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Geraldo Rivera uncovered ‘The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults’ on live television 40 years ago

Geraldo Rivera poses on the stairs heading down to the Lexington Hotel’s basement, where Al Capone supposedly kept a hidden vault. Forty years ago, millions of Americans tuned in to watch Rivera’s two-hour live television special revealing the contents of the “vault.” Steve Kagan / Getty Images
April 24, 2026

On April 21, 1986, television reporter Geraldo Rivera completed his final on-air shot in a live broadcast from the Chicago hotel where Prohibition-era Mob boss Al Capone supposedly had an underground vault. With 30 million viewers watching, the vault contained not much more than a couple of decades-old bottles and a cloud of dust. Afterward, sensing that critics would pounce, Rivera went on a bender, convinced his career was over. “He said he got tequila drunk across the street,” William Elliott Hazelgrove told The Mob Museum. Hazelgrove is the author of the newly released book, Capone’s Vault: The Real Story of the Biggest ...

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Mob movie classic ‘The Friends Of Eddie Coyle’ turns 50

The Boston-based movie The Friends of Eddie Coyle was released 50 years ago, in June 1973, introducing viewers to a…

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The Kansas City Massacre prompted legal reforms that bolstered federal law enforcement 

On June 17, 1933, an ambush at Kansas City’s Union Station railroad depot left five men dead and two wounded….

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The airport shootout and El Chapo’s big arrest

Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka “El Chapo,” is presented to the news media at Altiplano prison in Villa de Almoloya de Juarez on June 10, 1993. Courtesy of Cipollini Collection

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Body farms unravel mysteries of human decomposition

The University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center is one of seven taphonomic research facilities, or body farms, in the United States. Remains are laid out for researchers to observe the natural decomposition process. Getty Images

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‘When Spilotro got greedy, the end was written’

Since 1980, award-winning reporter Chuck Goudie has covered the Mob and much more for ABC7 News in Chicago. He’s been…

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Meyer Lansky’s 1953 jail stint

Seventy years ago, Meyer Lansky took a legal hit in an upstate New York gambling rackets crackdown that concluded with…

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Bugsy Siegel death house for sale in Beverly Hills

The Beverly Hills, California, mansion where Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was shot to death in 1947 is on the market for…

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