The Lexington Resort, situated on the corner of 22nd St. and Michigan Avenue on Chicago’s South Aspect, was the headquarters and nerve center of Al Capone’s bootlegging and racketeering empire. Guiding the harmless-wanting closets of sheets and hotel uniforms were being mystery doorways to stairways leading to dozens of rooms, this kind of as the taking pictures gallery where Capone and his gangster cronies practiced their purpose. Other mystery passageways led to Capone’s very own drugs chest, and to taverns and bordellos linked to a person yet another by hidden tunnels. Other tunnels led to hatches on the Levee which provided routes of escape for mobsters fleeing from raids by police and rival gangs.
The Lexington Resort was at first created in 1892 with design by architect Clinton Warren, who experienced also designed the Congress Lodge. The Lexington was fairly rapidly built of brick and terra-cotta, in purchase to accommodate the masses predicted to arrive go to Chicago for the World’s Honest in 1893. President Benjamin Harrison after gave an tackle from the balcony to a substantial audience in the street beneath. Al Capone moved into the Lexington in July, 1928 and, registered officially as “George Phillips”, he occupied the high-class 5th floor suite of rooms. Capone’s office environment had a look at of Michigan Avenue.
In the lobby an armed gunmen in a hotel uniform cautiously watched all the entrance doorways, and other guards armed with machine guns patrolled the floors previously mentioned. From listed here he directed his far-flung and really financially rewarding illicit functions till Oct, 1931 when he was escorted from the resort to prison. The pinnacle of Al Capone’s achievement – and also the harbinger of his downfall, was the St. Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, which successfully wiped out the previous of Capone’s gangster competitors, but also brought the wrath of the general public and federal government (who sent Eliot Ness to the rescue) down on his head.
Al Capone reputedly experienced some vaults on the lowest stages of Lexington Hotel where by he experienced stashed his loot away. These vaults had been so effectively-hidden that even Capone’s nearest associates failed to know in which they were being. In the 1980’s, just after the Lexington’s glory times have been lengthy since earlier, a woman’s design business appeared into the chance of restoring the Lexington Resort. Researchers checking out the crumbling ruins of the resort situated sealed rooms the place the hidden Capone fortune seemingly reposed.
In 1986 Geraldo Rivera, the well-identified Television set chat display host, took a stay countrywide Tv audience to the spot in his immaculate shirt uniform for a fashionable-working day treasure hunt. IRS agents were being also in attendance in anticipation of their share of the loot. Rivera’s crew blasted by way of the 7,000 lb. concrete wall which was thought to be the mystery hiding spot of Capone’s fortune … but when the smoke cleared, only an aged indication and a several empty bottles were being located. If there experienced when been a fortune there, it experienced long due to the fact been taken away.
