INVESTIGATION: The Luigi Mangione Files — How an Ivy League Graduate Has Become World's Most Famous 'Hot Con'

How does a young Ivy League grad from an affluent family, liked by nearly everyone he met, turn into an alleged stone cold killer?

The questions surrounding accused UnitedHealthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione have only grown, RadarOnline.com can reveal, since his shocking arrest at the end of 2024.

Mangione, 26, comes from a powerful Maryland family centered on the late patriarch Nicholas Mangiano, a first-generation American who built a real estate empire in the state.

He is originally from Towson, Maryland, where he lived in a $1million home with his parents and is an anti-capitalist who attended Baltimore's elite $40,000-a-year Gilman School, which a teacher there told Rolling Stone is the most accredited institution in the area.

The educator said: "Every family in this area knows that if you’ve got a superb kid, and you want them to go to a really good college, you send them to Gilman."

Mangione thrived at the school, where he graduated valedictorian in 2016. However, friends stress he never adopted a "better-than-you" attitude.

He was well-liked in school and throughout his hobbies and activities. One friend previously told Business Insider: "I would set my sister or friend up with him. Just knowing his personality I would completely trust him.

"Even knowing what I know now, if he 100 percent did it, I would feel completely safe being alone in a room with him.”

A former Gilman classmate recalled: "Luigi was in this crew of kids that you knew were going to an Ivy (school). But Luigi was the only one you could shoot the s--- with. Once you got him talking, he had all the kind of suave, cool-guy vibes."

However, the friend did pause to say Mangione was sometimes thought of as an outcast.

"I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I always got this feeling that he was really interested in having more of a social life than he had."

Mangione attended the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, where he studied software engineering. After completing his studies, he moved to Hawaii, where his interests expanded to hiking, stargazing and reading.

He worked as a software engineer at TrueCar, a Santa Monica, California-based online car market, but quit his job in 2023, telling a friend data engineering "paid super well, but was mind-numbingly boring."

Mangione continued to live and play happily in Hawaii until 2023, when he claims to have suffered from Isthmic spondylolisthesis – a spinal condition where one vertebra slips forward over the vertebra below it.

The intense back pain would plague him from then on.

In December 2024, Mangione was arrested and charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly shooting the 50-year-old in the back outside of a Manhattan hotel.

While his motive remains in debate, investigators believe Mangione exhibited a deep-seated resentment towards what he called "parasitic" health insurance companies and a disdain for corporate greed.

Looking for clues in his past, it was discovered Mangione was a sympathizer with Ted Kaczynski – the anti-technology extremist dubbed the Unabomber after he killed three and injured 23 more during a 17-year targeted mail bombing campaign.

In February 2024, Mangione called Kaczynski, and the infamous manifesto that led to his capture, an "extreme political revolutionary" while possibly foreshadowing his own plans.

Mangione wrote: "It’s easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as a manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies.

"But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out to be."