I don’t often receive boxes of bullets in the mail. Or even boxes of bullet casings. Because COINTELPRO: The Assassination of Fred Hampton doesn’t actually include bullets, only the spent brass that would normally hold the projectiles. When the game arrived, I hefted the entire handful. Ten casings, nine millimeter, five different manufacturers. Primers burnt. Cordite faint but noticeable.

Fred Hampton was shot four times. Twice in the initial barrage from outside the apartment where he slept, possibly drugged by his head of security and FBI informant William O’Neil; twice more at close range after officers realized he was still alive. He was the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party of Illinois, but the crime that had drawn the FBI’s attention wasn’t any particular clash between the Black Panthers and the police, nor even the Rainbow Coalition he had formed with poor white Southerners and Puerto Ricans. No, it was the party’s Free Breakfast Program for neighborhood kids that had drawn J. Edgar Hoover’s ire.

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