When Geraldo Rivera cracked open Al Ca-pone's secret vault on live TV on April 27, 1986, America didn't know what to expect. Big Al's best silk boxers? His favorite baseball bat? An Eliot Ness dartboard? Anticipation was high, and Rivera, already renowned for theatrics as an ABC news reporter, played to the audience with trademark skill. Standing in the basement of Chicago's abandoned Lexington Hotel, once the notorious prohibition-era gangster's headquarters and site of the vault, Rivera breathlessly proclaimed, This mystery is going to be resolved! Then he blasted away with a Thompson submachine gun and blew down a chunk of wall using a gangster-style dynamite plunger.

But the payoff, alas, never came. After nearly two hours of frenzied buildup, with IRS agents and police crime-lab technicians standing by in case loot-or bodies-were unearthed, Rivera gathered his excavation crew around him, peered into the hole,and admitted to the folks at home that what he had turned up was pure dirt.

https://worldhistoryproject.org/1986/4/21/geraldo-rivera-opens-up-al-capones-safe-on-live-tv