Mangione Episode 3: "Mister Cactus"

Hi, this is Brian Buckmeyer, here with another weekly episode of my new podcast from ABC Audio and 2020, Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione. Remember, you can also listen 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. How do you want to split it? Actually, dinner's on me. Okay, big money. Well, I got a Venmo balance that I can spend with my Venmo debit MasterCard, so. Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kind of on me, actually. Yeah, you send it, I spend it. Did my money get, like, reincarnated? Yeah, it's chicken shawarma. Want it back? I can't believe you, like, ate my Venmo. Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo debit card. No monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance account required to get a card and use a balance. A Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. I've got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. I got a Venmo card. 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 appeared to tie it to Mangione, 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 waxed 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 Omine, 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. 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 carabiner, a packable parka, 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 Mangione 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 against Mangione. 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 a 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 and 20/20, I'm Brian Buckmeyer, 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 Price Waterhouse Coopers. It was the beginning of a resume that would take him to the C-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. Mangiones were wealthy not only in money but in their spirit. That's Giovanna Acquia Blatterman. I am in Baltimore City, in Maryland. We are in the greatest neighborhood of this city, Little Italy. She was a hairstylist in the area for decades. And I think in the '70s, I briefly did this. I did Miss Mary's hair, who was Mr. Nick Mangione'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 Sun, Nick Sr. said he grew up 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 Sr. 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 Turf Valley that really put Nick Sr. 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. They're a part of their community. That's Tom Maronick, another long-time Baltimore resident. My experiences with the Mangione family come from 20 years being a radio host on their station WCVM. But I -- 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. It's 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 10 children -- five daughters and five sons. They all got married at the family golf club. All 10. And the children took over the businesses after Nick Sr. and Mary passed away. With 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 Mangione, 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 non-profit 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, recognition, 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 long-time donors, the Mangione 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 Mangione Family Center or the Mangione High Risk Obstetrics Unit. Both are at the great expense of the Mangione Family Center. The Mangione Family Foundation is one of the largest medical centers in the United States. The Mangione Family Foundation is based in the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, where the Mangione Family Foundation has donated over $1 million. 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. Luigi Nicholas Mangione was born to Nick and Mary's eldest boy, Louis. 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 Maronick 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 and a massive red-brick colonial-style hall as the centerpiece. You have to be certainly a little bit wealthy to afford that. I think the 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, 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 Mangione 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 the 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 Mangione with the same dark curls and thick 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 didn't even. I was, like, 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 was, 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 and just make it work. Hari says Mangione stayed calm and kept the mood light. Plus, he was the best coder on the team. He would. He was taking over, like, every lane, right? Like, whatever. We needed something to get done, and it was functional the next day. Luigi, 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 his 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 college life 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 master's in engineering. Getting a bachelor's and a master's from a university in 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 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 stop. 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 would 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's 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 manicured campus of a Maryland all boys 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? Support comes from WISE the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. Are you fed up with losing out to hidden fees when you send money abroad with your everyday bank? Choose the smart way. WISE. You can count on the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google. No unwelcome surprises. Plus ditch that where's my money feeling. Most transfers arrive in under 20 seconds. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE. Download the WISE app now. T's and C's apply. Okay, big money. Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week so it's kinda on me actually. Yeah, you send it I spend it. Did my money get like reincarnated? Want it back? I can't believe I believe you like ate my Venmo. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. 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Luigi posted a number of things on Reddit. Apparently, he posted under the handle MrCactus. 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. And focused. On Reddit, Mangione 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 2022 to May 2024, the MrCactus 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. The user asks about treatments and other people's experiences with the spine condition. He even offers encouragement to others. MrCactus 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 Mangione 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. To help alleviate his back pain. The ex-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 healthcare 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. But it was not the end of the story. 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 being 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 months in prison. 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 Unabomber 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 human beings. 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 Kaczynski was mailing bombs, were flocking to his ideas. And as media attention swirled around Luigi Mangione, Richardson heard that Kaczynski was a man of his word. This is one of 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 said, The user posted a review of the Unabomber Manifesto and gave it four out of five stars. The review said, 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 writings are, The writer says, 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 the Red Spiral. 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 explores 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. 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 Delany. Delany writes a sub-stack newsletter called Old Books Club. On X, he has 100,000 followers and posts quotes from Napoleon, Dostoevsky, 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. Delany has written a few self-published books, including a book called Hit Reverse, New Ideas from Old Books. The book has chapters like You Versus 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 offense. It's 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 Delany 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, Delany, was asked about 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 Delany wrote on X 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 to the writer who Mangione interacted with during his travels, Kerwinder Bogaal. Richardson says Mangione became a founding member of Bogaal's blog and that it meant he got to have a two-hour call with the writer. Bogaal told me that they talked mostly about Kaczynski and this question of agency. In a blog post about his interactions with Mangione, Bogaal 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 Bogaal, 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 Bogaal 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 jaywalking while they were rushing to an accident. Bogaal 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 earn 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 making 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 a Manhattan hotel on the day of an investor's conference? Gosh, I'd sure like to ask him 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 healthcare in America. What did Luigi Mangione say to him? Okay, big money. Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kinda on me, actually. Yeah, it was chicken shawarma. Want it back? 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In theaters August 28th. Get tickets now. Rated R. Under 17, not admitted 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 Mangione 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 like 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, you know, we started conversing and he said, oh, 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 restaurants, 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 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 sending him a 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 Mangione having a lot to say about health care. How it's all messed up in the U.S., like people take the health care companies, taking advantage of the normal people, and it's not right. To him, it seemed like health care struck a nerve for Mangione. But while they 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. He just seemed like a normal, chill guy. After their third round of beers, he says that he, his friend, and Luigi Mangione 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 Mangione returned from Asia, that's when ABC News' 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 Mangione 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 KHON in Hawaii, he moved out of his apartment. On October 22nd, according to the indictment, another entry in the Red Notebook starts with and goes on to say, 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, like, approaching someone randomly in that night and it happened to be the person that's being accused of this. Since that night in Thailand, Luigi Mangione has admitted to stalking and shooting Brian Thomas. Brian Thompson, a CEO, husband, and father of two in cold blood. So why is he, from the moment he was arrested, captivating the attention of so many people, not just from this country, but from the world? Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione, is a production of ABC Audio and 2020. Hosted by me, Brian Buckmeyer. Produced by Vika Aronson and. Our lead producer is Camille Peterson. Edited by Tracy Samuelson. Music by Evan Viola. Mixing by Bob Mallory. Special thanks to. Sasha Aslanian, Michelle Margulis, Tanya Simpson, Aaron Koturski, Josh Margolin, Peter Haralambos, Jared Kofsky, Jake Lefferman, Katie Muldowney, Anthony Ali, and Chris Loft. Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming. And. McNiff is our executive producer. Mysteries unravel and stunning truths are revealed when 2020 investigates. Follow the clues, the evidence, the breaking new details. ABC's 2020 means. True murder mystery. Shocking. If you follow true crime in 2020. Then you've got to listen to this. Subscribe now to 2020 True Crime Plus. Ad-free. Exclusive true crime content. Search 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts. And start your free trial. Terms apply. Insurance isn't one size fits all. 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