20/20 - Mangione Episode 3: "Mister Cactus"

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Some people who crossed paths with Luigi Mangione throughout his life say he was kind and had a promising future. How did Brian Thompson's shooter change in the lead-up to his arrest? To hear the rest of the series, follow "Burden of Proof: Luigi Mangione" for free on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazon Music⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen ad-free on Apple Podcasts when you subscribe to 20/20 True Crime+. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, this is Brian Buckmire, here with another weekly episode of my new podcast from ABC Audio and 2020, Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione. Remember, you can also listen to Ad Free by subscribing to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts. Click the link in the description to learn more. Now, here's the next episode of Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation

Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Less than a year before Brian Thompson was shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan. Luigi Mangione was traveling through Asia. This is ABC News contributor Anna Garcia. Even writing about his experiences in Japan and enjoying his hikes in the mountains.

And sharing his experiences by posting on Reddit. In spring of 2024, Mangione appeared to post to a Reddit channel called One Bag, The Art of Minimalist Travel. Several details of the user's Reddit profile appear to tie it to Mangioni, including a post that contained a link to his GitHub profile, which had his full name on it. In one Reddit post, the user, Mr. Cactus, wrote about fitting everything he needed to travel around Asia into a mid-sized backpack. He gave enthusiastic, detailed recommendations to fellow light travelers, and wax poetic about the philosophy behind carrying just one backpack on his journey.

In winter and spring 2024, Luigi Mangione traveled to Thailand, India, and Japan, where, on his 26th birthday, the New York Times reported that he checked into a guesthouse near Mount Omini, a sacred mountain in Japan, forbidden to women. The innkeeper told the times that he took out his own trash and kept his room spotless.

From Japan, he sent a friend a voice memo, saying, I want some time to zen out and do some Buddha. When Mangione returned to the United States in summer, he became increasingly hard to contact, according to authorities, and seemed to stop posting on social media. In November, a month before Brian Thompson's murder, Mangione's mother, reported him missing. Had something happened during his travels?

And Luigi Mangione changed? In December, he was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, with, according to authorities, one backpack. This time, the backpack didn't have a caraviner, a packable parca and a microfiber beach towel in it. Instead, investigators say they found a 3D printed gun, a silencer, a letter to the feds, and a red spiral notebook that described whacking a health insurance CEO.

Luigi Mancione pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking in federal court and admitted to shooting Brian Thompson. He has pleaded not guilty to murder and other charges in his state case, and his attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the state charges, citing double jeopardy laws. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office said in his statement that it remains committed to seeking justice for Mr. Thompson and his family. Mangione's state trial has been adjourned to resolve the defense's motion. From the very start of this case, and as it keeps evolving, people have poured over Luigi Mangione's past. Who is Luigi Mangione?

What decisions, what ideas, what twists and turns in his life led him to what he admitted to in federal court, stalking and shooting a man? From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm Brian Buckmire, an attorney and ABC News legal analyst. And this is Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione. Episode 3, Mr. Cactus. In 1998, Brian Thompson was one year out of college. He was an audit manager at Pricewaterhouse Coopers. It was the beginning of a resume that would take him to the sea suites.

Also in 1998, in Maryland, the man who shot him on a Manhattan sidewalk was born. While Brian Thompson was raised in a small farming community, Luigi Mangione was born into a dynasty, according to people who knew his family. Manjones were wealthy, not only in money, but in their spirit. That's Giovanna Aquila Blatterman. I am in Baltimore City, in Maryland. We are in the greatest neighborhood of this city, Little Italy. She was a hairstylistice in the area for decades.

And I think in the 70s, I briefly did Miss Mary's hair, who was Mr. Nick Manjone's. wife. She and Mr. Nick. They lived on the east side, and I had a salon on the east side. Nicholas, known as Nick Sr., and Mary Mangione are Luigi Mangione's grandparents. To understand the life Luigi Mangione was born into, we need to start with them. They were both born in Maryland to Italian immigrants. They got married in 1950. In a 1995 interview with the Baltimore son, Nick Sr. said he grew up extremely. extremely poor and was already working to provide for his family before he was a teen.

