"It's a very strong family," says former Baltimore city councilman Anthony J. Ambridge of the Mangione family, whose name recently leaped into the national consciousness with the arrest of Luigi Mangione in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. But as the New York Times reports, long before the recent notoriety and headlines, the Mangione family was widely known—vaunted even—in their hometown of Baltimore. "This just doesn't seem like anything associated with them," Thomas Maronick Jr., a family friend and radio host whose station is owned by the Mangiones, tells Fox News. "They own golf courses, they own WCBM, they own a retirement home. They just couldn't be more involved in charity and respected in general."
The family's tale is one of grit and rags to riches, beginning in Baltimore's Little Italy with patriarch Nick Mangione Sr., Luigi Mangione's grandfather. The elder Mangione fought in World War II, returned to work as a bricklayer, built a contracting company, then eventually bought a golf course when, per the Times, he "thought that he was being discriminated against at country clubs in the early 1970s because he was Italian." "I didn't have two nickels to rub together when my father died when I was 11, yet I still became a millionaire," Nick Mangione Sr. once said, per the New York Post, which labels the family "beloved Baltimore royalty." "What other country can you do that in? None that I can think of."
The elder Mangione was brash, and the family—which grew to five daughters and five sons, all of whom were involved in the family businesses—occasionally got into local scraps, like when a nephew who managed the Turf Valley golf resort was recorded using a racial slur or when the patriarch grew weary of waiting for a permit to expand his golf course and sent in bulldozers anyway. The nephew was fired, then re-hired months later, suggesting the fierce importance of family.
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But the Mangiones were mostly known for using their sway for local philanthropy that included the Baltimore Opera, Loyola University Maryland, the Greater Baltimore Medical Center (which has a high-risk obstetrics unit with the family name on it), the Catholic Daughters of the Americas, and the Walters Art Museum. Luigi Mangione's father, Lou, still works in the family business, and his mother, Kathleen, runs a local boutique travel agency; one of his sisters is training to be a doctor, while the other is a Baltimore artist. When news of Luigi Mangione's arrest broke, his cousin, state legislator Nino Mangione, issued a statement saying that the family was "shocked and devastated." "They are a great family, well I guess except for the one," a family acquaintance tells Fox. (More here.)
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