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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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White Boy Rick: From Teenage FBI Informant to Poster Boy for Criminal Justice Reform

Richard “White Boy Rick” Wershe is a living, breathing casualty of America’s war on drugs, locked away for the past…

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Fifty years ago this spring, Mario Puzo changed the way we view organized crime

Mario Puzo needed money. His first two novels, The Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965), received good reviews…

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Happy New Beer’s Eve!

On the evening of April 6, 1933, lines formed outside of bars and breweries. In Chicago, WGN Radio broadcast special…

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New movie rekindles debate over Jimmy Hoffa killing

Martin Scorsese’s upcoming movie The Irishman is reviving a dispute over who killed former national labor leader Jimmy Hoffa. The…

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Eppolito

‘Mob Cops’ saga still reverberates 10 years after their life sentences

A former New York garment dealer, Burton Kaplan, sat down with DEA agents in 2004 to tell them an incredible…

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Fatty Walsh

Ninety years ago, Thomas ‘Fatty’ Walsh died as he lived — by the gun

The setting was a suite on the 14th floor of the lavish Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida. Thomas Walsh,…

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Anthony Comello in court

The Mob hit that wasn’t

It could have been a classic “Mob rub-out,” a new case for the FBI’s Criminal Investigations Division and the U.S….

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