The Sad And Disturbing Story Of Whiting’s Mike Inik

Jerry Banik

December, 2024

The story of Mike Inik is an almost forgotten piece of Whiting’s history. 

Newspapers described Mike as a cripple, who was thought to be a harmless crank.

But that was before he shot up the superior courthouse in Hammond, after which he was described as demented, crazed and deranged; a madman, a lunatic and a maniac.

Mike’s Early Days Little was known of Mike’s ancestry.  He was a “stockily built foreigner from the Balkan country,” who spoke in disconnected sentences and had been a town character in Whiting since 1889.  The beginnings of his notoriety go back to May 13th, 1902, the date on which he later wrote that he had been injured in Standard Oil’s Whiting refinery, where he worked as a laborer.  One version of the cause of his injury was that a large pipe had fallen on him, another version was that he had fallen off a scaffold.

He sued Standard Oil, and in a Chicago court was awarded $1,500 in the form of a check.  He refused to cash it though, believing he had been bilked.  That refusal to cash it caused him additional problems because his lawyers, who were also named on the check, could not get paid what they were entitled to in the settlement.

From there, things got worse for Mike.

Mental Decline  Now out of work and penniless, he made a list of the pay days at local factories, and regularly waited outside their gates, begging for nickels and dimes from the workers heading home.  He grew increasingly obsessed with using the legal system to win what he believed he was entitled to, as he conjured up claims of an ever growing conspiracy against himself and others.

On September 22, 1910, he appeared in the pages of the Lake County Times for having been arrested in Washington, D.C. along with another Whiting man, Henry Gehrke, whom Inik said was his valet.  They had been demanding to see President William Taft and Vice President James Sherman at the White House, claiming the Commander In Chief bore some responsibility in the matter of Inik’s lawsuit against Standard Oil. By this time, Inik alleged that his $1,500 award check was incorrectly written, and that it was supposed to be for $150,000.  The two men were found to have letters written by hand, “in such a manner as to make them almost unintelligible.”  Both men were released the next morning on their promise to leave town.

In 1911, District Judge Virgil Reiter found Inik in court to be “of unsound mind,” and appointed former Whiting mayor Fred Smith to be Mike’s guardian.

The Beginning Of The End  For the next five years, Inik repeatedly showed up at the superior courthouse in downtown Hammond, imploring the prosecutor there to take up his case, but was always rebuffed.  His petition began:

By this time he had framed his uncashed check, and now claimed Standard Oil owed him $4,000,000. Articles described him as having “a slow, sideways shuffle, threadbare clothes and a flowing beard.  He always carries with him newspaper clippings and a list of persons killed at the Standard Oil Whiting Refinery,” and a “ten foot long list of lawyers to whom he claims to have shown it.”

In 1916, Inik lived in a room above the Sink and Wensberg clothing store at the corner of 121st Street and Schrage Avenue in Whiting. By December of that year, he had shown up at the Hammond courthouse almost every day for a month, showing considerable signs of insanity.  Officials there had begun to run out of patience with him, but no one thought him to be dangerous.

On December 4, Detective Sergeant George Lee of the Gary police department was present at the courthouse.  He saw Inik come in, armed with a sword.  But rather than call it to the attention of the court officers, he decided not to, when he noticed that Inik seemed to be acquainted with the court personnel, who responded to the greetings of the “harmless” foreigner.

Inik took the stairs to the second floor, to the office of Prosecutor J. A. Patterson, a man Inik appeared to especially dislike.  Laying a bundle of documents on a table, he once again implored Patterson to prosecute Standard Oil, but Patterson shooed him away, and then so did Judge Reiter.  Next, Inik approached Judge Charles Greenwald.  The judge reportedly called Inik a nuisance, saying, “Why don’t you go back to Whiting and take a bath?  If I was judge Reiter, I’d throw you in jail.” 

Inik left, but later returned, “loaded for bear.”

The Bear  On his person he had homemade armor, four revolvers, a sabre, a hammer, a butcher knife, a black jack, a club studded with pins, an iron hook, a five pound chain, and one hundred and sixty five rounds of ammunition, all hidden by a long coat. 

In the second floor corridor of the courthouse were jurymen, clerks and witnesses in various cases waiting to be heard.  Also present were Prosecutor Patterson and Judge Greenwald, again.  Seeing Inik, Patterson told Greenwald to ignore him. 

With that, Inik pulled two revolvers and fired.

He had fired point blank at Patterson but missed him by inches, instead striking Judge Greenwald in the arm.  Another shot went wild.  The judge and two clerks ran into a vault in the clerks’ office, and Patterson ducked into a second, nearby office.

