed that, prior to becoming CEO, Thompson oversaw the company's government programs, including Medicare. In that capacity, he was in an excellent position to observe improprieties in the business conduct of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)—an agency through which $1.52 trillion of federal money flowed in fiscal year 2024, or about 22.5% of all federal spending.

Here it is worth bearing in mind that a federal institution with trillions flowing through it is likely to involve corruption. As we reported in our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19, Medicare and Medicaid Services played a key role in creating a wide array of perverse incentives for hospitalizing COVID patients and giving them Remdesivir instead of giving them blood thinners and corticosteroids such as Methylprednisolone. The latter drugs, long ago approved by the FDA, have long been known to be safe and effective for treating blood clots and pulmonary inflammation. On the other hand, Remdesivir—the pet drug of Anthony Fauci and his buddies at Gilead Sciences—was known to be so unsafe and ineffective that even the WHO recommended NOT using it.

I told my friend that I would like to speak with the informant, who initially expressed interest, but then went silent.

I cannot evaluate whether the apparent informant was telling the truth or was even in a position to know the truth. All the same, I wondered if Brian Thompson had experienced something like a Damascene moment (coinciding with sufficient wealth to retire) and had mentioned to someone his intention to speak out against the U.S. government that was, at the time, putting heat on him.

Such a scenario is analogous to President Kennedy mentioning to someone that he intended to pump the brake’s on the U.S. government’s growing involvement in the Vietnam conflict—a conflict that his successor, President Johnson, was happy to escalate less than a year after Kennedy’s assassination.

In such a scenario, I imagine Luigi Mangione being recruited (by someone pretending to be a social justice warrior) as an accomplice with the assurance that when the murder case goes to trial, he will be able to produce exculpatory evidence that he wasn’t the shooter.

This scheme would enable the true gunman (and his masters) to evade detection while Mangione would become a celebrated, “wrongfully prosecuted” sex symbol with a seven figure book and film deal.

If this hypothetical scenario is the truth of the matter, a fitting title for the story is Luigi Mangione: The Joke is On Everyone.

I’ve been thinking along these lines for some time, and was inspired to write them down this morning when I saw the following Tucker Carlson interview with novelist Walter Kirn that was published about a month ago.

As the viewer will see, Kirn has also been wondering if Mangione really is the gunman, and he shares many other fascinating reflections on this bizarre story.