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Posted: Saturday, 27 June 2009 1:46PM
Artist accused of inking minors
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SHOREWOOD (STNG) -- A man arrested eight years ago for allegedly running a door-to-door underage tattooing service was locked up again Thursday on charges he inked another two youths.
George "Hook" Jerutis, 54, was held overnight on a $5,000 bond and remains in custody. Local police reportedly pinched Jerutis on Thursday at his home, the Joliet Inn near Interstate 55 and Jefferson Street.
Court papers only identified the two alleged victims of Jerutis' tattooing by their initials. Their ages and genders were withheld.
Shorewood police Cmdr. Aaron Klima failed to return calls for comment about Jerutis' arrest.
Jerutis ran a pair of tattoo parlors before allegedly embarking on illicit enterprises. He had Hook's Tattoo Mania on Plainfield Road in Crest Hill and Hook's Tattoo & Body Piercing on New Lenox Road in Joliet.
Jerutis ran afoul of the law in 2001 when the Joliet police charged him with tattooing a 13-year-old and two 15-year-olds.
Two of the boys were brothers and the third was their cousin.
One of the boys reportedly was referred to Jerutis by a friend and told he was a tattoo artist who made house calls. Two of the teens were tattooed in a house on Elmwood Street and another in a house on Lincoln Avenue, police said.
The charge against Jerutis was dropped after one of the victims failed to appear in court.
Jerutis now runs an Internet-based tattooing correspondence school. He boasts that he has written and copyrighted a tattooing textbook and that upon graduation from his class, his students can proclaim, "I learned everything that I needed to learn at Hook's Online Tattoo Apprenticeship Course. And I have a Certificate of Completion to prove it."
The class costs $500, the same amount of cash Jerutis needs to make bail after Thursday's arrest.
On the Web site for his class, Jerutis says he was born on Chicago's South Side in either 1953 or 1955 and got his first tattoo at age 19 while in the Army.
Later, while working as a carpenter, Jerutis, whose body bears dozens of tattoos, embarked on his career as a tattoo artist.
"I was now ready to get a job at a tattoo shop but I felt I needed a cool name, so the only one I could think of was the one my buddy gave me, Hook," Jerutis says on his site. "I got it because I always hooked him into playing pool even when he knew he couldn't beat me, so the name was the only legitimate nickname I ever got, so I kept it."
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