Luigi Mangione allegedly plotted to "wack" UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson at least a month in advance, prosecutors alleged in a federal complaint filed Thursday.
Citing several handwritten pages in a notebook found on 26-year-old Mangione upon his arrest at an Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald's Dec. 9, the former Ivy League graduate expressed hostility toward the health insurance industry and its executives, the complaint alleged.
"The details are finally coming together" and "I'm glad— in a way—that I've procrastinated bc [because] it allowed me to learn about [acronym for Company-1]," he allegedly wrote in an entry dated Aug. 15, the court documents obtained by The New York Times read.
In the same entry, he allegedly confessed "the target is insurance" because "it checks every box."
In a follow-up memo Oct. 22, six weeks before Thompson's alleged murder, Mangione penned, "this investor conference is a true windfall... and – most importantly – the message becomes self-evident."
Later in the entry he wrote it was his intent to "wack" an insurance company CEO at an investor conference, according to the complaint, the Times reported.
Separately, in a letter addressed to the "Feds," Mangione alleged he worked alone.
"This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD (computer-aided design), a lot of patience," the letter read, according to prosecutors.
"P.S. you can check serial numbers to verify this is all self-funded. My own ATM withdrawals."
Mangione made his first federal court appearance Thursday in a Manhattan courtroom where he was arraigned on charges of using a firearm to commit murder, stalking resulting in death, stalking through use of interstate facilities resulting in death, and discharging a firearm that was equipped with a silencer in furtherance of a crime of violence, in connection with the death of 50-year-old Thompson, according to prosecutors.
He faces the death penalty or life in prison if convicted of murder.
Thompson was shot to death by a masked gunman—later suspected to be Mangione—on Dec. 4 outside the New York Hilton Midtown ahead of the company's annual investors conference.
Mangione graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Masters in Engineering in 2020. Prior, he attended an all-boys preparatory school in Baltimore where he was valedictorian.
The suspect is from an affluent Maryland family, members of which own country clubs and nursing homes. His late grandfather is multimillionaire real estate developer Nicholas Mangione.
Earlier this month, Mangione pleaded not guilty to weapons charges in Pennsylvania. He has not yet pleaded to the first- and second-degree murder charges filed in his state case in New York, CNN reported.
