Geraldo’s Al Capone vault fiasco was actually the future of TV

Selling books in 2026 is a tough business — almost as tough as lugging a 140-pound safe to 2135 S. Michigan Avenue at 5 in the morning in Chicago. But that is what I found myself doing on April 21 — taking a squat hunk of steel out of the back of my SUV and carrying it to the sidewalk where I was to open it on the fortieth anniversary of Geraldo Rivera’s famous debacle forty years before.

My book — “Capones Vault: The Biggest Disaster in Television” — had just come out the week before. Chicago Media had been generous with a WGN television appearance and two WGN interviews on the radio, a full page in the Chicago Tribune, several interviews on talk radio and a Chicago Magazine interview.

In this second quarter of the twenty-first century this is incredible for an author. Writing has been eclipsed by movies, documentaries, sports … the list goes on and on. So, with all this media, why do I feel the need to wake up at four in the morning to open a safe on a cold street in Chicago, to simulate a broadcast deemed the biggest disaster in television? 

Because selling books is tough, and you have to do everything you can. That includes renting a safe from a movie prop company that neglected to tell me it weighed almost 150 pounds.

My strategy was to open my safe and lure in roving television crews looking for footage to commemorate the great Capone debacle of broadcast television.

Forty years earlier, a........

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