Hearing the shots, Bailiff Louis DeBow approached Inik, shouting “Drop that gun!”  Inik fired three more times, hitting DeBow.  George Robbins, a juryman returning from lunch, rushed Inik from behind.  “I jumped on him, reaching over his shoulder for his gun hand.  I grabbed his wrist, but it was so big around I couldn’t get a good hold of it.  He managed to twist his hand and he fired.  The first shot missed my head, then the second shot followed.”

Robbins took that second shot to his face, leaving flesh wounds beneath his right eye, across his right cheek and through his nose.  Three other jurymen helped Robbins overpower and hold Inik until police arrived on the scene and took him into custody.

Just earlier, before making the above statement to a Times reporter, Inik had stood “not three feet away” from the Judge, but “did not indicate with as much as a look that he recognized Judge Greenwald.”

It’s thought Inik’s heavy armor and weapons had interfered with his aim.  In all, he fired seven shots that day.  In addition to the seven empty cartridges left in the two revolvers, police found three more that, luckily, were nicked by the firing pin but didn’t fire.

Arraignment  Eight days after the shooting, Inik was arraigned.

The petition he had tried to present to the court on the day of the shooting was made public.  It included a typewritten list of some forty friends, attorneys and others whom Inik felt should be paid millions of dollars by Standard Oil on his behalf.  It also included $3,000,000 to go to “Lake County Hospital for poisoning.”

The suit of armor he had worn was on display along with his weapons, rigged up over a mannequin, and it “caused considerable merriment in the court room.”

The armor was made of pieces of sheet iron and stove pipes with newspapers pasted over them.

He had a head mask which nobody ever saw him wear.  It contained a beard and scalp covering made of mattress hair.  A message printed in red ink on the forehead of its visor read: “People don’t bedouche.  I’b United State and I was cavalry soldier.  I want true for everybody.  I crose death.”  The Times wrote, “The whole inscription is about as intelligent as was his average conversation.”

Superior Court Judge Walter Hardy heard testimony as to Inik’s mental condition. Two Whiting doctors testified that Inik suffered from monomania and hallucinations, that he claimed his armor was patented in Washington, and that he carried a hatchet to cut off the hand of anyone who tried to sign the check from Standard Oil that he carried.

When asked why he wore the suit of armor, Inik answered he wore it because he “smelled the big Standard Oil company war that was coming.”  The local sheriff testified that, at the county jail, Inik refused to put on a new pair of shoes because they were taken from the body of a dead man killed by Standard Oil less than a month before the shooting.

It was testified that he claimed he would get Greenwald, Reiter, Patterson and Smith some day.  The week before the shooting he had asked Whiting constable Charles Miller for Miller’s phone number.  When asked why, he said, “Next Monday maybe you get called to Hammond.  Then, you must come quick!”  Miller dismissed this as the type of thing Inik said often.

Inik believed Standard Oil was secretly murdering people at the Whiting refinery.  He claimed he had two children and a wife in New York.  He said he couldn’t bring his wife to Whiting because Standard Oil planned to murder her.  No one could confirm these claims of a family.  He frequently wore a placard over his chest bearing some slogan or challenge.  On the day of the shooting he had one which read, “How many people did the Standard kill?”

Judge Walter declared Inik insane and ordered him committed to the colony for the criminally insane at the Michigan City state prison.  Before the month was out, Inik was behind bars there.  If ever he was to be released, he was to be returned to Hammond to face prosecution.

In stark contrast with the stories that appeared in the days immediately following the rampage, less than a year later the Times ran a sarcastic story, padded and embellished with mockery of Inik.  Judge Greenwald, it proclaimed, was now world famous as a result of the Inik story appearing in “Wide World Magazine,” published in London and distributed around the world, “wherever the English language is read.”

Looking Back  George Robbins, the juror who tackled Inik, would be scarred for life.  It was discovered that Inik had fashioned a wristband made from cloth and the top of a lady’s button shoe.  That’s what made his wrist so large that Robbins was not able to hold onto it during the struggle.  The bullet that struck Robbins missed his right eye by a hair’s breadth, entered his nose on the right side and exited out the left.  His permanent scars bore the evidence of his bravery that day, saving the lives of others.

In 1917 he sued for damages and was awarded $400 by the court.

The other two shooting victims would recover.

Mike Inik, as reported in The Times, died in Michigan City’s ward for the criminally insane on August 2, 1945, where he had been confined for more than 28 years, “until his sturdy body followed his lost mind to a merciful end, his mind broken and cracked, sickly voice babbling incoherently of the $5,000,00 he thought somebody owed him.”

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Most of the information and images contained in this article, and all of the quoted statements, come from the pages of the Lake County/Hammond Times.