The Daily - The Manhunt, the Manifesto and the Murder Charge

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Last week, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare was shot and killed in Manhattan. A five-day search for the gunman ensued.On Monday, a 26-year-old suspect, Luigi Mangione, was arrested in Pennsylvania after an employee at a McDonald’s recognized him and called the police.Dionne Searcey, who covers wealth and corporations, and Maria Cramer, a crime reporter in New York City, break down what we know about the suspect, and what the case has revealed about many Americans’ contempt for insurance companies.Guest: Dionne Searcey, a reporter for The New York Times writing about how the choices made by people and corporations affect the future of our planet.Maria Cramer, a reporter for The New York Times covering the New York Police Department and crime in the city and surrounding areas.Background reading: The suspect was an Ivy League tech graduate from a prominent Maryland family who in recent months had suffered physical and psychological pain.A visual timeline of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. shooting.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Today, the five-day manhunt for the killer of a health care CEO, what we know about the suspect now in custody, and what the case has revealed about many Americans' contempt for insurance companies. It's Tuesday, December 10th. On Wednesday morning of last week, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, left his hotel in midtown Manhattan for his

company's investor conference a few blocks away. It was 6.45 in the morning, still mostly dark out, and as Thompson neared his destination, a hooded and masked gunman emerged from behind a parked car, took out a gun with a silencer, and began to fire at him, over and over, in what's clearly a targeted attack. Chilling new details tonight following what police say was the premeditated murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare on the busy streets of Midtown Manhattan early today. Surveillance videos of all of this, which emerged a few hours later, shocked the city. It was so surreal.

It's something that you would watch on a TV show or in a movie, this like in cold blood assassination, two blocks away from my house. What I heard was that he ran up Sixth Avenue and into the park. And so, you know, that would be like right here. And just as shocking was how effortlessly Thompson's killer got away. According to the NYPD, the shooter took off through an alley, grabbing an e-bike and riding

it into Central Park, which at that time was filled with morning runners and walkers. By the end of the day, a massive city-wide manhunt was underway. Cops literally fan out across Central Park. Hotel rooms are being searched. Drones are put in the air. New this morning, NYPD releasing surveillance photos of the suspected gunman at a New York hostel without a mask. Eventually, small pieces of evidence emerge.

A major discovery. Police sources say they found a backpack believed to be the shooter's. No gun was found inside. What was found? A jacket and Monopoly money. And as speculation begins about why exactly this CEO was targeted, the question naturally arises. Was this about health care?

And the police reveal a single piece of evidence that suggests perhaps it was. The words delay, deny, and possibly depose are written on shell casings recovered from the scene. Those words are strikingly similar to a title of a book that condemns the insurance business. Suddenly it looks like this murder and this missing suspect have tapped into something much bigger. I mean, every person in America has had a brush with the health care system that has not been, you know, excellent. Right.

I spoke with my colleague Dionne Cerci, who writes about wealth and power in New York. I got brought into this story last week, the day after the shooting, when I had noticed a lot of posts on social media strangely in support of the shooter. Some of the posts were very pointed and direct and just full of malice for the victim, which is something that we don't usually see. So I just started going through tweets and going through all the networks and collecting just this kind of outrage over the healthcare system.

Let me just start off this video by saying I do not condone violence by any means, but let's talk about what happened today with the UnitedHealthcare CEO. Six months before my mom died, her health insurance let her know that all of the things that she had been prescribed and insured for for the last 10-15 years of her life were no longer going to be covered. There was some real anger that this unleashed. Sitting in the emergency room with my one-year-old baby, she needed to be transferred to New York City so she could have

emergency brain surgery and instead we sat in the hospital for three days because United Healthcare refused to approve the transfer via ambulance. You know moms who couldn't get an ambulance ride covered. So my UnitedHealthcare story is that when my son needed a special type of bed because of his disability, they denied us that. Today is a beautifully ironic day for UnitedHealthcare to deny my injections for my cancer treatments. There's no shortage of really painful experiences. day for UnitedHealthcare to deny my injections for my cancer treatments.

There's no shortage of really painful experiences and I think why emotions are so heightened is because you interact with health insurance companies at obviously some of the worst moments of your life. When your kid is hurting or dying, when you are hurting or dying, I mean, you're keyed up for some pretty charged emotions. You know, maybe violence is not the way. But have you read any of the comments on those videos reporting this story? People are calloused. People do not care because the health insurance companies do not care about their lives.

So plenty of people are not celebrating what happened here. They're just seeing it as a chance to... Event? Yeah, to fume about it. Yeah, for sure. Medical debt is insane right now in America. And here's a guy who found a path to do something about it in the worst possible way. And then, on Monday morning, five days into this manhunt and this growing expression of fury at the U.S. health care system, there's a major development in the story.

