Capone’s Vault

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the broadcast, an inside look at the historic televised reveal of Al Capone’s vaults that would define Geraldo Rivera’s career and change television forever.

In 1986, more people watched The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults than either the Super Bowl or David Frost’s interview with Richard Nixon. It was a high-wire, high-reward, high-disaster broadcast that was meant to be a comeback for journalist Geraldo Rivera, who had been fired from ABC after fifteen years. On April 21,1986, at 9:15pm Eastern, Geraldo gave the signal at the midpoint of the broadcast to blow open with dynamite the subterranean vaults of the Lexington Hotel, ready to reveal to thirty million viewers at home the great secrets and treasures of legendary gangster Al Capone—but the live broadcast didn’t go to plan.

In Capone’s Vault: The Real Story of the Biggest Disaster in Television History, William Elliott Hazelgrove weaves together the stories of Geraldo Rivera’s career and the history of Al Capone, leading to the development of the infamous The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults broadcast. These stories merge on the night of the show with a play-by-play recalling of the disastrous two-hour program and its aftermath. The broadcast was a simple bet that Geraldo Rivera would open a vault in the basement of a nineteenth-century hotel and show the world something from Al Capone, but it would instead reveal basic truths about television that persist today. This is a wild and captivating true story for readers both new to the mystery and for those ready to relive what would be a crazy night that has defined live television for forty years.