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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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DEA report: Drug overdoses top cause of death for Americans

Drug poisoning was the chief cause of injury deaths among Americans from 2011 to 2017, more than the loss of…

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Longtime Colombo figure John ‘Sonny’ Franzese dies at 103

The violent, sociopathic and amazingly long life of John “Sonny” Franzese, a former Colombo crime family underboss who once ran…

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FBI director outlines threats from transnational organized crime

Editor’s note: On February, 5, 2020, Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, delivered a report to the…

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Giovanni Brusca: No. 5 on list of Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen

In this fifth and final installment in our series on the Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen, we profile a…

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Joe “The Animal” Barboza: No. 4 on list of Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen

In this fourth installment in our series on the Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen, the focus shifts to the…

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Roy DeMeo: No. 3 on list of Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen

In this third installment in our series on the Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen, we focus on a particularly…

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Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles: No. 2 on list of Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen

In this second installment in our series on the Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen, we move from the Chicago…

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