Just a few months ago, it was Erik and Lyle Menendez whose true crime case was making near-constant headlines thanks to Netflix’s Monsters series inspired by the murder of their parents. Since then, the streamer has also shed light on well-known cases like the Zodiac Killer and JonBenét Ramsay. Based on their history of turning real-life events into documentaries, our bet is it won’t be long until Luigi Mangione – the suspected killer of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson – gets a Netflix original of his own.
The 26-year-old was arrested at a Pennsylvania McDonalds earlier this week after an employee recognized him from viral photos circulating on social media. While some are attracted to Mangione’s boyish charm, others are intrigued by his anticapitalist stance, which was reportedly examined in the manifesto discovered when he was taken into custody. Also on the Maryland native’s person was a gun, silencer and fraudulent New Jersey ID that was reportedly used to check into a New York City hostel on Nov. 24. The weapon has been described as a “ghost gun,” potentially made using a 3D printer to avoid tracing.
Suspected Killer Has Many Affluent Family Ties
As further details come forward regarding Thompson’s death, as has information about the Mangiones of Maryland. It turns out that several of Luigi’s relatives are well-established members of the community, including his cousin, Nino, who’s a Republican House of Delegates member according to The Baltimore Sun. His mom, Kathleen Zannino Mangione, owns a boutique travel company, and his sister, MariaSanta, is a Vanderbilt medical school graduate who now works at UT Medical Center in Dallas.
On his paternal side, Luigi Mangione comes from a line of powerful businessmen with a passion for giving back to their community. His late grandfather, Nicholas, was a first-generation American born in Baltimore’s Little Italy to a struggling family. He served in the Navy, attended college and worked as a contractor before opening Harford County’s Fallston General Hospital which has since closed its doors. throughout his 83 years of life, Nicholas Mangione and his wife, Mary, welcomed ten children and 37 grandchildren (all of whom were reportedly birthed in the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, to which the family has donated more than $1 million).
Nicholas Mangione Loved To Give Back to the City of Baltimore
The family patriarch established generational wealth through building a real estate empire in Maryland, per Daily Mail. He and Mary purchased Turf Valley Resort, which boasts 220 hotel rooms, a 10,000-square-foot ballroom and an 85-seat amphitheater, in 1978. They added the Hayfield Country Club in 1986 before buying conservative radio talk show WCBM-AM 680 and a few others two years later. By 1995, Nicholas revealed his plans to pass the Mangione enterprise to his eldest sons, John and Louis (Luigi’s father). He and Mary lived together in a $1.9 million mansion on their country club until his 2008 death; she passed from Parkinson’s in 2013.
By all accounts, Luigi Mangione was being primed to follow in Louis and Nicholas’ footsteps, having graduated valedictorian from Gilman School (where tuition is $40K/year) in 2016. The accused killer went on to study software engineering an Ivy League – the University of Pennsylvania – before finding work in his field at TrueCar in Santa Monica. Reports indicate that Mangione suffered a spinal injury in 2023, which could in part explain his anger toward the medical system, though he’s surely feeling the consequences of his actions now.
Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan at 6:44 AM on Wednesday, Dec. 4. The CEO was in the city hosting an annual investor meeting and was set to detail bumper profits but instead was shot at point-blank range by three bullets which read “deny,” “defend” and “depose.” Luigi Mangione hasn’t yet been charged in connection with the case, but we’ll keep you up to date with more details as they become available.
The post Here’s Everything We Know About Luigi Mangione’s First Class Family appeared first on Blavity.