So I came this morning to the shack just to get a sense of the buzz. I wasn't expecting that there would be a break in the case. So I called my colleague, police reporter Maria Kramer, who works out of a small press room inside the NYPD called the shack. So I went upstairs and confirmed some tantalizing details like they'd found monopoly money in the backpack, that the canine units that are good at detecting guns had been deployed up close to where the Greyhound Depot was. So, you know, we were just gonna do sort of a small update.

And then just as we were doing all that, boom. It just very quickly developed that a man was taken into custody in Pennsylvania. After the break, everything we now know about the suspect. We'll be right back. Maria, this is a fast-moving story, so I just want to acknowledge when we're talking to you. It's 545 or so on Monday night. And I want you to tell us, based on what you know now, how this suspect was caught and how this manhunt came to what looks like its end. And then we'll get to what we're learning about who the suspect is and what truly motivated

him. But let's just start with how he gets caught. So what we learn from our police sources and from a news conference where the police address the media. Good afternoon, everyone. Earlier this morning in Altoona, Pennsylvania, members... ...was that on Monday morning at 914 at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania... The suspect was in a McDonald's and was recognized by an employee... You have an employee who notices a man eating in the restaurant. And that employee recognizes this man as the man that was photographed on various surveillance

shots released by the New York Police Department as the person of interest in the shooting of Brian Thompson. He calls 911. He calls the Altena Police Department. Responding officers questioned the suspect, who was acting suspiciously and was carrying... They find a man sitting at a table, looking at a laptop and wearing a blue medical mask.

And when an officer asks him to pull down his mask and asks if he's been to New York recently, the man becomes quiet and starts to shake. Upon further investigation, officers recovered a firearm on his person as well as a suppressor, both consistent with the weapon used in the murder. Eventually they search him and they find a gun, they find a silencer, and they find fake identification cards. Also recovered was a fraudulent New Jersey ID matching the ID our suspect used to check into his New York City hostel before the shooting incident.

Pretty distinct pieces of evidence, especially the gun and the silencer that suggest this is most likely their guy. Exactly. And the gun was a source of much debate online. People were trying to figure out what this gun was and what it turns out to be is what we call a ghost gun. You know, these are guns that are assembled from parts that have been printed out from a 3D printer.

And this gun is capable of firing nine millimeter rounds which are the rounds that were found at the crime scene in New York. What Maria do we begin to learn about this suspect, about who he is, about his biography? So what we learn about this man is that his name is Luigi Mangione. He's 26 years old and he seems to have come from a life of a lot of privilege. He was born and raised in Maryland. He went to a private school in Baltimore, the Gilman School. He was a wrestler there. He graduated as a valid Victorian. He goes on to have an Ivy

League background getting his undergrad degree and his graduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. And from there, he starts working in tech, travels a little bit around the country, living in San Francisco and in Honolulu. And he has a pretty interesting online presence. It suggests he's really well read. He's posting about books that he's read on Goodreads. And by all accounts, if you look at his background he seems accomplished but normal. And according to the police from what they have learned so far about him he doesn't have a criminal record. There was one citation for him trespassing in Honolulu at a state park but other than that his record is clean at least according to what we know so far. So, what are we learning about how he goes from having no criminal record and having

this fairly normal existence to, allegedly, committing murder? What are the police uncovering about any motivations? So there's very little that we know about him personally to suggest that he was going to go from valedictorian of his high school class and you pen grad to the electric killer of of an executive in New York. But there are some clues that the police are looking at. And one of the big ones is this three page handwritten manifesto that the police find on Luigi Mangione when he's arrested.

Hmm. And what is in that manifesto as best we know? So in this 260 word handwritten manifesto, Luigi Mangione is appearing to take responsibility for the murder according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document. And he notes UnitedHealthcare's market capitalization growing and condemns companies like UnitedHealthcare that, quote, continue to abuse our country for immense profit. And he also, in a pretty haunting part of the document, he says, quote,

these parasites had it coming and quote, I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done. Wow. Do we know if he himself personally had a bad experience with United Healthcare? We don't know if he had a personal experience with the insurance company, but we do know that he had been in regular contact with his friends and his family until about six months ago.

