Tips from Luigi Mangione manhunt exposed in Crime Stoppers hack
Less than 30 minutes after police escorted a handcuffed Luigi Mangione from a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Dec. 9, 2024, a call came in to the New York Police Department’s Crime Stoppers tip line. The tipster, according to hacked crime report data viewed by Straight Arrow News, took credit for the 911 call that led to the accused killer’s arrest.
“Tipster states that the suspect wanted for the healthcare CEO homicide is currently at a Mc Donalds in Altoona, PA,” a Crime Stoppers employee wrote. “Tipster called 911 and officers arrived and detained: Luigi Mangione, DOB: 05/06/1998.”
The anonymous tip was one of more than 400 that the NYPD received during a five-day manhunt for the gunman who shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street.
The tips — previously unreported — informed police that Mangione had fled to Pennsylvania, where callers to Crime Stoppers say they spotted him in at least four cities. The purported sightings included one in a sporting goods store in Altoona, a day before he was arrested in a McDonald’s in the central Pennsylvania city about 275 miles from New York.
These and other tips appear in a cache of more than 8.3 million records hacked from P3 Global Intel, a company whose software is used by hundreds of Crime Stoppers programs across the country.
The hackers — a group calling itself the Internet Yiff Machine — gave SAN and the nonprofit leak archiver DDoSecrets exclusive access to the data. DDoSecrets has granted select researchers and journalists subsequent access for continued reporting.
The hacked data contained personal information on both tipsters and people they accused of crimes. Experts interviewed by SAN said the leak posed significant risks to the individuals named in the records and, because it revealed tips to the military and other government agencies, could jeopardize national security.
Rewards and tips
SAN learned about the tip regarding Mangione’s arrest from the Swiss hacker and security researcher maia arson crimew, known best for discovering a copy of the U.S. government’s terrorism no-fly list in 2023 on an airline’s unsecured server. SAN searched the data cache and found an additional 283 tips that mention Mangione’s first and last name.
The tips came in as the FBI was offering up to $50,000 for information that led to an arrest or conviction, while the NYPD Crime Stoppers was offering $10,000.
NYPD officials said around 30 tips were useful in tracking Mangione’s movements before his arrest. The NYPD declined to provide SAN a statement when asked about the hacked crime tips regarding Mangione.
According to the Justice Department, a McDonald’s employee recognized Mangione as he sat at a table in the restaurant. When Altoona police officers arrived, Mangione allegedly gave them the same false identification he had used to check into a hostel in New York before the shooting. Authorities said he had a 9 mm pistol at the time of the arrest, as well as a silencer like the one used in the shooting.
Mangione’s lawyer in New York, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, did not respond to a request for comment from SAN.
Mangione has pleaded not guilty to state and federal murder charges. He is scheduled to go on trial later this year.
‘That’s the murderer’
Many of the tips related to Mangione are marked by Crime Stoppers with identifiers such as “spam” and “nuisance” — labels used to denote information of no investigatory value. Several of the tips, however, detail alleged sightings of Mangione in New York and Pennsylvania during the manhunt.
At 11 a.m. Dec. 6, a little more than 48 hours after the shooting, a man in Matamoras, Pennsylvania, about 90 miles outside New York, called Crime Stoppers to report a possible sighting near a Wendy’s restaurant.
The tipster described seeing a man wearing a dark hooded jacket with a dark backpack that instantly reminded him of the person shown shooting the CEO in surveillance footage that was playing on TV channels across the country.
Although the tipster could not see the man’s face, he reported noticing dark curly hair sticking out of the hood and white on the soles of his sneakers. The sighting, which was captured on the dashcam of the man’s truck, was reportedly just down the road from a Greyhound bus stop. The man shared the dashcam video with Crime Stoppers.
A day later, a caller reported spotting a man resembling Mangione as he walked past a Denny’s at 5 a.m. in Bedford, Pennsylvania. That is 275 miles from the purported sighting in Matamoras, but less than an hour’s drive from the McDonald’s in Altoona.
The caller noted that it was still dark outside but said the man was wearing dark clothes and carrying a backpack, a description matching Mangione.
On Dec. 8, with the manhunt intensifying, two tipsters again placed Mangione in Pennsylvania.
One was more than 175 miles from Altoona, in the opposite direction from Bedford. But the caller seemed certain she had spotted Mangione.
“My husband and I were exiting a McDonalds in Pittston PA, and came face-to-face with a man that strongly resembled Mangione,” the tip said. “We nearly collided with him at the door as we were leaving, and he was rushing out of the men’s room attempting to exit out the same door as we were to the parking lot.”
The woman, who left her email address and phone number in the tip, told SAN this week that as the man passed her, she said, “That’s the murderer.”
“Without saying a word, he looked me directly in the eyes,” the woman told Crime Stoppers. “He stared at me momentarily with a flat affect to his face, then rushed out the door ahead of us.
The woman told SAN that she never received a response from Crime Stoppers regarding her tip.
The same day, a high school teacher told Crime Stoppers that a student had seen a man looking for a flashlight at a sporting goods store in Altoona. The student found it “odd that the guy was wearing a scarf and also a medical mask” and noted that he paid in cash before leaving the store that afternoon.
“The student then told me that as soon as he saw the photos on the news that he recognized him,” the teacher wrote.
A little more than 12 hours later, Mangione was in custody.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
