The Whereabouts: Part One

Tracking Luigi Mangione's known whereabouts between February and April 2024

I’ve broken the timeline into parts for ease of reading. Part two will cover May 2024 through the end of November. The timeline I’ve engineered here has marginalia and annotations discussing conflicting information in media reports and other related items to help contextualize it. However, I will be posting a simplified version of the timeline for reference in the next week or so.

Just a reminder that this timeline may not include some events that other timelines you’ve read on social media include. That’s because I’m only including what I consider to be confirmed facts. In my notes I do discuss certain unconfirmed dates and events (i.e. Mangione’s “visit” to a Thai gun range), but I’m looking to compose a 100% fact-based timeline. Please comment if you have confirmed information for missing events/dates.

Note: Just before February, on January 31st, 2004, Luigi Mangione posted his Goodreads review of Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski.

February 2024: Hawaii, Japan

• Unspecified date: Arrives in Hawaii after an absence during which he visited family in Maryland.

• Unspecified date: Mangione departs Hawaii for Asia. In a Reddit post on April 5th, Mangione says, “for the last 2 months specifically, it’s held up great in Asia across various countries and climates, and throughout some cross-country motorcycling.”

• February 25: In Japan and meets poker player Obara Jun at a Tokyo restaurant, by chance, not by plan. Mangione told Jun that he was “on vacation” from Hawaii.

This is one of the only mentions of the month in 2024 in which this photo was taken.

Notes:

On December 11th, the New York Post reported that Mangione had been living at 801 South Street in Honolulu since February 2024. The paper provided no source for this information beyond a line that references “records” showing he’d moved into the apartment in February.

What records? The Post didn’t get them from the management company, because, as they report, it didn’t respond to the paper’s request for comments. The reporters certainly didn’t get records from the Japanese family who owned the apartment, as “a source close” to the family told the Post “they were unaware that Mangione was their tenant.”

However, KHON-TV also reported that Magnione lived in an apartment building on South Street—presumably this one. Except the property manager, who did speak with the reporter, told the station that Mangione had lived at 801 South for two years: “The property manager of the 14th-floor unit said he lived there from Oct. 1, 2022 through Aug. 31, 2024.”

This local reporting aired and was posted online on December 9th. The NY Post’s report, on the other hand, was published two days later, on December 11th, and the property management refused to comment.

This is a pretty big difference in tenancy length, isn’t it? But we have the property manager on the record providing exact dates to a local station, and he states Mangione moved in on October 1st, 2022. When it comes to local information, I trust local reporters more than I trust reporters from national papers, especially tabloid-adjacent newspapers like the Post.

With no records to show that Mangione did, in fact, sign a lease on February 1st, 2024, I am challenging this point on the timeline, which has appeared on a number of other Mangione timelines on social media, and feel comfortable saying Mangione, in fact, moved into 801 South Street in October. That’s why you will not find it under February on my timeline.

A publication called Civil Beat reported on December 9th, 2024 that Mangione lived at Surfbreak between January 2022-June 2022. A much-quoted source has been R.J. Martin, the founder of Surfbreak. He tells Civil Beat that Mangione “went radio silent in June or July” of 2022. So if we discard the Post’s reporting that Mangione moved into 801 South in February of 2024 and accept that he moved in to the building in October 2022 when the property manager said he did, then we have about five months of unaccounted time in 2022. That’s for a different timeline, but I thought it was interesting.

March 2024: Thailand, Unknown?

• Unspecified date: Mangione travels to Thailand

Notes: TMZ is the only quasi-news source for all reporting on Mangione’s alleged time in Thailand in March. I’m aware of countless TikToks by people discussing his time in Thailand in March, but TikToks are hearsay, so I don’t utilize them as sources. As a result, there is scant confirmable information about Mangione’s whereabouts in March. While I won’t slot in any of TMZ or TikTok’s assertions about Mangione visiting a gun range, I do feel reasonably comfortable that Mangione was, in fact, in Thailand in March 2024, particularly because Jash Dholani, whom Mangione is confirmed as having visited in Mumbai in early May, said that Mangione had been in Thailand.

