5 Things You Didn't Know About Al Capone

If you think you know about Al Capone based on his depiction in movies like The Untouchables, think again.

Jonathan Eig, the author of Get Capone, a nonfiction book that uses new interviews and IRS files to dispel the myths surrounding the legendary gangster, discussed Capone's ascent to power on April 25 at the . The New York Times best-selling author also discussed the many misconceptions pop culture has perpetrated about Capone, including the tax evasion charge that the government used to take him down.

Here are five things about Capone you never knew, or thought you did.

1. Capone's scars come from a bar fight that almost killed him.

Before moving to Chicago, Capone hit on a girl at a bar in Brooklyn. The girl's brother didn't like it and came at him with a knife aimed for the neck.

"If I hadn't been so drunk, I would have hit him in the neck and not the cheek and killed him," the man told Eig, who added, "and my book would have been 12 pages long, end of story."

2. The baseball bat scene from The Untouchable's never happened.

When Capone rose to power as Chicago's number one criminal, he was careful to distance himself from the money and violence he orchestrated. He ordered hits, but never performed them himself, and kept his name off of all the money that came in.

It was this sort of savvy that made it so hard for Herbert Hoover and J. Edgar Hoover to build a case against him.

3. Capone was "almost certainly" not responsible for the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.

Many believe Capone ordered the hit on the Moran gang on Feb. 14, 1929 that left seven men gunned down in a garage. Though the gang was a Capone rival, Eig doesn't believe the hit was Capone's style. For starters, the gang's leader, Bugs Moran, was not there.

"Capone never operated like that," Eig said. "Capone took out the top man, he did it precisely."

Eig's theory is that a cop's son was killed by the Gusenberg boys, who were members of the Moran gang. So the police set the gang up, offering to help them rob another gang's payroll. Instead, Eig said, "they went in there they wiped out everybody in sight."

"To kill seven people in a garage, you've got to be fired up about something," said Eig.

4. "Capone never heard of Eliot Ness."

The man put in charge of taking down Capone was not Eliot Ness, a very low level Prohibition agent who got his job through nepotism. President Herbert Hoover appointed George E.Q. Johnson to lead the case against Capone.

5. Even the tax evasion charge wasn't solid enough to get Capone.

Johnson and his men had so much trouble building a case against Capone that they were originally prepared to offer him a plea deal where he would go to jail for two years, because they thought if it went to trial they could lose.

"He touched nothing," Eig said of Capone's dealing with money. "The government could not make a case against this guy."

Everyone signed off on the plea deal, including Capone -- but the judge refused to accept it and the case went to trial.

"The trial is just shocking, how many violations there are of standard procedure," Eig said. 

Capone received 11 years for income tax evasion at a time when no one in the country had received more than three or four years. He got out early for good behavior and retired to Florida, where he died eight years later.

Want to find our more about Al Capone? See the photo gallery above.