He served in the Navy during World War II and worked in construction when he returned home. Well, I believe Nick Senior was like a magician. He took nothing and he built a million dollar business. The seeds of the Mangione Business Empire were planted in the 1970s. And it was a resort called Turv Valley that really put Nick Senior on the map. Here's a clip of Nick Sr. talking about the resort in the 90s from a video on its YouTube page. We have spent the last 13 years building this up to the beautiful resort that it is today. It never enjoyed the opulence and or the visual appearance that it has today.

When Mangione's grandfather bought Turf Valley in the 70s, it was a simple golf club. Over the years, he added a hotel, a spa, ballrooms, a conference center, pools, and multiple restaurants. It hosted massive conventions, weddings, and PGA matches. The Mangione's business portfolio expanded through the years. Public records show they also own a couple radio stations, hotels, construction companies, and the real estate that surrounds the golf courses. They're considered a pillar of the community. That's Tom Moronic, another long time Baltimore resident.

My experiences with the Mangione family come from 20 years being a radio host on their station, WCBM. But of the understanding, they own Turf Valley, which is a great golf course, Hayfields, which is a great golf course, and a retirement home and other real estate. and not just a retirement home. The Mangione's own a chain of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Nick Sr. built a sprawling, multi-industry business empire, and it was a family empire. He and Mary had ten children, five daughters and five sons. They all got married at the family golf club, all ten. And the children took over the businesses after Nick Sr.

passed away. But the Mangione's presence in the area goes beyond business. They've long had relationships with public officials, all the way up to the governor's office. And they've had all kinds of leadership roles, seats on school boards, college boards, and tourism committees. Luigi Mangione's cousin, Nino Mangioni, is a state delegate. And the other thing I know is they are known, they have a great reputation for being involved in charity, in the community, being very supportive of charity, and that's a great thing about them, a great asset. Many of their donations are made through the Mangione Family Foundation. The nonprofit was most recently valued at over $4 million.

It's now managed by Nick Sr. and Mary's children. In fact, according to 2024 tax records, Luigi Mangione's father heads it. The honors, awards, recognitions, the charity events where the Mangione's are the esteemed guests, it's nearly impossible to list them all. Additional support for culinary and hospitality students comes from longtime donors, the Mangioni family. Maybe take a visit to Howard Community College and check out the culinary suite named after Nick and Mary. If you live in the area and have had a baby recently, maybe you've spent time in the Mangioni Family Center or the Mangione.

High Risk Obstetrics Unit. Both are at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, where the Mangione Family Foundation has donated over a million dollars. According to an article on the hospital website, all 30-something of Nick and Mary's grandchildren and over 20 great-grandchildren were born there. The article described the birth of a new Mangione as a well-known, quote, rousing event,

one that all the aunts, uncles, and cousins show up for it. Luigi Nicholas Mangione was born to Nick and Mary's eldest boy, Lewis. He is the youngest and has two older sisters. By the sixth grade, Luigi Mangione was enrolled in the Gilman School, an all-boys private prep school, another fixture in the greater Baltimore area. Here's Tom Aronick again. I went to Loyola High School, and we like to say Gilman is the second best school in the area. Some would consider it the best, but it's a very good school.

It's a school that's not easy to get into. It's not inexpensive to pay the tuition, but it is an absolutely beautiful campus. It looks like a college campus with well-maintained sports fields in a massive red brick colonial style hall as the centerpiece. You have to be certainly a little bit wealthy to afford that. high school tuition is close to $40,000 a year now. So it's a prestigious, wealthy school with a lot of well-connected people. That's Freddie Leatherberry.

He's one of a few Gilman classmates ABC has interviewed, along with Hari, who asked to be identified by first name only. Yeah, we had uniforms, too. So it was collared shirts, dress pants, like khaki, and boat shoes and stuff. So everyone kind of looked bougie as hell. According to the Gilman website, around 1,000 boys. attend this K-12 school, and the entire high school has less than 500 students.

