ice pick

A standard ice pick.

An ice pick is a tool used to break-up, pick, or chip at ice. It resembles a scratch awl, but is designed for picking at ice rather than wood. Before the invention of modern refrigerators, ice picks were a ubiquitous household tool used for separating and shaping the blocks of ice used in ice boxes.

Other uses

Like most other tools, ice picks have been used for more than their intended use. For example, mafia hitman Abe "Kid Twist" Reles used an ice pick as his weapon of choice. Fellow Murder, Inc. hitman Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss also employed an ice pick as a weapon. On the show Deadliest Warrior, the Ice Pick is shown as a Mafia weapon, and that it can go through bone easily.

Neurologist Walter Freeman used medical instruments called leucotomes, and later orbitoclasts, both of which which were essentially ice picks, to perform transorbital lobotomies. This operation was informally called "ice pick lobotomy": the leucotome was hammered into the patient's brain with a rubber mallet via the eye's tear duct.

Although the murder weapon in the assassination of Leon Trotsky was an ice axe, it is often described as an ice pick.^[1]

In the Martin Scorsese film Casino, Joe Pesci's character Nicky Santoro mentions that during a two-day beating and torture of a man, he and his gang "put ice picks in his balls."

References

1. ^ See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford University Press, 1991, ISBN 0195071328, p.418 for a detailed account