Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Luigi Mangione Used 'Ghost Gun' to Murder CEO: Police

Starting point is 00:00:00 Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this law and crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Using possession of a ghost gun that had the capability of firing a nine millimeter round and a suppressor. Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had a ghost gun, according to police. So what is a ghost gun and how many are on the streets?

Starting point is 00:00:27 I take a look. Welcome to Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. When Luigi Mangione was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania for the murder of Brian Thompson, police said he was wearing a mask and had a backpack that had a manifesto in it and a ghost gun. A lot of people might have been thinking, what's a ghost gun? Well, it's basically a gun that's a ghost gun. A lot of people might have been thinking, what's a ghost gun? Well,

Starting point is 00:00:50 it's basically a gun that's a ghost. It's not like a gun that you buy at the store that has a serial number on it. Ghost guns can't be traced and they can be made privately at someone's home with a kit or even a 3D printer. Police said they believe that the gun and suppressor that Luigi Mangione had on him when he was arrested was made on a 3D printer. And now the commissioner of the NYPD has said that testing revealed the gun found on Luigi Mangione at the time of his arrest matched shell casings found at the crime scene where Brian Thompson was murdered. Certain aspects of this investigation and the crime itself is something that we have been zeroing in on, ghost guns. We have really talked about this since the beginning of the administration. They could be made on a 3D printer and they are extremely dangerous and we must sue more on the federal level to clap down on the availability of ghost guns.

Starting point is 00:01:47 And it just really leads into just the top headers of what we did last week and what we're doing this week. This week is all about public safety. Public safety, I've stated over and over again, is a prerequisite to our prosperity. And we're going to continue to make this city a safe city, safest big city in America. But anytime you have a crime of this magnitude, it shocks us. And it really has a major impact on the perception of crime in this city. Right now, Luigi Mangione is fighting extradition to New York, where he's charged with second degree murder and a handful of other charges. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro talked about the brutality of Brian

Starting point is 00:02:31 Thompson's murder and the use of a ghost gun when announcing the arrest Monday night. Brian Thompson was a father to two. He was a husband, and he was a friend to many. And yes, he was the CEO of a health insurance company. In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint. I understand people have real frustration with our health care system and I have worked to address that throughout my career but I have no tolerance nor should anyone for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most. In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice. I want to bring in Steve Wolf. He is a firearm safety expert. Steve,

Starting point is 00:03:41 I feel like we've heard a lot about these ghost guns in the last few years. So when did they really start becoming a thing? I think the ghost gun idea has been in the news for five years or so. Really, when 3D printing came of age, which it's still doing, you know, people thought, hey, I wonder if I could make a gun and you can, and people do. I don't think they really represent much of a threat in the crime realm, just because they're not serial numbered. Neither is the knife or the screwdriver or the brick that I pick up. So traceability is really not an issue. Whether or not people commit crimes is the big picture, not what they do it with.

Starting point is 00:04:29 What's fascinating to me is the fact that these 3D printers are so precise. I mean, I've covered stories when I worked in local news about, you know, other things being made on 3D printers, but the fact that you can actually make a firearm on a 3D printer, something that can actually fire a projectile, an actual bullet around, is really amazing to me. I mean, is it amazing to you as somebody who handles firearms on a daily basis? You know, not really. I mean, if you look at a gun like this, these parts are plastic in the frame, and then the business end is all metal. So that stuff is all purchased. So if you disassemble a gun like that,

Starting point is 00:05:20 you know, this is the part you can 3D print. This is not gonna hurt anybody, right? You need all the metal components that are in here. This is not going to hurt anybody, right? You need all the metal components that are in here. You need all the metal components in here. You need the barrel. You need the spring. So these parts aren't being 3D printed.

Starting point is 00:05:34 You can just make the grip, you know, not all these metal components at this point. But people are ingenious and they figure out how to make stuff. That's what humans do. So the fact that they figured out how to use 3D printing to make firearms doesn't surprise me at all. Steve Wolf, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it as always. Absolutely. Thanks so much, Anjanette. The cases I cover each day for you here on Crime Fix show you just how scary the world can be. And one of the scariest things that can happen is if you ever get hurt. But I want you to know if you're ever seriously hurt or in an accident, your case could be worth millions. That's where our sponsor, Morgan & Morgan, comes in.

Starting point is 00:06:16 The firm has more than 1,000 lawyers who will fight for what you deserve, and they have the track record to prove it. In the past few months, Morgan & Morgan has won some big verdicts like $12 million in Florida, $26 million in Philly, and $6.8 million in New York. All were much higher than the highest insurance company offer. Seeing if you have a case can be done in eight clicks or less, and you don't even have to leave your couch to start one. Also a great thing, you only pay Morgan & Morgan if you win. There are no upfront fees. So if you're ever hurt, you can easily start a claim at ForThePeople.com slash CrimeFix. I want to turn now to Chris Swecker. He's a retired FBI agent and a practicing attorney. Chris, how big of a concern are these ghost guns? Well, they are of great concern to law enforcement. They're basically invisible guns. I mean, hence the name