It's very common for people to know everyone in their grade, and, you know, even more than that, right? Hari and Freddie say Luigi Mangoni was down to earth. Luigi was never someone who I would think off, like from the get-go, was super wealthy or anything like that. He never threw his money in your face. And that honestly speaks to his humility. He was not flashy at all.

I did not know anything about his family's ownership of the country clubs. He was just Luigi to us. At Gilman, his classmates say he was really involved. He did a range of extracurriculars like Model UN, but also sports, like soccer, track and field, and wrestling. He even started a game development business, Approar. From a young age, Mangione was really interested in game development. He picked up programming and coding because of it. His classmates say he was really good at STEM, including robotics.

Hari showed ABC News the Gilman Yearbook from Mangione's senior year. Yeah, so there's Luigi and I at a robotics competition, actually. He's probably looking at a computer screen because our robot started malfunctioning in the middle of competition. And I think our arm fell off our robot in the middle of it. In the yearbook, there's a collage of photos of Mangioni, with the same dark curls and things. big eyebrows at various ages. There's a photo of him fishing, a photo where he's holding paintball guns with his father, and a few photos with his mother and two sisters.

And in the middle of the photos... And the message from his parents, right? Luigi, you continue to astound us with your passion for knowledge, your genuine respect for others and your courage and strength to be true to yourself. We love you. Wow. Hari was a sophomore when Mangione was a senior. As an underclassman, Hari said,

you're very aware of the cool seniors who lead the clubs. You don't want to say too much and annoy them. You want to be them. When I walked in there the first time, I didn't know any of the kids in there, even in my grade. So I was, I was thinking about walking out, and then he was there. And then he made me feel pretty comfortable about staying. And then I was there for, like, a whole two or three years in high school. Hari says Mangione was a great team leader, talented, smart, and inviting.

So this is a picture of Luigi and I with other people, and we were qualifying for our first regionals. Our club hadn't done that before, to my knowledge, so it was a pretty big moment for us. I remember it was like a week before our last competition to qualify for like regionals, which is like the next level up. And our robot was non-functional. It was like dead in the water. You know, like I think we had gotten busy with school and stuff like that. And he just, we just decided to have like a late night work where we would like go to someone's house with the robot, like the night before the competition,

and just sit there from like 5 p.m. until the day of the competition, just make it work. Hari says Mangione stayed calm and kept the mood light. Plus, he was the best coder on the team. He was taking over like every lane, right? Like whatever we needed something to get done. And it was functional the next day. Ouija, Nicholas Mangione.

Luigi. No one was surprised when Mangione was named Valedictorian. Just like Brian Thompson, he had excelled through all of high school and was respected by peers and teachers alike. Throughout its time here at Gilman, the class of 2016 has been coming up with new ideas and challenging the world around it. His speech was uploaded to Gilman's YouTube channel. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill valedictorian speech.

Lots of gratitude. Mangione is standing at a podium flipping through his printed speech. He's wearing a blazer, dark blue tie, and light blue collared shirt. The same blue button-up and tie combo can be seen on his classmates sitting in rows behind the podium. Our friendships, values, and memories from Gilman will always stay with us. Thank you. Like many Gilman grads, Luigi Mangione ended up at an Ivy League school.

He attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The campus is about three hours away from the McDonald's that years later he'd be arrested in. His interest in STEM and computer science continued. A UPenn blog post reported on a new student club Mangione founded in 2016. The paper said that it was the school's first ever video game development club, and within a year the club had 60 members. Mangione was in an electrical and computer engineering fraternity, and in 2020 he graduated

with both a bachelor's and masters in engineering. Getting a bachelor's and a master's from UPenn in four years is crazy. After graduating, he got a job as a data engineer. He could work remotely so he moved to a co-living space in Hawaii. Online, there are photos of Mangione's surfing, hiking, and attending community dinners, smiling ear-to-ear alongside people his age. Surf Break is basically like an Ohana, like a big family that gathers all together and they do everything to get a fun stuff, lots of cooking, lots of eating, lots of celebrating, watching TV together, just great hangouts. ABC News spoke to a resident who overlapped with Mangione at Surf Break.

