By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2024-12-14 13:16:26 | Updated at 2024-12-25 01:53:09
1 week ago
Life in Hawaii was a beach for Luigi Mangione, before the privileged 26-year-old computer engineer flipped a switch, went off the grid and allegedly gunned UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold-blood outside a Hilton hotel in Midtown.
Exclusive photos, obtained by The Post, show the murder suspect having fun in the sun, dining with tanned pals and even frolicking with a pair of beauties during his time at the penthouse in Surfbreak, a “co-living” space in Honolulu near Waikiki, where he stayed from January to June in 2022 paying $2,000-a-month.
In one photo, the murder suspect cuddled up next to a grinning woman, Tracy Le, with his arm draped behind her on a couch. Aanother snap shows Mangione tickling the gal pal and another woman in a hallway.
“There was no simmering anger that was visible,” Josiah Ryan, a Surfbreak spokesperson, told The Post.
Instagram @tracy.meomeo
Le, a data engineer in New York City, posted the pictures on her Instagram account in April 2022, with the caption, “So many people I love in one picture.”
Mangione was “the only name whose FaceTime calls I would pick up. He was one of my absolute best, closest, most trusted friends,” she wrote in the caption of a TikTok video, which showed Mangione — who now stands accused of killing Brian Thompson, 50, on the streets of Midtown — holding mochi ice cream at a grocery store with a giggling alongside Le.
The Post reached out to a number of the individuals depicted in the pictures, including Le, none of whom responded to a request for comment or an interview.
The NYPD is exploring whether a July 2023 back injury fueled Mangione’s apparent hatred toward to the medical industry.
Mangione, who was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., following a five-day manhunt, was found with a three-page manifesto accusing “parasitic” health insurance companies of corporate greed.
The accused killer was locked up without bail at State Correctional Institution in Huntington, Pa., and is fighting extradition orders to ship him back to New York. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to the slew of charges against him, including murder and illegal gun possession.
His jail cell is a far cry from the alleged killer’s beginnings. Mangione’s grandfather, the family patriarch Nick Mangione Sr., built a network of businesses that ranged from developing and owning local resorts and country clubs to nursing homes and a radio station in Baltimore.
There, he attended the $35,000-per-year Gilman School where he became valedictorian, but appeared shy socially.
“I don’t remember him ever having a serious girlfriend. He was very shy with girls,” a classmate who asked to be anonymous told The Post.
Painful Paradise
Mangione, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, was working remotely as a data engineer at California-based auto website TrueCar Inc. in 2022 when he moved to Surfbreak as a respite from his chronic pain.
“He communicated that being in Hawaii might be good for his health concerns. I heard that he had some brain fog,” Ryan recalled, noting Mangione underwent a background check and paid his own way at Surfbreak, where he had his own room and shared a kitchen and living space with housemates in the high rise building.
“He was well liked by people. He wasn’t a big partier or anything like that. He loved hiking and doing things with people. He [helped start] a book club,” Ryan said.
But, the Maryland native’s medical issues took a turn for the worse after he strained his back during a group surfing lesson that worsened his already injured lower back, according to R.J. Martin, who became friends with Mangione in 2022.
“His spine was kind of misaligned,” Martin told The New York Times.
“He said his lower vertebrae were almost like a half-inch off, and I think it pinched a nerve.”
Seeking pain relief, Mangione began practicing yoga with Dorian Wright, a Honolulu-based yoga teacher, between 2022 and 2023. He remembers Mangione’s movement being limited during a back bending pose.
“He was very clear when he told me where his back injury was … He was receptive of me helping him work through his injury,” Wright said.
Another teacher at the studio, named Summer, instantly recognized the University of Pennsylvania grad from his Tinder profile which she had matched with, according to Wright.
“One of our teachers matched with him on Tinder. She was taking my class at the same time as he was. She was like, ‘I wanted to go up to him and ask him out on a date, but I was too nervous,” Wright recalled of Mangione’s dating profile where he appeared smiling in a navy hoodie crouched down with an active volcano in the background of his profile photo.
Mangione listed travel, reading, hiking and working out as his interests.
“He’s a tall good looking guy – that’s the only person I know who he [Mangione] was going to potentially go on a date with,” Wright told The Post.
But life wasn’t all sunshine for the brunette bachelor. In July, 2023, Mangione took to Reddit to post about slipping on a piece of paper, noting it hurt to sit down and that his leg muscles were twitching. He reported numbness in his groin.
Martin told The Times this seemingly sidelined Mangione’s sex life, because “he knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible.”
The back pain became so severe, he consulted with doctors and eventually quit his job in 2023 to spend time reading and doing yoga.
It’s unclear if Mangione was covered for healthcare during that time. An NYPD official confirmed Thursday the Ivy League grad was never a client of UnitedHealthcare medical insurance.
Free Fall
He continued to read about big pharma and the medical industry, including books such as “Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery’’ and “Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease ― and How to Fight It.” The titles were added to his virtual bookshelf on Goodreads between May 2022 and February 2023.
The reading list also linked to handwritten notes by Mangione that detailed he was suffering form spondylolisthesis, a condition that causes a vertebra to slip or shift into the vertebra below.
He traveled from Hawaii back to the East Coast for spinal fusion surgery in July, 2023, later texting Martin on Aug. 10 a photo of his spinal X-rays, The Times reported.
Mangione returned to Hawaii after the surgery, and moved into a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment in February, records show, though it’s unclear if he lived alone.
He appeared to become more radicalized, praising Unabomber Ted Kaczynski 35,000-word manifesto on in a four-star review on his Goodreads page, calling the domestic terrorist — responsible for a series of bombings over a 17 year time period to call attention society’s dependence on technology — a “political revolutionary.”
After March this year he stopped responding to messages from friends and then even his own family and his movement and whereabouts between then and the Dec. 4 shooting.
A concerned friend texted in June, “where in the world are you?” to no reply.
Mangione’s family reported him missing on November, 18 in San Francisco. Just days later he arrived in New York City on a Greyhound bus from Atlanta, according to sources, to scope out the scene and allegedly carry out his twisted plan to shoot down Thompson with a ghost gun he had 3-D printed.
“He was in a lot of pain and needed a lot of help,” another high school classmate told The Post.
“Of course I’m shocked but there was a darkness to him that was always there.”
