The Chaser Report - To Catch A CEO Killer

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Dom and Lachlan revel in all the juicy gossip about Lachlan's newest idol fascination, the alleged CEO killer Luigi Mangione. This is about as true crime as The Chaser Report will ever get. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. Dom here with producer Lachlan. John is a bit unwell, so he's not in the pod today. No sightings of Charles today, Lachlan. He's probably having a good time. No, I suspect Charles is in a pub still.

And John, who has told us that he's sick. I assume that in a few weeks' time we'll hear that John's in a pub as well. So I wish them boast quick recovery and free drinks. If only we were doing this in a pub, but we aren't. However, we have some lovely fresh news. We did try that. Lovely fresh news, Loughlin, in particular, you've been paying a great deal of attention to the bizarre murder case over in New York City.

You've been scouring the newswires to give us an update, which I assume will be brought to the table with your usual sensitivity intact in dealing with such serious matters. So let's get into what on earth is going on with the assassination of the healthcare CEO after this. All right, for those who missed this absolutely massive story from NYC, remind us what we know. Yeah, basically, murder is still illegal.

Murder is very much still illegal in America. Trump came in, but he hasn't changed that. And until the 20th of January when, yeah, he can kill anyone in the streets of New, I think it's in Fifth Avenue and it won't. matter. No, no, that's true. Trump will be, sorry, murder's illegal unless you're president, and that's just what it is in the courts. But in the court of public opinion, murder has become a lot more, shall we say, the line has gotten a bit thicker after the United Healthcare,

health insurance CEO, Brian Thompson, 50-year-old, was gunned down in the streets of New York on his way to a conference by the now unmasked, 26,000. year old Luigi Mangione. This is the person who's been helping the police with their inquiries, we believe. Yeah, it's a curious one, isn't it? Because, I mean, I generally thought murder was bad, even if you disagreed with the, you know, career choices, politics, values of the person being gunned down. But that's now really up for grabs in the United States by the sounds of things.

So, look, we were a little bit tough on the NYPD. We said that by the virtue of the gunmen disappearing into Central Park, they had managed to get a clean getaway. Maybe I was wrong on that. If you know Central Park, there's nothing about it that's at all clean. It's a deeply dirty place. And so it was a young Luigi, who I'm somehow visualising in green overalls, which I know is wrong and possibly even racist.

But anyway, he has been apprehended. How did they manage to track this gentleman down? Well, they found him exactly in the last place you'd look, which is McDonald's in Sleepy Joe's. hometown Pennsylvania. Are you serious? Yeah, I'm fully legit. So they had released the images of Luigi that we'd seen.

Now, we didn't have a name for him yet, but his face was plastered all over the internet, both by people looking for him and by people looking at him, because he was a bit of a looker and still is. Yes, this is another interesting factor, is that I gather Loughlin, for some, the value system varies with the politics, but for others, if it's a hottie who allegedly put, the trigger, hello. No, I mean, it's the Ted Bundy effect, isn't it? He's a very strapping young lad, and so we're willing to...

Literally strapping a gat by the sounds of it. He's definitely strapped. Oh, yeah, so Luigi was munching down on some Macas after five days on the run from police, and he was seen by another customer in the store who then told management of the McDonald's, who then called the police. And apparently police, they said that as soon as we got a look at this guy, we knew he was the person we were looking for. And allegedly, when they walked up to the 26-year-old

and asked him if he'd been in New York recently, he started to get a bit jittery. And at that point, they called in more officers and arrested him. But basically, McDonald's isn't safe anymore. Yeah, I think that's the shock in all this. I would have thought, I mean, your average McDonald's it's pretty much your Star Wars can'tina, but with worse food, isn't it? You're basically in there, flotsam and jetsam, you know, who knows where they're from,

they don't even have a Australian beef, and you just get randoms. And I would have thought he would have imagined there's no way they'll get me in here, particularly because you don't find good-looking, sexy dudes generally in a McDonald's. It's generally the desperadoes, Lachlan. And that said, there are cameras everywhere in McDonald's, so still a little brave, given his image had circulated everywhere. Maybe he was thrilled by the public perception of him and wanted a few more photos to get out. Maybe he was using the Wi-Fi to check out if he'd been caught yet,

