Luigi Mangione's family couldn't merely afford healthcare. They could afford to donate more than $1m of their own money to healthcare.
That is according to a report on Monday from The Baltimore Banner, which chronicles the family history of the man charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
In the wake of that killing, many speculated that the killer who craved "Deny", "Defend", and "Depose" onto bullet casings intended for Thompson must be someone severely down on their luck; another victim, perhaps, of America's unequal and sometimes callous healthcare industry.
But if Mangione is that person, as New York prosecutors now contend, then the truth may be 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."
Mangione Sr 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, they owned golf resorts, country clubs, a nursing home company, and three conservative talk radio stations, sometimes sparring with city and county officials as he expanded his business empire.
Mangione Sr died in 2008, leaving behind 37 grandchildren including Luigi Mangione. But 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.
In fact, the Banner reports that GBMC even has a hospital ward named after the Mangiones. One of Luigi's cousins, Nino, is also a Republican member of the lower house of Maryland's state legislature.
Following the news of mangione’s arrest, his family released a statement saying they were “shocked” by news of his arrest.
“Unfortunately, we cannot comment on news reports regarding Luigi Mangione,” said the family in a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter) by Nino Mangione. “We only know what we have read in the media.
“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.”
A Statement From The Mangione Family Regarding Luigi Mangione pic.twitter.com/6E6E2CfgFv
— Nino Mangione (@NinoMangione42) December 10, 2024
Exactly how this interacts with Luigi Mangione, or a potential motive for Thompson's murder, is unclear. Luigi himself attended a paid private school in Baltimore, got degrees in computer science and engineering, and got a job 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 showed he had raid 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, the Goodreads account left 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 Seventies, Eighties and Nineties.