Until the arrest this week of Luigi Mangione, the family was best known for building a business that has made them a force in local politics and charity.
Long before the shooting, before the manhunt and before the arrest of Luigi Mangione in connection with the killing of a healthcare executive, the Mangione name was well-known around Baltimore.
The Mangiones, fuelled by the competitive, combative spirit of their immigrant patriarch, built a formidable family business that made them a force in local politics and charity.
When Nick Mangione snr, Luigi’s paternal grandfather, thought that he was being discriminated against at country clubs in the early 1970s because he was Italian, he bought his own golf resort. When he got tired of waiting for permission to build a second golf course at one of his clubs, he sent in bulldozers to begin clearing the land. And when one of his sons was cut from a local soccer team, Mangione barred the team’s coach from his country club.
“Nick Mangione is foremost identified as a family man,” Thomas J. D’Alesandro, the former Baltimore mayor and late father of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told The Baltimore Sun in 1995. “He is maybe a little rough around the edges and maybe with an aggressive personality, but a man with a big heart.”
When he died in 2008, the elder Mangione left behind 10 children, more than 35 grandchildren and a collection of business holdings, which now include two country clubs, a chain of nursing homes and a local conservative radio station. The Mangiones are longtime supporters of numerous local causes and institutions, including Loyola University Maryland and the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, where the high-risk obstetrics unit bears the Mangione name.
Until this week, those commercial and philanthropic pursuits were the principal sources of the family’s prominence. Then, on Monday, Luigi, 26, was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and charged with second-degree murder and other offences in connection with the killing last week of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
The fatal shooting, in midtown Manhattan outside a hotel where UnitedHealthcare was hosting a conference for investors, stirred panic among employees at the company and other health insurers. An internal police report obtained by The New York Times said writing found on Mangione indicated that he saw the killing as a direct challenge to the healthcare industry’s “alleged corruption and ‘power games’”.
But prosecutors have not said what they believe the motive for the killing was, and much about Mangione is still being pieced together by investigators from the New York Police Department and other agencies.
The 2016 dux at a prestigious all-boys prep school in Baltimore, Mangione went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied computer science and earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree.
Friends said that he had been suffering from a painful back injury when, about six months ago, he suddenly and inexplicably went dark, prompting worried family members to ask his friends about his whereabouts.
On Monday night, a cousin, Nino Mangione, who is a Maryland state legislator, posted a statement on behalf of the family on social platform X saying that the family was “shocked and devastated” by Luigi’s arrest.
“We only know what we have read in the media,” the statement read. “We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved.”
On Tuesday evening, access to the Hayfields Country Club, a sprawling rural property north of Baltimore that is owned by the family and where Mangione’s parents also own a house, remained closed off to reporters.
“It’s a very strong family,” Anthony J. Ambridge, a former Baltimore city council member, said in an interview, noting that he had recently seen many members of the Mangione family during a fundraiser for Baltimore Polytechnic Institute.
The story of the Mangione family in America begins far from swank charity events and verdant golf courses, in the gritty, rowhouse-lined streets of Baltimore’s Little Italy.
Born in 1925, Nicholas Mangione snr, known as Nick, started working at age 11, after his father, an illiterate immigrant from Italy, died of pneumonia, leaving the family without income. During World War II, Nick Mangione joined the Navy and fought in the South Pacific before returning to Baltimore, where he began laying bricks and eventually built a successful contracting company.
In the early 1970s, Mangione and his wife, Mary, also the daughter of Italian immigrants, moved to the Baltimore suburbs to accommodate their growing family.
In 1978, they made what was considered a risky acquisition. With a bank loan and about US$750,000 ($1.3 million) of their own money, they bought the Turf Valley Country Club, in Howard County, outside Baltimore.
“People thought I needed money from the Mafia to buy this place,” Mangione once recalled to The Baltimore Sun. “They asked me what family I belonged to. I told them: ‘I belong to the Mangione family. The Mangione family of Baltimore County.’”
Over the years, the Mangiones converted the 1000-acre club into one of the county’s few full-service resort and conference centres.
The gamble paid off. The venue, which is now known as the Turf Valley Resort, became a popular destination, hosting everything from high school proms to political fundraisers.
Along the way, Mangione developed a reputation for a brusque business style. In 1988, a furore erupted when Mangione’s nephew, then a manager at the Turf Valley resort, was recorded using a racial slur after placing a call to a Black community leader and not realising the answering machine was recording.
Facing a boycott and mounting public pressure, Mangione took a confrontational tack. He rescinded a sizable pledge to a local hospital, he withdrew from some local school and charitable programmes and he halted the complimentary practice time he had been providing to the high school golf team. And although Mangione fired his nephew for the racist remark, the man was rehired months later.
It was just one of many clashes that Mangione had with local officials and the community over the years, especially as the family empire grew to include the Hayfields Country Club, in Cockeysville, Maryland, and the conservative radio station WCBM-AM 680. The family also founded a nursing home and assisted living company called Lorien Health Services, which operates more than a dozen facilities in Maryland.
“It’s a two-way street,” Mangione said not long after the Turf Valley episode. “If I am judged guilty and I’m not guilty, then they’re not friends of mine.”
There was a softer side to the Mangione family, too. Before her death in 2023, Mary Mangione, Luigi’s paternal grandmother, served on the board of the Baltimore Opera; as president of the Catholic Daughters of the Americas, a women’s organisation; and as a trustee of the Walters Art Museum.
And friends of Mangione often refer to his fierce dedication to his family. All 10 of his children – five sons and five daughters – worked for the family company, taking over the business after the patriarch’s death in 2008.
They include Luigi’s father, Louis Mangione, known as Lou, who still works for the family business. Luigi’s mother, Kathleen, comes from another prominent local Italian American family. The daughter of Joseph N. Zannino jnr, who founded a funeral home in the heart of the Italian community in East Baltimore’s Highlandtown neighbourhood, Kathleen now runs a boutique travel company.
In addition to Luigi, they have two daughters, MariaSanta, who is a physician-in-training in Texas, and Lucia, an artist in the Baltimore area.
In 1993, Louis and Kathleen purchased a home in Towson, a suburb outside Baltimore. Built in the 1960s, the four-bedroom, split-level house on a wide cul-de-sac was listed as Luigi’s address on a report that the police in Altoona filed Monday after his arrest.
The Mangiones sold the house in June for US$865,000, property records show. Speaking to a reporter Tuesday night, one neighbour described the community as close-knit and family-oriented. Just a few days ago, she said, neighbours organised a tree lighting. Cups of hot chocolate were passed around, and Santa Claus also made an appearance.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Amy Qin
Photographs by: Rachel Wisniewski
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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