The Smooth Jazz Angle

As the world pores over the biography and extensive online history of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, one significant question—significant, at least, for fans of quietly sophisticated flugelhorn music—has gone unanswered: Is the alleged shooter related, even in some distant way, to Chuck Mangione?

Chuck Mangione, of course, is the horn player behind the massively popular 1978 single “Feels So Good,” whose upbeat groove and breezy singalong hook made it the rare instrumental to crack the top 10 of Billboard’s singles chart, and provided an early blueprint for what we now know as smooth jazz. Now 84, Chuck has led an accomplished musical life before and after that smash success, including an early stint in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, a group known for incubating the early careers of some of the world’s greatest musicians. I couldn’t help but think of him when Luigi’s name was first made public as a person of interest in the Thompson investigation. Searching Twitter and Bluesky showed me I wasn’t alone.

Could America’s two most famous Mangiones share a bloodline? It seemed, for some obscure reason, worth trying to find out. The initial evidence pointed, sort of shockingly, to yes. But the more I dug in, the less clear it became.

Let’s start with Luigi’s family. It has been widely established, including in the New York Times, that he hails from a prominent Baltimore Mangione clan that owns two country clubs, Turf Valley and Hayfields; a nursing home; and a conservative talk radio station in the area, WCBM; and whose scions also include the Republican Maryland state delegate Nino Mangione. (Nino, who also hosts a show on WCBM, is Luigi’s cousin.) 

Mary C. Mangione, Luigi’s grandmother and the family matriarch, was an arts patron and philanthropist who died last year at 92. She married Nick Mangione Sr. in 1950. According to her Baltimore Sun obituary, “The couple celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary at Turf Valley. Another Mangione family member, the flugelhorn player and trumpeter Chuck Mangione, performed with singer Jerry Vale.” Another family member! It would stand to reason, I thought, that if Chuck Mangione is somehow related to Luigi Mangione’s grandmother, he is also related, however distantly, to Luigi himself.

I drove myself a little nuts in my attempts to confirm the relation or find any additional details about it. I came across another obituary for Mary Mangione, broadcast on the family radio station and preserved as a Facebook video, that also mentions Chuck played at her wedding anniversary, but does not include any further details about their connection. I spent $16 on a Kindle copy of Mount Allegro, the 1942 memoir written by Chuck Mangione’s uncle Jerre Mangione, considered a classic document of the Sicilian-American immigrant experience, hoping to find some mention of a cousin named Nick (Luigi’s grandfather) or of a branch of the family that moved from their adopted hometown of Rochester, New York, to the Baltimore area. There is none. I called a number listed for Chuck Mangione’s lawyer on his official website, and emailed an address I found on a people-finder service for Chuck himself. I even called the webmaster of ChuckMangione.com. 

It occurred to me, as someone who grew up around Baltimore, that a longtime Triple-A farm team for the Orioles is based in Rochester. Could there be some link there? A baseball angle? I found myself reading an unrelated Reddit post by a guy whose sister is a waitress in Baltimore, saying she’d once waited on Chuck Mangione at her job. I was getting desperate. 

I even tried to trace their respective lineages back to Italy. Both Chuck and Luigi’s family roots are in Sicily, but from different provinces. According to a 2003 Washington Post article about the family country club business, Luigi’s great-grandfather came to the U.S. from the Sicilian province of Enna. Chuck’s grandfather, according to Mount Allegro, came from Porto Empedocle, a small town in the province of Agrigento. 

Could the mention of Mary and Chuck as relatives in her obituary be a mistake? Was the notion of this world-renowned musician as a member of their clan just a familial inside joke? Jacques Kelly, the Sun reporter who wrote it, says no. When I emailed him to ask if he remembered confirming their relation, or if he’d learned anything else about how they were precisely related, he wrote back within minutes: “Chuck is definitely a family member… that was what I was told when Mary died. The family had no reason to make up a fact like that.” 

After hearing from Kelly, I wrote what I thought would be my conclusion for a draft-in-progress of this piece: I’m not ready to definitively claim that Chuck and Luigi are related, but if I had to put money on it one way or the other, I would bet some modest amount that the famous flugelhorn player is indeed a distant great-uncle to the alleged CEO assassin. 

Then I got a call back from Chuck’s attorney, Peter Matorin. “There’s no relation at all,” he said confidently. “I did talk to him about it, and he laughed.”