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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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Dennis Griffin, true crime author who chronicled the Mob in Las Vegas and elsewhere, dies

If there was a hall of fame for true crime authors, Dennis Griffin would be in it. He was a…

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Emma Coronel Guzman Instagram Photo

Wife of drug kingpin El Chapo pleads guilty to drug trafficking

Standing in a federal court dressed in a green prison jumpsuit and white face mask, the wife of imprisoned Mexican…

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Eighty-five years ago this week, Lucky Luciano convicted of pandering

A few years after the fall of Chicago’s Al Capone in 1931, a new recognizable face of organized crime emerged…

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Historians of the underworld

When media outlets need an expert to explain what might have happened to former labor leader Jimmy Hoffa’s remains, they…

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Former New York Mafioso shines light on syndicate ‘treachery’

When he was 20 years old, John Pennisi shot a man to death in a dispute over a girlfriend. “The…

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The 10-week-long Commission trial played to full courtrooms

Last of two parts. The Commission trial continued through November and into December of 1986.  The eight men on trial…

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The Commission trial lifted the lid on the New York Mafia

First of two parts. In the annals of Mafia courtroom dramas, one case tends to stand above the rest, The…

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