The most exhilarating live television event of 1986 was the Chicago Bears winning Super Bowl XX, for some.
For others, it was a two-hour broadcast from a basement.
On April 21, 1986 — 37 years ago — Geraldo Rivera hosted “The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults” from the depths of the former Lexington Hotel at Michigan Avenue and Cermak Road on the city’s Near South Side.
Chicago Outfit boss Al Capone once used the hotel as his headquarters and a cast of characters speculated that his belongings, bootleg liquor and even the remains of his enemies might be found inside a cement crypt at the site.
Spoiler alert: The early experiment in unscripted programming was one of the most fascinating busts in Chicago history.
Rivera may have walked out of the hotel empty-handed, but the show’s incredible ratings delivered him a long-term talk show deal.
Capone’s riches, by the way, were eventually found decades later — thousands of miles away from Chicago.
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‘One of the most perfect hotels in the world’
The imposing 10-story Lexington Hotel had a brown brick and terra cotta exterior supported by a steel skeleton. When opened in 1892, the hotel had 370 suite-style rooms — some with bay windows — and public areas including “crystal chandeliers, a glittering ballroom, soaring arches, wrought-iron staircases and a broad lobby lined with multicolored marble from France, Italy and Vermont,” according to the Tribune.
Grover Cleveland — the 24th president of the United States — checked in before helping to open the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.
By 1976, though, the Tribune referred to the Lexington — renamed New Michigan Hotel around 1935 — as “picturesquely rundown.” Read more here.
‘It was Capone’s hotel, although he didn’t own it’
The Lexington had lost some of its luster by 1928, but gained its most infamous inhabitant. Capone, the head of organized crime in Chicago, moved his headquarters to the fourth and fifth floors.
Former hotel employees told the Tribune in 1962 that “Scarface” — not management — ran the place.
A barber chair, private kitchen and luxurious bathroom with a lavender tub, green wall tiles and gold fixtures were among the upgrades inside Capone’s own quarters, Room 530. It was rumored there were hidden tunnels, staircases and subterranean storage spaces accessible from his room. Read more here.
Capone’s final days, death in Florida and burial in Chicago — why we remember it 75 years later
Photo gallery: Capone — A life of crime
Who thought the Lexington’s basement could be full of Capone’s riches or rivals?
Harold Rubin — the “founder” of the concrete wall under the hotel’s vaulted Michigan Avenue sidewalk — had a colorful reputation. The proprietor of Weird Harold’s, an adult bookstore, massage parlor and nude modeling studio in the South Loop in the 1970s, Rubin was known as the “king of Chicago pornography.”
He scavenged marble from the Lexington after the residential hotel’s final 150 tenants — many on public assistance — were ordered to move out in October 1980. Read more here.
‘Capone’s old hangout may now be just a tomb’
If there were a paper trail to document when the fallacy that Capone buried his treasures in a subterranean level of the Lexington began, then the first page might be from the June 18, 1981, edition of the Chicago Tribune.
Almost five years before Rivera fired a machine gun on live TV, Edward Baumann and John O’Brien informed Tribune readers that a huge concrete slab under the Lexington Hotel “may be the tomb of some of Capone’s enemies.” Read more here.
‘Without his infamous name, we wouldn’t have gotten any attention’
Just as the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition brought the Lexington to life, the opportunity for Chicago to host another world’s fair — almost a century later — offered hope for the dilapidated Lexington. The building was bought for $500,000 in 1982, by the Sunbow Foundation, a nonprofit that trained women in construction skills.
Patricia J. Porter, Sunbow’s founder and executive director, publicly speculated that treasures belonging to Capone could be hidden behind the hotel’s walls — and began soliciting for donations to search for the loot. Read more here.
‘We’ll go in there and blast open the vault and see what’s there’
Doug Llewelyn — the court reporter for “The People’s Court” — thought the Lexington’s mysterious concrete wall could be an intriguing idea for a TV special. Instead of digging out the basement prior to air time, Llewelyn thought it might be more captivating if the excavation were done on live TV.
He and John Joslyn, who formed the Westgate Group together in 1980, decided to produce their first “docutainment” — a television special that combines aspects of a documentary with live entertainment — about the hotel basement with a Capone connection. The cost: about $1 million. Read more here.
‘I was the most famous unemployed person in America’
Llewelyn didn’t want to host the TV special. He thought a “big name” was needed.
Geraldo Rivera, formerly a correspondent with ABC News, was available. Read more here.
Disfigured cats, explosions and Mr. T — what happened behind the scenes during ‘The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults’
Thanks to a publicity blitz, more than 180 stations around the country aired “The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults,” making the show available to 94 percent of the population in the U.S.
Reporters and photographers packed into a small room inside the Lexington and watched the broadcast from TV monitors.
Joanie Bayhack, Rivera’s primary publicist, described the hotel’s basement as dark, creepy and a haven for wayward animals. Her colleague, Tom Potts, adopted a three-legged cat from the Lexington and named it Capone.
A representative of the Internal Revenue Service — which was still owed $800,000 by Capone — was there. Cook County medical examiner Dr. Robert Stein, who identified victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy and Flight 191 in 1979, was also on hand in case bodies were discovered.
Then, there was Mr. T. Read more here.
‘My God, the whole world is watching’
As the broadcast neared its end, Rivera remembered realizing that nothing else would be found and that the show could become “ammunition” for his former ABC News colleague Peter Jennings to potentially “demean me, or ridicule me for the rest of my life.”
The crew continued to dig for two more days, but didn’t find anything significant, Llewelyn told the Tribune. Read more here.
‘The show did very, very well’
What was found inside the Lexington? Ratings.
“The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults” recorded a 57.3 rating and a 73 share in Chicago, according to Nielsen data. The Bears’ Super Bowl victory — just three months prior — logged a 63.2 rating and 87 share. Both topped local TV ratings history.
WGN-TV Ch. 9 collected its highest non-sports rating in the station’s history.
“That means 1.7 million TV households in the Chicago area were having their pockets picked and loving every minute of the fleecing,” wrote Tribune media columnist Steve Daley on Oct. 7, 1986.
An estimated 5 million people in the WGN viewing area watched all or part of the show. That’s almost double the population of the city of Chicago at that time.
Rivera struck a deal in October 1986 to host his own talk show, which lasted 11 years.
For Llewelyn and Joslyn, the program opened the door for more docutainment stories — including ones about Adolph Hitler and Titanic that followed their formula for “Vaults.” Read more here.
The Lexington after ‘Al Capone’s Vaults’ — here’s what happened to it
In 1995, a judge declared the edifice “a public nuisance” and granted city attorneys’ request that it be torn down.
The Lex — a 296-unit apartment tower with a heated garage, sixth-floor fitness center, rooftop pool and hot tub, dog run and street-level stores — opened on the site in March 2012. Across Indiana Avenue from the Lex is Wintrust Arena, home to the Chicago Sky and DePaul University’s basketball teams, opened in 2017. Read more here.
So, where were Capone’s assets?
Capone’s vaults inside a decrepit Chicago hotel were embarrassingly empty in 1986. The real riches of the legendary boss of Chicago’s organized crime syndicate were located more than 2,000 miles west in northern California, quietly occupying the homes of his four granddaughters — Veronica, Diane, Barbara and Theresa.
Almost 75 years after the death of their grandfather, the three surviving sisters parted with these pieces during a 2021 auction. Read more here.
Growing up Capone: An interview with a granddaughter of the legendary Chicago Outfit boss
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