They Leaked Everything But This

Mangione's "Lost Months" Have Never Made the Headlines...Why?

Some of my longer-time readers may remember that I have crafted 2/3 of a non-social media sourced, comprehensive timeline¹ of what we know about Luigi Mangione’s activities in the year leading up to December 4^th, 2024.

While I still intend to release the final third, I haven’t yet done so because I’ve wanted it to be as accurate as possible. That’s difficult, however, because of the misinformation that circulated, and has continued to circulate, via the mainstream media in the month of December. I was hoping, given time, that some information would harden into objective fact.

That hasn’t been the case.² And, for me, anyway, this has only raised more questions. These questions are not just about what we think we know, or have been told, or even about what we don’t know. My questions are about what we haven’t been told.

The days following the murder of Brian Thompson in Manhattan on December 4^th, 2024, were saturated by leaks, mostly from the NYPD. Interestingly, much of this leaked information turned out to be wrong (one reason why completing that final third of the timeline has been so challenging). I’ve covered this fact at length in previous posts, so I won’t expand on those leaks here.

I’ll only remind those of you who followed the murder of Brian Thompson from jump street that we were awash in information about the nameless suspect, his escape route, what he’d left behind, what he looked like, how he arrived in the city, how he left it, and so on. If one were particularly observant, one might remember that the leaked information that was later contradicted by fact was very rarely corrected by either law enforcement officials or the mainstream media.

And if one were particularly cynical, one might look back on this moment in time and wonder if, in the aftermath of the murder of a CEO and an unexpected public response, the leak overload was intentional.

I mention all this because I’m thinking a lot lately about what I call Mangione’s “lost months.” These are the weeks, and sometimes months, where we know nothing about his whereabouts. I generally categorize these months, with occasional exceptions, as ranging from July-late August, and then early September through late November. I provide what I hope is a helpful timeline of this time period in the second part of my timeline. (Please note, I’m not talking about early 2024 and Mangione’s fairly well-documented travels to Asia and his correspondence with various online bros—I’m speaking specifically of the summer and fall of 2024.)

During that time, Mangione effectively vanished. No digital trail, no confirmed sightings, no location data made public. That’s nearly 150 days unaccounted for in an age when even the most private lives are algorithmically surveilled, traced, and made legible. And yet, somehow, nothing.

Why do we know so little about these strange weeks/months during which Mangione disappeared from the world, both online and IRL? Is the NYPD and federal government sitting on a massive trove of investigative material they’re saving for Mangione’s trial?

Again, if you’ve followed the Mangione legal case, you’re probably laughing at this proposition. After all, this is a police force and a prosecution that provided discovery information in an HBO documentary that they had not even handed over to Mangione’s defense team. They’ve leveraged their media connections to preemptively paint a portrait of the suspect meant to convince viewers that he is guilty. Alarmed by what they see as public support of their suspect, they’ve utilized sympathetic corporate-owned media to make appearances to further disseminate some of the leaked information or to insinuate the nature of any DNA results they may or may not have.

Since the earliest days of the investigation into Luigi Mangione, the NYPD and prosecutors have demonstrated a clear willingness to shape public perception through selective disclosure, especially when it served their narrative. Selective disclosure is a strategy, and not an unusual one.

However, what is unusual is what hasn’t surfaced during this increasingly desperate campaign to establish Mangione as a terrorist who should be put to death: where Mangione was for nearly five months.

Do you ever wonder why we’ve seen no leaks from law enforcement about Mangione’s whereabouts from mid-summer 2024 until late November? Why the NYPD has offered no confirmed information about his whereabouts and has offered no timeline? Where are the intrepid journalists seeking to either establish this information on their own or else cultivate their relationships with law enforcement sources to get the information that NYPD and the Justice Department surely want out in the world?

In a case where “information” has flowed so freely to reporters, the silence around this stretch of time is curious. When institutions leak what suits them and redact what doesn’t, silence becomes its own kind of signal.

Based on my observations of the joint efforts of corporate-owned media and law enforcement in this case, I think it’s unlikely that we know little about these lost months because of “information holdback.”

I think it’s more likely, even though I find it incredible if true, that they don’t know where Mangione was or what he was doing. (By the way, I’m working on a post about what might have happened in those lost months—the “responsible speculation” part of the Bartleby on Trial mission statement.)

Luigi Mangione’s disappearance remains extraordinary. I think it’s the most interesting, and important, aspect of this story. In a case marked by selective leaks and media theatrics (hello, Eric Adams, hello Superman perp walk), the fact that we know so little about Mangione’s whereabouts for the months leading up to a murder is deeply fascinating. Perhaps it’s even telling.

But telling of what? Institutional uncertainty? Lack of investigative results? Disciplined and strategic silence? (ha).

No matter what the reason ends up being, lack of information in this case is not neutral.

1. I’ve made my archived timeline available to non-paying subscribers and other general readers, so those links should bring to those timeline posts.

2. It’s rather extraordinary that, in my opinion, social media like Reddit was often more accurate than traditional news outlets when it came to reporting facts about the murder of Brian Thompson and the life of Luigi Mangione.