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

One hundred years ago: Murder of ‘Big Jim’ Colosimo spawned one of the most powerful crime syndicates in American history – the Chicago Outfit

Three weeks after his marriage to the beautiful singer Dale Winter, James Colosimo remained giddy, and nervous. Known as “Big…

Learn More
Francesco Bonura

Citing coronavirus risks, Italy releases four imprisoned Mob bosses

During the coronavirus pandemic, the world’s prisons are among the hotspots for the disease. Inmates living in close proximity create…

Learn More

Mexican cartels deliver care packages to citizens amid pandemic

From mobster Al Capone’s Chicago soup kitchen that served three meals a day during the Great Depression to Colombian cocaine…

Learn More

Who bombed Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal’s car?

Flames two or three inches high emerged from the defroster vent as he sat in his car with takeout food…

Learn More

The Camorra and the garbage racket in the ‘Land of Fires’

This is a condensed version of a longer case study, “Organized Crime and Environmental Issues in Naples, Italy,” that will…

Learn More

DEA attacks top Mexican drug cartel with 600 arrests across U.S.

The operation was named “Project Python,” presumably reflecting an effort by federal law enforcement to squeeze the life out of…

Learn More

From shoe-leather reporter to Mob movie screenwriter, Nick Pileggi remembers it well

Author and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi is enjoying a couple of major career milestones this year. Two groundbreaking Mob movies he…

Learn More