to check whether the images have been segregated yet, yeah. One fun thing about the McDonald's aspect of it actually is after he got caught, people have gone to that specific McDonald's location on Google, and they've started giving it massive poor reviews because, you know, of Luigi for, It turns out when you kill a very rich man and the internet claims you as a progressive woke, eat the rich hero, snitching on that guy is not good PR for your McDonald's. And there's a ton of reviews, my favorite one, my favorite negative review says there's tons of rats in the kitchen and your insurance isn't going to cover it.

Wow, the sick burn, dude. Did anyone write, would you like lies with that? Because that was a big one when I was at a university student. Very weak. So, just to be clear, I mean, you know, given McDonald's, we aren't always short, it's in the ingredients, are we sure that he wasn't literally eating some sort of multi-millionaire burger? Was he eating the rich in a sort of cheeseburger arrangement,

or was it a genuine, was it a regular or beef patty? No, I think it was, unfortunately, a regular beef patty, but one thing we haven't been able to confirm is that he wasn't on another job. He could have been looking for Ronald as his next. target. We know that he's very anti-capitalist, or at least very anti-rich. So that could have been potentially what he was doing there. Could have been, Loughlin, although I don't want to correct you, but if he was looking to ice someone in McDonald's land, I think Mayor McChese, you know, would have been the one. Mermichchees is the one he would have taken out. He's the man,

he's the state. He runs the cops too. It's a real criminal underworld. You've got the hamburger. Perhaps he was trying to bunk down with him. He would have been in go-coats. Because I don't think anyone is getting iced at McDonald's because the machines don't work. Hey. Hey. I'll see myself out. I bet he grimesters who was arrested and that's all the puns we've got time for. Oh, on fire.

Oh my God. Anyway, so I'll he be a fry guy? Is it an electric chair state where he was arrested? I'm not sure. Wow. Yeah. That's, okay. Let's just back.

Beep, beep, beep. Out of pun alley. And, right. So they've got him. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Allegedly. So he's now being charged.

He's now being charged by New York police for first degree murder as well as possession of a firearm. And he was also in possession of a few fake IDs that he was presumably using to travel around. On him, cops found a 3D printed ghost gun and silencer, which they believe were what were used to do the deed. Now, those things are really scary. If you're not familiar with these, essentially now it's very, very simple to print out a gun. And this has been, the designs have been released in an attempt to essentially make all efforts at gun control meaningless because they're made it of plastic and all detectors can't find them. So, yeah, it's a bit concerning.

It's a bit concerning. In the Supreme Court at the moment as well on the legality of should these guns continue to be. That's a great question. Does the Second Amendment protect plastic ghost guns? I mean, the right to bear plastic ghost guns. I'm sure the founders were thinking about 3D printers when they wrote that constitutional amendment, Lockland. Yeah, no, I'm sure they were.

But the argument being that ghost guns are totally legal because you're not actually buying a gun, it's more like buying an IKEA set, and therefore there should be no registration of these things whatsoever. Of course. However, now that one has been used to take out a multimillionaire, maybe we'll see a bit more movement in that particular area of the law. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this founder said didn't want CEOs assassinated,

Looker, let's talk more about this in just a sec. I can't know what happens next. The Chaser Report, more news, less often. Now, one of my big disappointments is since Luigi was found and identified, it did mean that he's really cool, he just hit the brink of being an outlaw where nobody knows your name, so you get a really cool outlaw nickname. Oh, yeah. He'd started getting called the claim adjuster online.

