But as facts dribbled out - the gun with the silencer, knowledge of exactly which door and at what time CEO Brian Thompson would arrive at the Hilton in pre-dawn darkness, the use of cash and burner phone, the clever getaway by bike into camera-free Central Park - I started to waver. The mind wandered into cinematic territory: A billionaire Doctor No behind the United Health Care C-suite’s insider trading scandal, hiring a professional with a non-extraditable national passport. A fellow corporate suit with a personal vendetta, a love triangle, a dirty secret involving massive medical malpractice.

A few nights after the “hit” I cued up a movie that seemed in the spirit of the moment. Michael Clayton is a classic of corporate evil, Tilda Swinton as the pinched corporate lawyer who hires a pair of professional killers to commit a murder and hide the fact that her chemical agribusiness client has been poisoning farmers with a toxic product. George Clooney as the fixer is terrific. Swinton won an Oscar for it.

Corporate intrigue seemed possible. Black bag team. High end hit man already on a flight back to Belarus.

But this morning, it turned out, my initial instinct was kind of on target: The suspect is an all-American boy who, as an NYPD chief of detectives put it drily, “does seem to have some ill-will toward corporate America.” He even had an anti-insurance “manifesto” on his person when arrested.

Luigi Mangione, 26, charged with murder in a so-far sealed New York criminal complaint, is presumed innocent until proven otherwise, obviously. But the reported clues to his involvement are pretty damning. He was arrested with a ghost gun - possibly made with a 3D printer - that matched the one the killer used. He had on his person the fake ID the killer used to check into the New York hostel police had traced him to, and where, flirting with a female clerk, he had pulled down his otherwise ubiquitous face mask to flash a grin. And he looks like that guy.

Early reports are that either an “elderly customer” or the Altoona McDonald’s staff themselves recognized the patron and called cops.

Either way, online fans of the murderer (whose numbers are legion, who have started selling merch commemorating him, and whose existence has provoked reams of concerned analysis) apparently went on an immediate bad-review rampage, posting that the kitchen was rat-infested, etc. The fact that McDonald’s doesn’t offer its employees health insurance also came up.

The truth, as is often the case, turns out to be stranger than fiction.

Mangione reportedly studied computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was enough of an intellectual to have on his Goodreads account quotes from Bertrand Russell. (“Luigi’s favorites” include Russell’s: “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”

He read Michael Pollan’s book on hallucinogens - How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics - earlier this year. His “want to read” list also included a tome called The Great Conversation: Volume I: Pre-Socratics through Descartes.

He gave Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto four stars and reporters have cherry-picked his commentary of that book because it seems relevant:

It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.
He was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.

He added: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”

The New York Post, Murdoch rag, was first out of the gate with the predictable assessment that Mangione is a radical leftist. But even a cursory glance at his digital trail indicates it’s not that simple. He was engaged with the online male right, was an Elon Musk fan, seemed antagonistic to DEI, and even had Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on his “want to read” list.

He was the 2016 class valediction at Baltimore’s top boys’ prep school. My friend investigative journalist and author Dave Troy, happened to have a son who graduated in the same class of the Gilman School, and he first shared a video of the speech on X. In it, a composed younger Mangione - the same man in a hoodie and a mask New York City street surveillance cameras recorded shooting a man in cold blood and calmly walking away - wears a navy blue suit with a white boutonnière, surrounded by a sea of young men in suits.

His speech isn’t fiery at all. No politics even though it was an election year. No whiff of radicalization. He is not yet a murderer, just a thoughtful, poised young man, on the road to success, one of America’s more promising, poised and brainy Gen Z men, about to step out into an amoral world.

On the knife edge of adult understanding and his destiny.

Poignant, tragic and deeply uncanny - the video can be viewed on Youtube here. “The rush is on,” journalist Troy posted. “Was he a 'leftist', or radicalized by the 'online right'? Facts, as always, are more nuanced. Evidence suggests he is a smart, mixed-up kid with questions, who got turned inside out by a nasty world and did something terrible. Other takes are incomplete.”

As I write this “FREE HIM” is trending on social media.

*M4A - Medicare For All, the slogan that supporters of nationalized healthcare have been using since at least 2016, when Bernie Sanders ran on it, lost to Hillary Clinton, who then lost to Donald Trump.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible. This post is reprinted with permission from her American FreakshowSubstack. Please consider subscribing.