Luigi Mangione, accused of the murder of United Healthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, is escorted by police as he arrives at court in New York City on September 16. Photo / Timothy Clary, AFP
Deep within the lush mountains of Japan, among the thousands of peaks that form a sprawling peninsula on the country’s main island, stands a sacred mountain that has been a sanctuary for spiritual pilgrims for more than a thousand years.
Since the seventh century, Mount Omine’s towering trees and burbling streams have greeted Japanese men on spiritual pilgrimage.
Devoted practitioners of Shugendo, a fusion of Buddhism and mountain worship, go there to climb a treacherous ridge, an endeavour they believe can help them attain supernatural powers.
In premodern Japan, lore has it, ninja assassins disguised themselves as Shugendo practitioners to evade the shogun’s restrictions.
And there is still a belief that approaching the mountain in search of spiritual direction without proper training can make a person susceptible to manipulation by dark forces.
Few foreign travellers make the actual journey to its misty peaks.
On May 6, 2024 — his 26th birthday — an American man checked into a small guesthouse in the village of Tenkawa, the entry point to this legendary mountain.
He introduced himself as Luigi Mangione, a backpacker from the United States.
Seven months later, on December 4, 2024, a man who prosecutors say was Mangione travelled to New York City, pulled out a 3D-printed 9 mm pistol and fired it at the chief executive of one of America’s largest health insurance companies, UnitedHealthcare.
The CEO, Brian Thompson, died on the footpath, and his killer escaped by bicycle.
Mangione was arrested five days later while eating a hash brown and browsing on his laptop at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
The police said they found what they called a manifesto decrying America’s system of for-profit healthcare and the “parasites” of the insurance industry.
A journal detailing plans for the assassination was also found in Mangione’s possession, according to prosecutors.
Now facing state and federal murder charges, Mangione, 27, who has pleaded not guilty, is arguably the most scrutinised defendant to emerge from the recent spate of politically motivated violence in the US.
The essentials of his life story — valedictorian at his elite private high school in Maryland, computer science student at the University of Pennsylvania, data engineer in Hawaii — are now relatively well known.
His whereabouts and actions in the months leading up to Thompson’s murder have largely remained a mystery.
Some family and friends have said they were unable to reach him starting shortly after he returned from his backpacking trip to Asia, a trip that now appears to have been pivotal for him.
The New York Times was able to unearth new details about that period.
Interviews with fellow travellers and local residents, along with a review of Mangione’s writings and communications, suggest a shift from seeking human connection and community to isolating himself and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how to make a statement about injustice.
Mangione had grown up in a Baltimore suburb, part of a well-known local family whose business ventures included country clubs and a chain of nursing homes.
He graduated from the prestigious all-boys Gilman School in 2016 and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree related to computer engineering.
He excelled academically, and friends described him as intelligent, thoughtful and considerate.
But he also had what he described as brain fog that affected his grades and mental focus, according to his social media posts in college.
He had also endured long-standing back pain from a spinal condition that worsened after a surfing incident, according to his social media posts.
In July 2023, he underwent surgery that was an unexpected success. By day seven, he wrote later that summer, he was on “literally zero pain meds”.
The surgery cleared the way for his tour of Asia in early 2024.
At first, like many young backpackers, he drank and made friends with strangers along the way. While in Tokyo in February, he met a Japanese professional poker player at dinner and joined his group for a meal. The next month, he went to Thailand.
Eventually, Mangione apparently yearned for a slower, more deliberate pace.
On April 21, Mangione sent a voice memo to a friend saying that he was in the Nara Mountains, where Mount Omine is located.
Not long afterward, Mangione checked into the guesthouse in Tenkawa.
The guesthouse where Mangione stayed is a small building converted from the village’s post office into a bare-bones lodge with four rooms.
When Mangione booked online, there was only a room with a bunk bed left, known as the Hunter room, said Juntaro Mihara, the inn’s owner. He spent six days at the guesthouse.
Unlike other guests, Mihara said, Mangione left his room completely spotless and took out his own rubbish.
While other guests in the inn’s tiny wooden bar scrolled their phones or laptops, Mangione spent his time quietly sipping on a beer and writing in his journal or reading a book, Mihara recalled.