The claim adjuster. Oh, my God. People are enjoying this a lot. This doesn't speak well of the healthcare system in America, that people are so relishing the assassination of an industry big week, does it? Mm, mm. Well, and it's funny you say that because, again, after he was identified and unmasked, a Twitter page got set up called Luigi Craves,

which is a play on a famous Twitter page called Pop Craves, where they are dedicated 100% to 20%. 24-hour Luigi Mangione updates, and within the first 12 hours of its creation, it got over 40,000 followers. So it's safe to say that this guy has a pretty devoted following, and whether it's because of his looks, his motives, or a mixture of both, I guess we'll find that out. So is this basically open season with plastic guns on all CEOs? Where does this end? and has Luigi escaped using a 3D printed kind of lockpick or something. Yeah, no, who knows what this man's capable of?

Maybe he's a little tinkerer. If we let this guy near a computer, who knows what he's going to print himself? Yeah, he's kind of geeky McGiver, right? Rather than using duct tape and a pair of toothpicks to escape from... He's 3D prints whatever he needs. I mean, this is... It's funny that you point out he's a little bit geeky because of his age, he's kind of one of the first people, at least that I've been able to observe.

where after being unmasked as a criminal and as an alleged murderer, his entire internet history is now pretty much open season because you can just go onto this guy's Facebook page, his Twitter page, his LinkedIn page, I think his Goodreads. His plastic weapons printout page, yeah. His plastic weapons printout page, all of that's readily available. His LinkedIn, don't go on his LinkedIn.

Don't humiliate yourself by going on his LinkedIn. No one should be on the dim. And they have found out that he is quite a geeky guy because, you know, at first after he killed a very rich man and that appealed to certain demographics politically, he was hailed as a woke hero. But now that everyone's got access to his Twitter, they found out that he's not really some full lefty.

He's a bit more of an Elon Musk stand than people would have liked to have thought. Yeah. So it's not that he minded the guy being rich. it's more that the politics didn't align. So healthcare CEOs are up. But is he in favour of the Department of Government Efficiency, the Doge? Well, I'm sure that we'll be able to find some tweets resurface from him soon. When cops found him, they did allege that he had a handwritten document that expressed, quote,

ill will towards the health insurance sector. Yeah, I think we all know that. Yeah. Okay, so this does this mean no CEO is safe? Lockland at this point or is this just a random dude with a ghost gun I mean do I need to get a 3D printer to print myself ghost guns in self-defense

because the best defense against a bad guy with a 3D printed gun is a good guy with a 3D printing gun isn't that the way it works well it's just like they've always said in the NRA guns don't kill people 3D printers kill people and I think that the frankly there's going to be a full wave that we see now of legislation pushing to prevent 3D printers from going on to the market,

which is going to have unseen consequences to the tech sector and probably AI, because I assume that they're involved in this somehow. However, guns, guns are fine. We're going to, guns are still safe. I just want to know that the way things are going, AIs will be able to connect to 3D printers, print ghost guns and splice them to autonomous drones. So, yeah, we've invented SkyNet.

But on the bright side, a lot of people think that it's cool because the guy was a healthcare CEO. Interesting. No, very balanced. There is one thing, Dom, though, that people are upset about. Oh, yeah. Their former outlaw hero, Luigi Mangione. And that's that he actually has committed one cardinal crime

that some are saying is unforgivable. I assume that's eating at McDonald's. You can't be woken. Can you? No, you can't support where the boycotts on. No, it wasn't that even. It was worse than that. People found his good reads page when they were scouring through. And it turns out that he plagiarized a review. Oh, my goodness. I mean, I mean, look, the jury was out before, but now, Lockeland, I think the man's a criminal. I think there's absolutely no defense. What's even funny is the fact that the book that he plagiarized his review of was the universe.

Bombers Manifesto. Oh my goodness. That is a smoking plastic gun right there. He gave a four-star review presumably because he thought he could do better. Quite possibly. There you go. Lachlan, you've had heaps of research on this. Most delighted to be brought up today. No, I assure you that it was all from a completely non-biased and only interested in the facts and not the body. I mean, the guy. I mean, I'm just here for the stats, Dom. You know me. Thank you so much to you and whichever extremely dubious subreddit you managed to get that one from Lachlan. Fantastic work. Catch you tomorrow. Anytime. Catchers.