A pizza order, a thank you, or a death threat — Giuseppe Mantova didn’t know which awaited him as he answered the call the Wednesday evening before Christmas. The phone at Vito’s Pizza had been ringing more than usual that week, thanks to an illustration Mantova’s 30-year-old daughter had taped above the cash register of Luigi Mangione as a saint, wearing an emerald-green robe with a sun haloed behind his dark hair. “You’re supporting a criminal,” a woman on the other end of the line told Mantova.
“I’m not coming to your place anymore.” “Fine, don’t come!” the 64-year-old replied in his heavy Italian accent, and hung up. Vito’s sits in a strip mall in Towson, Maryland, the hometown of Mangione, who’d been arrested weeks earlier in connection with the early-morning murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York City street.
News of the crime rocked the Baltimore suburb where Mangione grew up, back when Mantova knew him as just another teenager who came in after school to order a chicken-parm slice. Mantova’s daughter tells me she taped up the illustration as a statement against the “corrupt health care system in America.” After a customer posted a photo of the St.
Luigi display on social media and it went viral, Mantova and his employees were bombarded with calls. Some echoed the woman’s sentiments, accusing Mantova of supporting murder. One man called with a death threat.
But along with the angry calls and Facebook messages, .
