Luigi Mangione's family ties to organized crime

With a name like Mangione...

I don’t know about you, but as soon as I heard the name of the purported killer of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, my mind immediately leapt to organized crime. Very presumptuous on my part, I know - but when you have an old-world Italian name like Mangione, it’s hard to resist the temptation.

I suppose others must have had a similar impulse, because shortly after the arrest of Luigi Mangione, DailyMail published another one of their sensational headlines with absolutely no substance - “Bullying behavior of Luigi Mangione's self-made tycoon grandpa accused of having Mafia ties revealed”. This article, of course, focused solely on Luigi’s paternal grandfather Nicholas B. Mangione, for whom there is absolutely zero evidence of a real connection to organized crime as far as I have been able to determine.

As usual, they left the real juicy part of the story untold.

It turns out that Luigi’s maternal line has a much more intriguing history. His mother’s maiden name is Kathleen Zannino:

The Baltimore Sun, Aug 2, 1987

Note the irony of Ms. Mangione’s employment by the insurance giant USF&G. Her father (Luigi’s grandfather), Joseph N. Zannino Jr., also seemed to be fond of the insurance industry, but mostly in the illegal-racketeering-sort-of-way. We’ll get to that in a second. First, some background on Joe Jr. He was born in 1928 in Clarksburg, West Virginia to Joe Sr. (Giuseppe) and Rosa DeVono Zannino. By 1950, when Joe Jr. was 21 years old, the family had moved to Baltimore and Joe Jr. had taken up the occupation of mortician. He then started up his own funeral parlor by the name of “Joseph N. Zannino, Jr. Funeral Home” sometime between 1950 and 1961.

It appears as though the simple business of burying people just didn’t cover the bills for Joe Jr., because in 1976 he did something crazy…

Lebanon Daily News, Oct 1, 1976

That’s right. Joe Jr. crossed state lines to Pennsylvania to engage in arson in the aid of racketeering along with two other men - Ronald Light and Herman Pinnon. The story goes that Joe was offered $8000 by Ronald Light, owner of the business that was fire-bombed, to assist with its destruction. Although, it’s not really clear to me what services Joe could have provided beyond those already provided by Herman Pinnon, who was apparently an expert criminal. In 1974, Pinnon and his wife were involved with a string of burglaries and a gas-station explosion that ended up killing his nephew in St. Louis. Sounds like something out of a mafia movie.

The Daily Standard, Oct 30, 1974

Later in 1988, Pinnon was again arrested for burning houses to collect insurance money:

The Kansas City Times, Jan 26, 1988

Back to the fire-bombing involving Joe Jr. - this case actually ended being sent to the US Supreme Court in 1977. The petition asked for the Supreme Court to review the lower court decisions regarding the sentencing of Joe Jr. The US prosecutor essentially made a plea deal with Zannino to plead guilty and rat out his two co-conspirators for a lighter sentence. At the time the deal was made, the judge said he would reserve the right to not honor the plea deal if negative information about Zannino came to light in his pre-sentencing report. Lo and behold, there was apparently negative information in the pre-sentencing report. The judge therefore did not honor the plea deal and gave Zannino the same sentence as the other two co-conspirators. Zannino tried to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court. I do not know if this case was ever heard by the Court, but I would suspect it wasn’t. The interesting thing to me is that none of the men involved wanted to go to trial. As soon as Light and Pinnon found out about the plea deal offered to Zannino, they switched their pleas to guilty. Pinnon apparently also threatened Zannino after the latter said he had to “think about his family” as justification for the plea deal, to which Pinnon responded “that’s not all you have to worry about”.

I do not know if the above information strongly ties Zannino to large-scale organized crime, but it is certainly suggestive of such a link. A much more substantive connection of Luigi Mangione’s lineage to the mafia can be found with his great-uncle, Salvatore “Big Sam” Zannino, who was the brother of Joe Jr.:

Big Sam was a boxing promoter in Baltimore who ended up “disappeared” along with another man named Messina in 1952 in a mafia hit:

The Baltimore Sun, Jul 22, 1952

Interesting stuff. Keep in mind that we are talking about the grandfather and great-uncle of Luigi Mangione. The extent to which, if any, the Mangione-Zannino families are involved with organized crime in the present day are completely unknown. Still, we should carefully consider all relevant information in the appropriate context.