She asked not to share her name. I remember there's lots of volleyball games, especially during the barbecues. Luigi was very competitive and he's very positive. So if you wouldn't, you know, miss the ball or something, he'll say, hey, good job, we can do it again, we can do it again, let's do it, let's do it, we can win. Much like his Gilman classmates, this surf break resident recalls someone who was driven and involved in a variety of group activities. I remember how intelligent he was. We were at the book club. That was my first interaction with him.

And he was sitting left of me, and he was the only one who really read the entire book. And I was shocked. I was like, wow, this person was like really serious. Everyone was there for wine and food, and he was the only one that was there for the book. From the well-manacred campus of a Maryland All-Boy School to the high-rise on the Oahu shores, no one who spoke to ABC News thought of Mangione as violent. No one could picture the person they knew killing a man. Mangione's family released a statement, saying they were shocked and devastated by Luigi's arrest,

and they went on to say that they offered our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson, and we asked people to pray for all involved. It appeared that no one from Mangione's family was there when he pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking in federal court. Luigi Mangione seemed like a guy who had everything going for him. So what happened?

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That's night and day decor.com. Luigi Mangione is obviously a member of Generation Z. He was online all the time. This is ABC News's chief investigative reporter Josh Margolin. ABC News has identified several social media accounts associated with Mangione, Facebook, X, Instagram, good reads, and Reddit. Luigi posted a number of things on Reddit, apparently he posted under the handle Mr. Cactus. He talked about his plans, his travels, going to the gym, his reading materials. It seems that he posted a lot about physical appearance and health, and it's perceived kind of like very bro-ish, like very masculine-focused.

On Reddit, Manjoni appeared to post regularly about his health. Here's an ABC News producer reading some of those posts, like this one, about brain fog. He used to play chess daily against my roommate. I used it as a metric to see how the brain fog was improving. Eventually, I just stopped since I could never remember any strategy. He would use the same moves against me day after day, and I just wouldn't remember them. And how tired he felt. I wake up feeling unrefreshed.

no matter how much sleep I get. But by far, the user seemed to spend the most time posting about back pain. This issue of back pain seems to travel along with Luigi over recent years. From May 22 to May 24, the Mr. Cactus Reddit account commented regularly in the subreddit for a spine condition in which one of your vertebrae slips and applies intense pressure to the vertebrae below it. The user asks about treatments and other people's experiences with the spine condition. He even offers encouragement to others.

Hope you're progressing well in your recovery. Mr. Cactus shares that they've had back pain, quote, from childhood up until age 23. But it wasn't too bad. Until a surfing accident in 2022, the same time, Luigi Mangione was in Hawaii. Authorities learned about the back injury from his friend R.J. Martin, who knew him in Hawaii. My understanding is his spine was misaligned. R.J. Martin ran the co-living community Mangioni joined in Hawaii. He did let me know that the severity of his back issue

was such that it was very difficult to have physical relationships with women. I got caught in this loop for a year, all the while putting my life on hold in my 20s and damaging my nerves while I waffled on the decision. When he was in Hawaii, people told us that he was planning to go back to the mainland for surgery to help alleviate his back pain. The X-account, believed to be operated by Mangione, showed an x-ray. He posted online an image that is believed to be an x-ray of his own spine with four

surgical screws in his spine that it was a fusion surgery, which is often done on people who suffer extreme back pain to try to alleviate the back pain. In a press conference after Mangione pleaded guilty in his federal case, his attorneys mentioned his back pain. As Luigi explained in court today, he endured years of severe debilitating pain following a broken back while struggling to navigate our health care and health insurance systems. Like the thousands of people who have reached out since this tragedy to share their own experiences, he believed that the system had failed him and destroyed his life. Mr. Cactus did not post complaints about the surgery or the medical system in general.

