The Lexington Hotel, located at the corner of 22nd Street and Michigan Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, was the headquarters and nerve center of Al Capone’s bootlegging and organized crime empire. Behind the hotel’s innocent-looking closets of sheets and uniforms were secret doors to stairways leading to dozens of rooms, including the shooting gallery where Capone and his mobster cronies practiced their marksmanship. Other secret passages led to Capone’s own medicine cabinet and to taverns and brothels connected by hidden tunnels. Other tunnels led to hatches in the levee that provided escape routes for mobsters fleeing raids by police and rival gangs.
The Lexington Hotel was originally built in 1892 to a design by the architect Clinton Warren, who had also designed the Congress Hotel. The Lexington was hastily built of brick and terracotta, to accommodate the masses expected to visit Chicago for the World’s Fair of 1893. President Benjamin Harrison once delivered a speech from his balcony to a large audience on the street below. Al Capone moved into the Lexington in July 1928 and, officially registered as “George Phillips”, occupied the luxurious fifth-floor suite of rooms. Capone’s office overlooked Michigan Avenue.
In the lobby, armed gunmen in hotel uniforms closely guarded all the entrance doors, and other guards armed with machine guns patrolled the upper floors. From here he ran his extensive and lucrative illicit operations until October 1931 when he was escorted from the hotel to prison. The pinnacle of Al Capone’s success, and also the harbinger of his downfall, was the 1929 Valentine’s Day massacre, which effectively eliminated the last of Capone’s mobster competitors, but also drew the ire of the public and the federal government. (which Eliot Ness sent to the rescue) on his head.
It is said that Al Capone had some vaults in the lower levels of the Lexington Hotel where he had hidden his loot. These vaults were so well hidden that even Capone’s closest associates did not know where they were. In the 1980s, after Lexington’s glory days were long past, an all-female construction company considered restoring the Lexington Hotel. Investigators exploring the ruins of the dilapidated hotel found sealed rooms where Capone’s hidden fortune was supposedly resting.
In 1986, Geraldo Rivera, the well-known television talk show host, led a live national television audience to the location in his immaculate uniform shirt for a modern-day scavenger hunt. IRS agents were also in attendance in anticipation of his share of the loot. Rivera’s team surpassed 7,000 lbs. Concrete wall thought to be the secret stash of Capone’s fortune… but when the smoke cleared, only an old poster and some empty bottles were found. If there ever was a fortune there, it was long ago taken away.