Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, had built the original Rainbow Coalition and a free-breakfast program that made him, in the FBI's own assessment, precisely the kind of unifying figure COINTELPRO existed to stop. He was already a political prisoner in the ordinary sense — serving time on an absurd conviction for allegedly stealing $71 worth of ice cream bars — when the Bureau's informant William O'Neal, his chief of security, supplied a floor plan of his apartment marking where he slept.

Before dawn on December 4, 1969, Chicago police attached to the state's attorney's office fired nearly a hundred rounds into the apartment, killing Hampton in his bed — likely drugged with barbiturates — and Mark Clark, and wounding four others; one shot may have come from the Panthers' side. The survivors were charged with attempted murder while the raiders were exonerated. Thirteen years of civil litigation ended in 1982 with a $1.85 million settlement and judicial findings of a cover-up spanning the FBI, the prosecutor, and the police — the clearest documented case of a political assassination carried out under color of American law enforcement.