Luigi Mangione allegedly considered bombing Manhattan as he planned out his attack on UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Mangione, 26, appeared in court on Tuesday, fighting against extradition to New York – where he is charged with second-degree murder after Thompson, 50, was slain.
The former Ivy League student had been apprehended at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania on Monday, when he was found with a 3D-printed pistol and black silencer, as well as a manifesto condemning the American healthcare system.
Mangione also had a spiral notebook in which he wrote a ‘to-do list,’ ahead of the grizzly shooting, CNN reported.
In it, he allegedly toyed with the idea of using a bomb to kill Thompson – but he decided against the prospect because it ‘could kill innocents,’ and determined a shooting would be more targeted.
He also reportedly mused that it couldn’t get any better than ‘to kill the CEO at his own bean-counting conference,’ as Thompson was set to disclose the financial gains the company made this year.
Journalist Shimon Prokupecz reported that ‘law enforcement and certainly investigators’ will view that sentence as a ‘confession.’
Mangione is expected to plead not guilty to both his New York murder charge and gun possession charges in Pennsylvania, and his lawyer Tom Dickey claimed there’s no evidence to suggest that Mangione is the shooter.
After his orange jumpsuit-clad client appeared at the hearing – where he was denied bail – Dickey spoke to reporters at a press conference to predict Mangione’s pleas.
‘I haven’t seen any evidence that says he’s the shooter,’ defense attorney Dickey said. ‘The fundamental concept of American justice is a presumption of innocence until you’re proven guilty.’
The lawyer’s comments came after an action-packed court hearing that only ended when the suspect was escorted out of the courtroom.
Privately-educated Mangione suffered a ferocious public meltdown on Tuesday, and had to be restrained as he screamed at police while heading into the hearing.
The irate 26-year-old shouted out ‘this is completely unjust and an insult to the American people’ while being physically apprehended by officers on the scene.
Dramatic images from outside the building in Pennsylvania showed irate Mangione’s gritted teeth and furrowed brow as he yelled – before one cop grabbed his neck from behind and hurried him through the courtroom door.
Authorities have said Mangione’s three-page manifesto is currently being investigated, which they have labeled a ‘claim of responsibility.’
The document is a different piece of evidence from notebook – where he flirted with the idea of bombing Midtown to kill the millionaire healthcare boss.
In the manifesto, Mangione allegedly wrote about the grandiose size of UnitedHealthcare and how much profits it makes, and went on to condemn health insurance companies more broadly for placing profits over care.
Details about his writing come amid the backdrop of the UPenn graduate’s own experience with the medical world, as he had been struggling after a spinal injury. His elaborate online presence also showed he’d read multiple books on back pain.
‘To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, [and] a lot of patience,’ he allegedly wrote in the manifesto, according to the Daily Beast.
He went on to say he had ‘respect’ for federal investigators, and apologized for causing any ‘traumas,’ but seemed to defend his alleged actions.
‘Frankly these parasites had it coming,’ the manifesto wrote.
It claimed that the United States had the ‘most expensive healthcare system in the world,’ but blasted the system for making America only the 42nd in life expectancy.
According to the most recent data published by the World Health Organization in 2020 found that life expectancy in the US was 78-and-a-half years for both men and women – ranking it 40th compared to other countries.
A 2023 report by the World Economic Forum also found that the US had the most expensive healthcare compared to other mostly Western countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
It reported that Americans were spending an estimated $12,318 per person in 2021, compared to $7,383 spent per person in Germany, the second most expensive system.
Police said Mangione viewed himself as a ‘hero’ fighting a corrupt health insurance industry, according to the New York Times.
An internal police report obtained by the Times said Mangione ‘appeared to view the targeted killing of the company’s highest-ranking representative as a symbolic takedown and a direct challenge to its alleged corruption and “power games.”‘
It goes on to say Mangione ‘views himself as a hero of sorts who has finally decided to act upon such injustices.’
One theory is that the the former valedictorian killed Thompson, 50, as an ‘act of war’ after the company ‘violated’ its contract with his mother who suffered years of excruciating pain and expense following a diagnosis of severe neuropathy.
Mangione had written in an alleged document, obtained by true crime podcast Hidden True Crime, that his mother, ‘hit her $6,000 deductible of her UnitedHealthcare plan in October. Then the doctor went on vacation and my mother wasn’t able to resume tests until January when her deductible reset.’
‘Back then I thought there was nothing I could do,’ Mangione allegedly wrote. ‘The high co-pays make consistent treatment impossible, new treatments were denied as not necessary medically, the old treatments didn’t work and still put us out for thousands of dollars.’
‘With every delay, my anger surged. With every denial, I wanted to throw the doctor through the glass wall of their hospital waiting room, but it wasn’t them.
‘It wasn’t the doctors, the receptionists, administrators, pharmacists, imaging technicians or anyone we ever met. What it was it was UnitedHealthcare.’
In Mangione’s alleged summary, UnitedHealthcare, ‘think because [their conduct] is legal no-one can punish them.’
He wrote: ‘We entered into an agreement for healthcare with a legally binding contract that promised care commensurate with our insurance payments and medical needs. Then UnitedHealthcare changed the rules to suit their own profits.’
Mangione goes on to reference his own ‘chronic back pain’ – a result of a surgery following a surfing accident – saying that now it is his own pain which ‘wakes me in the night, screaming in pain.’
In his closing sentence, Mangione wrote: ‘UnitedHealthcare…violated their contract with my mother, with me, and tens of millions of other Americans. This threat to my own health, my family’s health and the health of this country’s people requires me to respond with an act of war.’
He was also allegedly influenced by ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski, whose manifesto he praised on Goodreads as an ‘extreme political revolutionary.’
‘It’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.’
‘When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive,’ Mangione wrote. ‘You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.’
He even quoted Kaczynski on his page, with excerpts from his ramblings including: ‘Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness.’
‘The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress,’ read another excerpt.
David Kaczynski, Ted’s brother, has since spoken out about the connection between the accused killer and his kin.
‘Many factors go into a person’s motivation that they drastically act like this, and I hope my brother wasn’t in a way a key model for him,’ he told NBC News.
‘It really gives me a great deal of personal pain to think my brother’s actions have in any way contributed to influencing a man like this to kill an innocent human being.’
David went on to say his brother is not someone others should look up to.
‘To the extent that he [the Unabomber] may have attributed at all to sort of normalizing or recasting the violent acts as beneficial to humanity is a terrible mistake,’ David said.
‘His actions are like a virus. They could be like a virus unless they understand he was a very angry and disturbed man. It doesn’t mean his ideas are ideas of a lunatic, but his behavior, I believe, is the behavior of a lunatic.’