Starting point is 00:07:05 Ghost. They're not on any record. They don't have serial numbers. They're manufactured privately or put together privately from kits. And, you know, they're not the type of gun that can be traced if they're used in a crime, which is one of the biggest things. So they're and they're very popular, unfortunately. The manifesto, the so-called manifesto that Luigi Mangiano wrote, he talked about how this was, you know, basically pretty easy to do or pretty easy to carry out. You know, and he talked about some some CAD that he used and people are thinking that might relate to the 3D printer aspect of this, the computer-aided design software. Maybe the possibility that he didn't just buy this 3D printed gun, but maybe that he actually made it himself. So, I mean, how easy is it for people to do this? Yeah. I mean, somebody like him who has the educational background that he had

Starting point is 00:08:06 would not be a problem. It's not hard to do. I mean, unfortunately, we used to run into this problem with improvised explosive devices. The internet can just walk you right through it. There are a lot of bad things that you can learn on the internet, and this is one of them.

Starting point is 00:08:24 The 3D printer is not hard to get a hold of. I mean, you can buy those on online shopping from a lot of different places. And I want to walk a line here between not planting ideas with people. But to answer your question more directly, it is not difficult to do. He wouldn't have had to go to a third party to get it done. It seems like this was very methodical, the planning out of this crime. So the fact that somebody could possibly make their own gun and then take the time to write on the cartridges, deny, defend and depose all of these different things. What does that say to you as a retired FBI agent?

Starting point is 00:09:08 Yeah, this is the mark of someone who's truly obsessed with what he's doing. You know, like like the Unabomber, which is the inevitable comparison, like Eric Rudolph, the Olympic bomber, like many other sort of self-radicalized lone wolves, although we're not 100% sure he was a lone wolf at this point. But they, you know, they get it in their head that this is, their ideology drives them to do this for the greater good of society. And so they get very meticulous in their planning. This is a very intelligent, educated individual. And,, he, let's just assume that he made the weapon. He researched the company, which is not hard to do with CEOs. They put too much information on the internet, on their website. So it's not hard to track their movements, particularly if it's a stockholder meeting like this, which is one of the highest profile events of the year for a company like that. So you wouldn't necessarily even have to have an insider feeding him information. So he, you know, he becomes obsessed and focused.

Starting point is 00:10:15 He plans it. He gets the time and the place. He gets there early, what, eight days early on a bus. He has cash with him, backpack. You know, he has the mask. He's playing for a lot of different things. He's just not, he's not a trained killer. And that's the, you know, that's why he got caught. So it's not an unprecedented pattern here, you know, with the so-called true believer. And this is what I think he is. I think he's very

Starting point is 00:10:43 deeply driven by his own personal experience and his ideology, which formed up over the last year or so, apparently. You know, ghost guns, back to that aspect of this, you know, I've read that there are kits that have been available for some time where you can build your own gun. But obviously, the 3D printer aspect of this has made it much easier. And I see more and more reports about ghost guns being recovered in crimes. While you might be able to make this yourself at home using a 3D printer, are there like underground operations of people selling these so-called ghost guns? Without a doubt, on both the overt internet and also in the deep web. And you can get just about any instrumentality of a crime,

Starting point is 00:11:35 even a network of bots to do a cyber intrusion. You can get it all on the internet, unfortunately, particularly the deep web, if you will. So it wouldn't be hard for someone like Mancione, who has a technical background, to do the 3D printer thing. I think that's the more difficult process. You can get kits, you know, just assemble the kit, which legally is, in most states, is okay to do. It's legal to do. Or you can buy them at gun shows. So I think there's all of the above, underground, overt internet, gun shows. They just aren't sold in gun shops themselves. Well, it is a really scary kind of phenomenon and scary to think that somebody could do something like this, building a homemade weapon. I mean, I guess he talked about the

Starting point is 00:12:36 possibility of even using a bomb, but he didn't want to hurt what he called innocent people or innocents. So he even thought about that aspect of it. So, you know, I guess he could have possibly, he's innocent until proven guilty, carried it out in that way. So this is somebody who put a lot of thought into what he was doing. Without a doubt. I mean, he's, if you trace the evolution of his thinking over the last year or so and some of his postings and writings. And you can see the evolution of his thought process. And it's kind of with a warped sense of conscience. And I don't mean that to take any criminal responsibility away from him. But people like him, Eric Rudolph, the Unabomber, they have this warped sense of

Starting point is 00:13:23 we're doing something for the greater good of society, and that justifies the killing. That's been the justification for many such killings over the years. If you go back to the 70s, the weather underground, some of the radical groups of the 60s and 70s were robbing banks, killing people in the name of whatever cause they had, whether it was a right-wing cause or a left-wing cause. So there are many books written about this and the mindset of the so-called true believer. It's a terrorist mentality as well. We've seen terrorists, both international and domestic terrorists, adopt some sort of ideology that drives their killing, their violence. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Terrorism is kind of what came to mind for me the minute I kind of saw him and, you know, the manifesto and all of that stuff. That's kind of what it made me think of.

Starting point is 00:14:15 Chris Swecker, thank you so much. Thank you. And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Annette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.

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Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Luigi Mangione Used 'Ghost Gun' to Murder CEO: Police

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Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Luigi Mangione Used 'Ghost Gun' to Murder CEO: Police

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