Blog

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 ...

Learn More

Blowing the whistle on Mob-connected sports betting

In the fourth quarter of a 2002 NBA conference playoff game, Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant elbowed the Sacramento…

Learn More

The Kefauver hearing in Las Vegas

The U.S. Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, chaired by Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver, focused attention…

Learn More

‘The Godfather: Part III’ is getting a makeover

With a thunderstorm raging outside the kitchen window, Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III expresses anger at the Mafia…

Learn More

Did the Chicago Outfit elect John F. Kennedy president?

A number of authors assert, based on claims by individuals who were linked in one way or another to organized…

Learn More

Federal law enforcement agencies announce series of major busts

While most of us are focused on the pandemic and the final weeks of the presidential campaign, federal law enforcement…

Learn More

Decades of temperance activism led to passage of Prohibition 100 years ago

All the tumult of 2020 makes it easy to forget that it is a huge anniversary in the history of…

Learn More

‘Goodfellas’ still going strong after 30 years

In the painting, a man with white hair and beard, his left hand steering an outboard motor, is piloting a…

Learn More