That's when he suddenly stopped communicating with them. And his friends have told us that he had been suffering from a painful back injury at the time. And that's when communication went dark and his relatives and friends began to become very anxious about him. Why hadn't anyone heard from him? The other thing we know is that in the last year, he had been writing many reviews on Goodreads, specifically one about a book that was written by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber who mailed bombs to people that he felt were destroying the world with technology. Ted Kaczynski killed three people and he was seen, he was a terrorist. But in his review,

Mr. Mangione describes him as a mathematics prodigy and he tells readers not to dismiss the book as the manifesto of a lunatic, he praises him by saying that many of his predictions about modern society turned out to be true so he was prescient and he specifically says that while he was a violent individual, rightfully imprisoned for killing and maiming people, these actions, and this is a direct quote, 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. So there's admiration in that view of a man who did terribly violent things. To some degree in the name of stopping

corporations from hurting the world. Exactly. So the working theory here would seem to be that Mangione, over some period of time, since he left college, became somebody who identified with these efforts to take on corporate America, perhaps specifically the healthcare industry, out of some belief, allegedly, that like the Unabomber, he could single-handedly hold them to account. At this point, that is a theory that many people hold, but we really don't know what happened to Luigi Mangione.

What awaits Mangione now in the legal system, assuming that police in New York line all this evidence up and decide that he is their suspect in the murder of Brian Thompson. So just a few minutes ago, Luigi Mangione arrived at the Blair County Courthouse in Holladesburg, Pennsylvania. He was led out of the car by two officers who walked him in, his hands bound behind his back. And there was a huge media presence there. Here he is being brought into a courthouse, not to face murder charges,

but to face gun charges. He's there for preliminary arraignment. And then what's going to happen is prosecutors there will decide whether they want to carry out these charges against him in Pennsylvania, or if he can be extradited to New York for presumably, potentially, murder charges for the killing of Brian Thompson. So, Maria, stepping back just a little bit, I'm curious at this point how you're thinking about this overall case and the meanings that it's taken on. We spoke earlier today with our colleague Dionne Sersi about just how much this case, before there was a named person of interest, before there was an arrest, has become about America's healthcare system and people's frustration with it.

And of course, it's a cold-blooded murder, right? And yet it's also become this referendum, it would seem, on a broken healthcare system and populist rage over that. So how are you kind of making sense of all that as this case now moves into this next phase of the actual criminal justice system? You know, and I think that's a really interesting question that I've been thinking about myself because to the police, to prosecutors, to the detectives who've been looking into this and talking to Brian Thompson's family and

colleagues and friends, this is a homicide. This is a murder they have to investigate. This is a murder they have to solve. To many in the public and even some officers that I've spoken with, it's something that underscores the anger and the frustration at a system that they feel they have no control over. And yet it's such a huge part of their lives, their healthcare and how they pay for it. So I wonder as this case unfolds,

will the public's perception of him change as we learn more about what motivated him when he did what he allegedly did, which is kill a man who was heading to a meeting, a father of two, and a person who is missed by colleagues, is missed by friends, is a human being. To many, he represents this avaricious industry, but he's also a person who was murdered in cold blood and his killer in the minds of the police and the minds of investigators and the minds of Prosecutors and his family and friends. He needs to be brought to justice

So does this investigation Reveal more about him that makes the public think twice about this folk hero status that some have attached to him. Well Maria, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. After we spoke with Maria, Mangione was charged with five crimes in Pennsylvania, including carrying a gun without a license, forgery, and falsely identifying himself to the authorities. A few hours later, prosecutors in Manhattan charged him with murder. On social media, an ex-account belonging to Mangione gained more than 200,000 followers

after his arrest, and the hashtag Free Luigi was trending across the platform. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that in a major legal defeat, Rupert Murdoch has lost his effort to change his family's trust in a way that would lock in the right-wing editorial slant of his media empire, which includes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch, whose family trust originally gave all four of his children equal control of

the empire, had sought to rewrite it to give almost all that power to his eldest son Lachlan, who is far more conservative than his siblings. But a Nevada court resoundingly rejected that effort, saying that it had been undertaken in bad faith. And in a closely watched trial, Daniel Penny, a former Marine who choked a fellow New York City subway rider last year, was acquitted on a charge of criminally negligent homicide. The case came to exemplify New York City's post-pandemic struggles. Prosecutors alleged that Penny's actions killed Jordan Neely, who was homeless

and had a history of mental illness. Their encounter began after Neely, who is black, began yelling at and frightening fellow subway passengers, prompting Penny, who is white, to put him in a chokehold. Today's episode was produced by Stella Tam, Alex Stern, Lindsay Garrison, and Nina Feldman, with help from Luke Vanderbrook. It was edited by Paige Cowitt and Maria Byrne, contains original music by Diane Wong, Alicia Baitoop, Pat McCusker, and Sophia Landman,

and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Nick Pittman. ["Wonderly"] That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you tomorrow.