There are obviously other factors at work that lead somebody to be what they call radicalized to violence. Somebody who has animosity or a gripe or a grievance to then take that all those steps down the road and actually plan to kill somebody and then kill somebody. How did Luigi Mangione become. radicalized. Who or what had influenced him? He seemed to portray something of a sympathetic tone toward the Unabomber. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The NYPD said that based on Mangione's social media profiles, he may have found inspiration in Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski spent nearly two decades, starting in the late 1970s,

mailing or delivering bombs to his targets. He killed three people and injured nearly two dozen others. Kaczynski's famous book is The Unubomber Manifesto, although he wrote a few others in prison. The journalist John H. Richardson spent years reporting on Kaczynski. He says Kaczynski wrote about two main concerns. First, he worried that technology was starting to control more and more of our lives. And second, he worried that people were losing agency.

We are not going to make major decisions about our lives. It's going to be done by larger forces, by corporations, by governments, and algorithms. Richardson says that he had gotten interested in why young people, people who weren't even born when Kazizki was mailing bombs, were flocking to his ideas. And as media attention swirled around Luigi Mangione, Richardson heard the early reports about Mangione potentially being influenced by Kaczynski. That caught his attention.

That was really what got me going. I was like, oh, he was one of these Kaczynski guys. According to the court testimony of a guard who monitored Luigi Mangione while he was held in Pennsylvania, Mangione said he was disappointed about being tied to Kaczynski. But he did appear to engage with Kaczynski's ideas. In a goodreads profile, ABC News verified, as associated with Mangione, the user posted a review of the Unabomber Manifesto and gave it full. four out of five stars.

The review said, it's simply impossible to ignore how Prussian's many of his predictions about modern society turned out. It went on to say that he was a violent individual, rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people.

Ted Kaczynski also appears in Mangione's alleged writings, the ones inside the red spiral notebook found during Mangione's arrest and shared by prosecutors. The writer says, Ted K makes some good points on the future of humanity.

But to make his point, he indiscriminately mail-bombs innocence. Normies categorize him as an insane serial killer and dismiss his ideas. And the last time Mangione appeared to post on Reddit, he posted to a Kaczynski-related channel. The post was titled, Streaming Overdose, 2024, China, and included a video. It was of crowds of people in China posing for selfies. I think that sort of links a bunch of things. It's Kaczynski, it's technology, it's sort of self-involvement of a culture that's not committed to anything. How does someone go from posting about back surgery and traveling light to posting in a Ted Kaczynski channel?

That's what John Richardson explorers in his book, Luigi, The Making and the Meaning. Richardson examined the Goodreads profile associated with Mangione, which included 240 books the user wanted to read, and 65 he had read. The user also marked 121 quotes from books. There's a big range of books on the reading list. Sci-fi and fantasy novels like Brave New World and The Hobbit, self-help books like Atomic Habits and The Spartan Way, philosophy classics, and books about depression, technology,

and the history of humanity. An awful lot of sociological books, books about psychology, about history, how did society get this way, what are the larger forces at work? I really think Luigi was looking at society as a computer problem, like, where are the bugs? How can I fix this?

How can I fix it before it's too late? Richardson says one of Mangione's favorite writers, Tim Urban, encapsulates this kind of thinking. Urban wrote a book called What's Our Problem, a self-help book for societies. Tim Urban is basically writing about how did America get so divided. He's really trying to wrestle with how can we stop dividing ourselves. To Richardson, that was very on brand for Mangione,

fixing the bugs, trying to help, troubleshooting. But Richardson says in spring 2024, when Mangione was traveling around Asia, he seemed drawn to a very different kind of book, a different kind of thinking. He got into a writer named Josh Delani. Delani writes a substack newsletter called Old Books Club. On X, he has 100,000 followers and post quotes from Napoleon, Dastoevsky, Ayn Rand, and Nietzsche. He also posts things like feminism's first mistake. women weren't denied work, they were spared work, and why therapy often backfires.

Delani has written a few self-published books, including a book called Hit Reverse, New Ideas from Old Books. The book has chapters like Youverse the Modern World, the dark side of equality, and how to be a man of history. Richardson says he found hit reverse disturbing. I hate to trash another writer, but this is an offensive book. It's full of really ugly ideas that sort of tend to the fascist side of things. That was quite a ways from Tim Urban saying, how are we going to seal the divisions in our society? Josh Delani replied to Richardson's criticism in an email. He wrote, Hit Reverse is about creating beauty, pursuing excellence, and learning about human nature from old books.