TMZ interviewed two German tourists, identified only as “Max” and “Paul” and disguised in shadow. Anonymous sources are the weakest evidence that can be offered by a journalist. The storied anonymous sources like Deep Throat of the Watergate scandal are usually used in concert with documentary evidence that confirms the contours of the source’s story. Max and Paul are TMZ’s only source for the assertion that Mangione visited a gun range while in Thailand. It would have been very easy to find the gun range and speak with the owner or a staff member. TMZ chose not to do this. Therefore, because there is zero confirmable evidence for the visit to the gun range, I can’t include it in the timeline. I’m not saying I think it’s impossible that he went to a Thai gun range. I’m only saying it can’t be added to a timeline built only on verifiable facts.

Also relevant is that every single media site that has reported on this trip to Thailand, and its details, has used the TMZ documentary as its single source. If you know of an independent source reporting on this trip, please let me know.

Finally, we have no information at this time indicating that Mangione either stayed in Thailand for the entirety of March or that he visited other countries in Asia. I think it’s highly unlikely he stayed in the environs where he reportedly encountered the two German tourists, but without any other bread crumbs, we can say nothing definitively.

April 2024: Japan

• April 5: “Mister_Cactus” posts on Reddit a packing list and suggestions he said worked well during two months he spent traveling in Asia. It’s likely the two months he references are February and March of the this same year. (Note: the link to the Reddit post will bring you to PushPull API, which preserved some of Mangione’s now-deleted posts. However you need to hit the “search” bar to find it.)

• April 6: Mangione subscribes to Gurwinder Bhogal’s Substack as a founding member, according Gurwinder himself.

• April 16: E-mails Gurwinder Bhogal, stating that he will be in Japan until the beginning of May (according to Gurwinder, via the source above).

• April 18: Tweets about Japan, writing, among other things, that "modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal..." On this date, Mangione also interacts with a tweet from Jash Dholani, whom he will later visit in Mumbai, in May.

• April 27: Mangione is in the Nara region of Japan. According to The New York Times, Mangione leaves a voice message for an acquaintance, saying he wants to “zen out.” (This is reported by the Times on December 12^th). The New York Times is a mostly reliable outlet, but note that the friend is not named and the reporters do not indicate that they listened to the message themselves, only that they “reviewed” it. Newspapers are very intentional with the words they use when discussing sourcing.

• May 1st (earlier reported as being April 30, but I’m leaving it here for now): Mangione tweets a Huxley quote from Brave New World: “But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

Notes: Based on the information available, it appears likely that Mangione was in Asia for the part of February, all of March, and all of April. There’s no indication he returned to the United States during this time. As we’ll see in the next chunk of the timeline, he likely was in Asia for most of May as well.

I feel comfortable stating that Mangione was in Japan in February. I’m less confident in stating he was definitively in Thailand in March, but am tentatively including that in the timeline. And I’m comfortable stating he was in Japan again in April. So Japan to Thailand back to Japan, shortly to include India (in May).

You may notice that I do not include every tweet or social media post Mangione made during these months. I only included those I felt illuminated something about his whereabouts. For example, the April 18th tweet about Japan, combined with his e-mail to Gurwinder about being in Japan during this time, is convincing evidence that he was, in fact, there.

Why am I so fussy about confirming his whereabouts via several sources? Because relying on the subject/suspect’s own assertions (both online and to friends/family) of where he is on any given day as fact is ill-advised. People lie, obfuscate, and mislead, particularly if they are planning to commit a crime. Again, I’m not saying this is the case with Mangione. I’m just saying in order to build a fact-based timeline, we must be rigorous and make no assumptions.

The next post will cover May through late November. Please do not hesitate to share any information you feel is reliable and/or should be slotted into this timeline.

If you find any of this useful or entertaining, please consider a paid subscription…or consider purchasing one of my books (you can find them on Bookshop.org or Barnes and Noble). My work on Substack is entirely self-funded. That being said, no pressure, as I know I’d support far more Substack writers if I were financially able.