It was October 19, 1970. I was just four months out of the Army and trying to settle back into my role with the Cook County Sheriff’s Police. I was in the old courthouse at 2600 South California Avenue, standing on the sixth floor when the peace shattered. Gunfire. Sharp, echoing cracks bouncing off every inch of the marble like the whole damn building was made of a snare drum.
I drew my gun and bolted up the stairs to the seventh floor. As I turned the corner, a blast of marble debris smacked me across the face. For a second, I thought I’d been shot. I ducked back, heart pounding, just in time to hear a voice calmly say, “He’s finished now.”
They weren’t kidding. About 19 rounds had been fired. Two uniformed officers and a plainclothes detective had emptied their six-shot revolvers into a well-dressed dead man—Gene Lewis, also known as “The Iceman.” He lay on the ground, stone cold and face up, still rocking an iridescent green suit, white shirt, and matching green tie. One handcuff dangled from his wrist like a grim accessory. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t going to move again.
The press was on him like vultures before the body was even cold. Cameras flashing, newsmen elbowing each other for the best shot. Back then, those images made the front pages and the evening news without a second thought. These days, we’re too delicate for reality. Wouldn’t want the public to actually see what consequences look like.
Sheriff Joe Woods showed up with his entourage, stepping around blood and body like he was inspecting a new car. The story came together quickly. Lewis already had one death sentence and was working on a second, courtesy of Judge Richard Fitzgerald. He was such a high escape risk that he wasn’t even kept in the bullpen lockup, he was handcuffed in the judge’s chambers under watch.
But love, as they say, will make you stupid. A female clerk in the judge’s courtroom had apparently lost her heart and her mind to The Iceman. She smuggled a revolver into the courthouse by hollowing out a law book from the judge’s library. Like something out of a prison escape movie, only dumber.
Lewis, never one to leave things to chance, had turned a brass ballpoint pen refill into a working handcuff key and kept it stashed in his mouth. When he got into the judge’s chambers, he retrieved the book, the gun, and took control. He disarmed the bailiff and grabbed a young prosecutor as a hostage. Then he strutted down the hallway toward the elevator like he was in a gangster flick.
That’s when Officer Lee Hamilton entered the scene and opened fire. The hallway turned into a war zone. A defense attorney, Leonard Carlin, caught a stray round right in the crown jewels—collateral damage in the courthouse version of Bonnie and Clyde.
The next morning I was down at the Cook County Morgue watching Lewis get filled like a fish a fish. Twenty-two bullet wounds, mostly entrance holes. When they pried open his mouth, there it was—the pen refill handcuff key, still hidden between his teeth like a magician’s final trick.
And no, this wasn’t the first act of gunplay inside that courthouse. Two years earlier, another genius named General Grant Lampley whipped out a concealed .45 and took a shot at a judge. Missed. Fled. Was immediately shot by cops a few blocks North on California Avenue.
Later after the autopsy, I was walking with the Presiding Criminal Court Judge, Joseph A. Power. He was visibly annoyed, probably more about the paperwork than the bloodshed. He told me everyone entering the building was going to be searched from now on. He was drafting the court order himself.
That order came down fast, but there weren’t nearly enough bailiffs to screen the crowds. Suddenly, the Cook County Sheriff’s Police were turned into human metal detectors. In those days, there were no beeping machines or X-rays. Every person got frisked by hand like it was a nightclub with no bouncer.
During the first month, we had confiscated somewhere between 35 to 50 firearms per day. And knives? Enough to arm a small army. Homemade shanks, brass knuckles, straight razors, you name it. By the end of the month, we had filled multiple 55-gallon drums with confiscated weapons. Outside, stashed in the bushes, we found even more pills, syringes, and enough street contraband to make a pharmacist weep.
And then the rest of the country caught on. Over the next five years, courthouse security screenings became the norm from coast to coast. The idea that judges might actually fear the lawyers more than the defendants? That’s not sarcasm. That’s straight from the bench.
Today, we all shuffle through checkpoints at government buildings, stadiums, airports, concerts, you name it. Most people have accepted it as the “new normal.” But make no mistake, it was one more giant nail hammered deep into the coffin of the Fourth Amendment.
All it took was a lovesick clerk, a hollowed-out book, and 22 bullet holes to get us there.
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