Luigi Mangione’s family couldn’t merely afford medical care. They could afford to donate more than $1 million of their own money to healthcare.
That’s according to a report Monday from The Baltimore Banner, which chronicles the wealthy family history of the man charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Following the news of Mangione’s arrest Monday, his family released a statement saying they were “shocked.”
“Unfortunately, we cannot comment on news reports regarding Luigi Mangione,” said the family in a statement posted on X by Luigi’s cousin Nino Mangione, a Republican member of the lower house of Maryland’s state legislature. “We only know what we have read in the media.”
He noted: “Our family is shocked and devastated by Luigi’s arrest. We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson, and we ask people to pray for all involved.”
In the wake of the fatal shooting of Thompson, many speculated that the killer who carved “Deny, Defend, Depose” onto bullet casings intended for the CEO would be someone down on their luck — another victim, perhaps, of America’s unequal and sometimes callous healthcare industry.
But the truth is somewhat different.
“I didn’t have two nickels to rub together when my father died when I was 11, yet I still became a millionaire,” Mangione family patriarch Nick Mangione Sr told The Baltimore Sun back in 1995. “What other country can you do that in? None that I can think of.”
Nick Mangione was reportedly born to an illiterate father in Baltimore’s Little Italy before the Second World War. He fought in the Pacific and made his fortune as a contractor and then a real estate developer in the baby boom years.
By the 1990s, the Mangiones owned golf resorts, country clubs, a nursing home company, and three conservative talk radio stations, sometimes sparring with city and county officials as NIck Mangione expanded his business empire.
Nick Mangione died in 2008, leaving behind 37 grandchildren, including Luigi Mangione. The family did well enough that they were able to establish a family philanthropic foundation, which donated to the Greater Baltimore Medical Center and numerous other hospitals and healthcare institutions, as well as the Baltimore Opera Company and the Walters Art Museum.
Greater Baltimore Medical Center even has a hospital ward named after the Mangiones, the Banner reported.
Exactly how Luigi Mangione’s history and experiences may be linked to Thompson’s murder is unclear. Luigi attended an expensive private school in Baltimore, got degrees in computer science and engineering, and worked as a data engineer in California.
Nevertheless, friends told HuffPost and The New York Times that he had suffered from ongoing back pain that had prevented him from surfing and impaired his romantic life, while a Goodreads account apparently belonging to Mangione reveal he read books about back pain and spine surgery.
“He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve. Sometimes he’d be doing well and other times not,” said RJ Martin, the founder of a group house in Honolulu where Mangione had lived.
“He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible. I remember him telling me that, and my heart just breaks.”
Meanwhile, Mangione’s Goodreads account posted a positive review for the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, whose hatred for “industrial society and its consequences” led him to commit a spate of bombing attacks in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.