Geraldo Rivera turned 83 this past August, and he’s still telling the story of the empty vault.
The former television journalist published a column this week in Long Island Press marking 40 years since what he calls the most humiliating and paradoxically career-defining night of his professional life: the April 1986 live television special built around opening Al Capone’s secret vault at Chicago’s Lexington Hotel, a Prohibition-era gangster landmark on the South Side that had been shuttered for years.
The vault was empty. Rivera drank tequila for hours at a nearby Mexican restaurant. He woke up the next morning to learn the special had outscored the Super Bowl in the ratings.
That trajectory, from fired network man adrift on a sailboat to accidental television phenomenon, is exactly the kind of career story that resists easy summary, and Rivera doesn’t try to simplify it.
He starts in January 1986, aboard his sailboat New Wave, somewhere in the Panama Canal during what was supposed to be a solo circumnavigation. Rivera had just been fired from ABC News after 15 years, the casualty of a very public editorial fight with Roone Arledge, president of both ABC News and Sports, who Rivera calls “a creative genius” and his long-term friend and mentor. The dispute centered on a story Rivera’s colleague Sylvia Chase was reporting for 20/20 about alleged relationships between Marilyn Monroe and both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Arledge killed the story. Rivera thought he knew why: Arledge had a longstanding friendship with Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s widow. The disagreement leaked to People Magazine. Rivera was out within minutes of the item hitting newsstands.
So there he was. Sailing through the Panama Canal with a crew that included his brother Craig, heading for Los Angeles and eventually Hawaii, a man the column describes as “among the most famous unemployed people in America.” Then came the message from the Tribune Company in Chicago.
Tribune owned newspapers and local television stations across the country and had secured rights to open a recently discovered vault in the basement of the Lexington Hotel. Capone had controlled the property during Prohibition. The vault was rumored to hold cash, gold, weapons, and possibly the skeletal remains of gangsters buried behind its thick cement walls. Tribune wanted to open it live on television. Rivera, anxious for legitimate work of any kind, accepted. Craig and the remaining crew took New Wave onward to Los Angeles, where Rivera planned to rejoin them after the special aired.
Nothing was in the vault. Not cash. Not weapons. No bones.
Rivera says he spent several hours that night drowning his sorrows in tequila before going into hiding. When he surfaced the next morning, messages were stacked and waiting. The special had beaten the Super Bowl.
The column doesn’t inflate the event’s cultural legacy. Rivera writes with the flat acknowledgment of a man who has had four decades to think about what the Capone special actually meant: not a journalistic achievement, not a proud career moment, but proof that television audiences will watch anything if you build enough anticipation around a locked door. He was the right man at the right moment, freshly unemployed, already famous, willing to stake what remained of his reputation on a stunt that could have finished him entirely.
It almost did. The empty vault became a national punchline, and Rivera’s name was attached to it for years as shorthand for television excess. What the mockery missed was the number. A special that outdraws the Super Bowl doesn’t happen because the host is a fool. It happens because the host understood something about live television and suspense that the rest of the industry was still learning.
The Lexington Hotel itself has a documented history with the Chicago History Museum and city preservation records, a building that stood as a genuine artifact of the Capone era before its eventual demolition in 1995. Whatever was or wasn’t behind that vault, the address was real, the history was real, and the audience knew it.
Rivera’s column doesn’t claim the night was good television in the traditional sense. He’s more honest than that. What he claims, with the authority of someone who has now watched the story circulate for 40 years, is that it worked. Brother Craig sailed New Wave to Los Angeles. Rivera flew in from Chicago, probably still slightly hungover, with a television career that had just been reborn in the most improbable way possible, inside an empty room in a dead gangster’s hotel.