On the podcast, Chasing Curiosity, Delani was asked about a lot of, a section of the book that argues that democracy represses excellence. What if there was a society with 300 million 170 IQ geniuses? It might actually work because I think ultimately we should think about and this was eugenics and it got super unpopular. But countries totally compete over having the tallest building, right? So why shouldn't we try to come up with more intelligent human beings? Richardson says Mangione seemed hooked on this book.

He was so interested in this book that he tried to buy $5,000 worth of copies online and then he flew to Mumbai to talk to the author. Josh Delani wrote an ex that Luigi Mangione ended up with just one copy of the book and that the two met once for an hour while Luigi Mangione was in India and lost touch within a few weeks.

To learn more about Mangione's interests, Richardson spoke with another writer who Mangione interacted with during his travels. Kerwinder Bogal. Richardson says Manjioni became a founding member of Bogal's blog and that it meant he got to have a two-hour call with the writer. Bogal told me that they talked mostly about Kaczynski

and this question of agency. In a blog post about his interactions with Mangioni, Bogal said Mangione was particularly interested in three of his pieces. The intellectual obesity crisis, why everything is becoming a game, and why you are probably an NPC. All pieces, according to Bogal, about threats to human autonomy. NPC stands for non-player character. And if you've been online, you see it's like a blank face

that is just watching other people actually do things. Richardson says Mangione told Bogol that Japan was full of NPCs. He felt like it was the NPC paradise, you know, that a lot of people just followed the rules and they were just non-player characters. There's one thing that a lot of people have noticed that where he wrote about Japanese police officers stopping at the intersection on foot and not just, Jaywalking while they were rushing to an accident. Bogal wrote that Mangione felt that Japan was just the canary in the coal mine and that he believed people everywhere are becoming NPCs. Richardson spent a lot of time trying to understand what was going on in Luigi Mangione's mind.

Authorities say Mangione didn't know Brian Thompson. He didn't have a personal vendetta against him. And according to United Health Group, he was not a customer and neither were his parents. I mean, most people don't go to those kinds of lengths without a really profound personal injury to drive them. I mean, to do it intellectually, wow. In federal court, Mangione said he emailed United Healthcare

and posed as an investor with more than $50 million in capital so that he could learn the exact location of the conference Brian Thompson was attending. In a statement after Mangione's plea hearing, United Healthcare said, Brian Thompson's life was cut short by an act of violence that devastated everyone who knew and loved him. We are grateful to law enforcement for bringing Brian's murderer to justice, and our thoughts remain with Brian's family and loved ones during this difficult time. Though we now know a bit more about what Mangione's motivations were in stalking and shooting Brian Thompson,

there are still a lot of open questions. Why target United Health? Why target Brian Thompson? Why shoot him with a 3D printed gun outside of Manhattan Hotel on the day of an investor's conference? Gosh, I'd sure like to ask him to some questions. I mean, I don't understand so much. Richardson has not been able to put these questions to Luigi Mangione directly. But we talked to someone who got a rare glimpse into Mangione's thinking.

Someone who did speak with him, who did hear him, talk about health care in America. What did Luigi Mangione say to him? Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of Cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. When WestJet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different.

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The Dog Stars Directed by Ridley Scott In Theaters August 28th Get tickets now rated R Under 17 not a mid without parents meeting Luigi was a very one in a million. We were able to speak with someone who spent time with Luigi Mangione during his travels through Asia. He asked us not to share his name.

I met Luigi Mangioni in a random bar in Bangkok. He's American, but he moved to Thailand in 2020 to play professional soccer. In March 2024, he was showing one of his college friends around Bangkok. At night, they went to a famous district called Soi Cowboy. It caters to tourists. It's a place to go out and party. It's known for its bright neon lights and very narrow and crowded streets. He says he and his friend picked a bar, and once they sat down,

they spotted a man sitting alone. According to him, it was Luigi Mangione. He was on his phone in the corner. So I just said, hey, what's up? Where are you from? And then that's when we started conversing, and he said, I'm from the U.S. After, I would say, five or ten minutes of conversing, we decided all to look at a round of beers together.

