You're standing near where the Lexington Hotel once stood. This was Al Capone's headquarters from 1928 until his arrest in 1931. The building is gone now—demolished in 1995—but for three years, this was the most dangerous address in America.
Capone didn't just rent a room here. He owned the entire hotel. He had armed guards on every floor, a private elevator that only went to his suite, and he had a secret tunnel built that connected to the building across the street, so he could escape if the feds ever raided.
The tunnel was real. When they finally explored it in 1986 for a live Geraldo Rivera TV special, they found... nothing. Empty bottles. It was a two-hour special watched by 30 million people, and it was just an empty basement. Greatest anticlimax in television history.
He ran his empire from suite 530. Illegal alcohol, gambling, prostitution—he was making an estimated $100 million a year. In 1929 dollars. That's about $1.7 billion today.
The IRS eventually got him not for mur
der, not for bootlegging, but for tax evasion. He'd never filed a single return. The most powerful criminal in America was brought down by paperwork.
— From the tour: Bootleggers, Bullets & Baloney
