Hotel Lexington reveals Al Capone’s secrets
The Lexington Hotel, located at the corner of 22nd St. and Michigan Avenue on Chicago’s south side, was the headquarters and nerve center of Al Capone’s smuggling and organized crime empire. Behind the innocent-looking wardrobes of sheets and hotel uniforms were secret doors that led to stairs that led to dozens of rooms, like the shooting gallery where Capone and his gangster cronies practiced their marksmanship. Other secret passages led to Capone’s own medicine cabinet and taverns and brothels connected to each other by hidden tunnels. Other tunnels led to hatches in the levee that provided escape routes for mobsters fleeing raids by rival police and gangs.
The Lexington Hotel was originally built in 1892 to the design of architect Clinton Warren, who had also designed the Congress Hotel. The Lexington was hastily built out of brick and terra cotta, to accommodate the masses who were expected to visit Chicago for the World’s Fair of 1893. President Benjamin Harrison once delivered a speech from the balcony to a large audience on the street below. Al Capone moved to the Lexington in July 1928 and, officially registered as “George Phillips,” occupied the luxurious suite of rooms on the fifth floor. Capone’s office had a view of Michigan Avenue.
In the lobby, armed men in hotel uniforms were vigilantly guarding all entrance doors and other guards armed with machine guns patrolled the upper floors. From here he directed his illicit operations, very profitable and distant, until October 1931, when he was escorted from the hotel to the prison. The pinnacle of Al Capone’s success, and also the harbinger of his downfall, was the 1929 Valentine’s Day massacre, which wiped out the last of Capone’s gangster competitors, but also drew the ire of the public and the federal government. (sent by Eliot Ness to the rescue) headfirst.
Al Capone allegedly 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, a women’s construction company considered restoring the Lexington Hotel. Investigators exploring the hotel’s ruins located sealed rooms where Capone’s hidden fortune allegedly rested.
In 1986, Geraldo Rivera, the well-known television show host, brought a live national television audience to the venue in his impeccable shirt uniform for a modern day scavenger hunt. IRS agents were also present in anticipation of their share of the loot. Rivera’s crew wiped out 7,000 pounds. concrete wall thought to be the secret hideout of Capone’s fortune … but when the smoke cleared, only an old sign and a few empty bottles were found. If ever there was a fortune there, it had long since been taken away.