“He didn’t use any digital devices,” Mihara said. “He was quiet, and only had minimum necessary conversations with other guests or he maybe didn’t talk with anyone.”
Mangione was considered by friends to have a philosophical mind and an intellectual curiosity about a wide variety of subjects.
According to interviews and his own writings, he read widely and expressed interest in a range of structural problems: corporate greed, the negative effects of social media, the impact of falling birthrates on society.
He appeared to feel strongly about the healthcare system in America, though it’s not at all clear that this was a result of the back pain he had struggled with or his own interactions with the medical establishment.
He was never insured by UnitedHealthcare, according to the company, and no evidence has emerged of any personal disputes over insurance coverage.
After his time at Mount Omine, Mangione flew to Mumbai, India. There, he met a writer named Jash Dholani, who is best known for distilling concepts from classical books. They met in late May, according to Dholani.
Dholani once went on the social platform X to post 14 insights from the writings of Ted Kaczynski, the American mathematician known as the Unabomber, whose nearly 20-year bombing campaign resulted in three deaths and 23 injuries.
He called Kaczynski a “philosopher terrorist” whose manifesto “attacks modern civilisation like nothing else before or since”. He later deleted the post.
Among Mangione’s many interests, one throughline is clear: a fascination with Kaczynski.
In conversations with others, in a journal entry and in a social media post, Mangione wrote and spoke of his interest in Kaczynski, who believed that modern-day technology was harmful for individual freedom, as well as the natural environment, and had led to widespread human suffering.
He once noted that Kaczynski was “rightfully imprisoned” for his violent acts but that it was impossible to ignore “how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out”.
By July, Mangione had returned from his backpacking trip and was in the US, temporarily settled in San Francisco.
It is not clear whether he took a job there, but he got a fake ID with an issue date of June 18.
He had stopped posting on his known X and Reddit accounts.
His last posts, in May and early June, not long after he was on Mount Omine, were about the negative impact of social media.
He also stopped responding to messages from some family and friends, and his mother filed a missing person report with police in San Francisco in November.
In his writings from those months, he was ruminating over how to fight what he saw as injustice.
He wrote in his journal that he was sleeping poorly and feeling “foggy.” And yet he appeared to be zeroing in on something.
“I finally feel confident about what I will do,” he wrote in an entry in August. “The details are finally coming together. And I don’t feel any doubt about whether it’s right/justified. I’m glad — in a way — that I’ve procrastinated, bc it allowed me to learn more about UHC.
“The target is insurance,” he wrote. “It checks every box.”
In the next journal entry filed in court by the prosecution, on October 22, Mangione invoked Kaczynski.
The problem with most revolutionary acts was that the message was lost on the general public, he wrote.
Because Kaczynski had killed innocent people, he was seen by many people as a serial killer, and his ideas were dismissed.
“He crosses the line from revolutionary anarchist to terrorist — the worst thing a person can be,” Mangione wrote.
“This is the problem with most militants that rebel against — often real — injustices; they commit an atrocity, either whose horror outweighs the impact of their message, or whose distance from their message prevents normies from connecting the dots.
“Consequently, the revolutionary idea becomes associated with extremism, incoherence, or evil — an idea that no reasonable member of society could approve of.”
In his journal, Mangione wrote about the event that was bringing Thompson to New York: a conference for UnitedHealthcare investors on December 4 at a Hilton Hotel on West 54th Street.
“This investor conference is a true windfall,” he wrote in the October entry. “It embodies everything wrong with our health system, and — most importantly — the message becomes self evident.”
Prosecutors have said that Mangione “meticulously” planned the shooting; he tracked Thompson’s movements and staked out the hotel in the days before the killing.
On December 4, he arrived outside the hotel — masked — and waited until Thompson walked by, they said.
As Thompson walked towards the hotel’s entrance, a man in a hoodie emerged from between parked cars, levelled a handgun affixed with a silencer and fired.
Thompson was left bleeding on the footpath, a trail of shell casings next to him. The words “delay” and “depose” were written on some of the casings, as well as “den”, which prosecutors took to mean “deny”.
Five days after the shooting, Mangione’s months-long journey came to an abrupt end at the McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Hurubie Meko, Katie J.M. Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Hisako Ueno
Photographs by: Noriko Hayashi
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