He says they ended up sharing three rounds of beers together and talked about a bunch of things, Mangione's computer science background, Pokemon, video games like Call of Duty, and his life in Hawaii. He got his phone and he was showing me pictures of him in the Hawaiian mountains. Eventually, he says Mangione asked him

what life was like in Thailand. I gave him a specific story about how I had a pretty bad knee injury in a soccer game. And I went to the doctor. I got an MRI, an X-ray, got prescribed pain medication. And I had no insurance, no, no anything.

I went to go pay the bill. And it was about $170, $180. My younger brother's a nurse. So I sent him, I remember, him the picture of the receipt, and he couldn't believe it either. And then I think that's what really shifted the conversation to talk about the health care in the U.S. He remembers Luigi Mangioni having a lot to say about health care.

How it's all messed up in the U.S. Like people take a, the health care companies are taking advantage of the normal people. And it's, yeah, it's not right. To him, it seemed like. like healthcare struck a nerve from Mangione. But while they'd talked at the bar over a few hours, he says Mangione didn't say anything about back pain or

medical problems and says his impression of Mangione at the time was that he was a good person and a funny, smart, nice guy. He didn't seem angry or you know, out for revenge or he just seemed like a normal,

chill guy. After their third round of beers, he says that he, his friend, and Luigi Manjione left and walked around soy cowboy. They stopped at a tattoo shop and a weed store. And then we parted our ways. That was the last time I ever

spoke or saw Luigi. That was spring of 2024. By summer when Luigi Mangiii returned from Asia, that's when ABC News's Josh Margolin says, according to authorities, his behavior had noticeably changed.

It seems that Luigi kind of went dark. In July, according to Rolling Stone, one of Luigi Mangione's childhood friends asked him if he was still going to his wedding, which was being held at one of the Mangioni family's country clubs. According to Rolling Stone, he said no. Life had become difficult and nobody understood him. On August 15th, Mangione allegedly wrote in the Red Spiral Notebook, I finally feel confident about what I will do. I'm glad in a way that I've procrastinated because it allowed me to learn more about UHC. The target is insurance.

It checks every box. On August 31st, according to a property manager interviewed by K-H-O-N in Hawaii, he moved out of his apartment there. On October 22nd, according to the indictment, another entry in the red notebook starts with one and a half months and goes on to say, the investor's conference is a true windfall, and most importantly, the message becomes self-evident.

In December, the man who met Luigi Mangione in Thailand said his friend texted him an article with Luigi Mangione's photo in it. Do you remember this guy? We met him in Bangkok. And then I took a closer look. And once I saw the picture and kind of drew from memory, I couldn't believe it. Like, that was him. With the first and last name, too. I was thinking, first of all, like, what are the odds of meeting? and like approaching someone randomly in that night, and it happened to be the person's being accused of this. Since that night in Thailand, Luigi Mangione has admitted to stalking and shooting Brian Thompson, a CEO, husband, and father of two in cold blood.

So why is he? From the moment he was arrested, captivated the attention of so many people, not just from this country, but from the world. Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangiote, is a production of ABC Audio and 2020. Hosted by me, Ryan Buckmire. Produced by Vika Aronson and Audrey Moestek. Our lead producer is Camille Peterson.

Edited by Tracy Samuelson. Music by Evan Viola. Mixing by Bob Mallory. Special thanks to Katie Dendos, Sasha Aslanian, Michelle Margolis, Tanya Simpson, Aaron Kuturski, Josh Margolin, Peter Haralambos, Jared Kofsky, Jake Lefferman,

Katie Maldani, Anthony Ali, and Chris Loft. Josh Kohan is our director of podcast programming. Amon McNiff is our executive producer. Two in five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar-raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk.

21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. My name is Shannon Maldonado. I'm the founder of Yowie, a gift shop from the lens of artists and handmade objects. I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms, it was definitely one of the most user-friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the future, all of the tools

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