Lowest Price Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster

This is a review for the book "Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured
America's Most Wanted Gangster" by Jonathan Eig published by Simon and Schuster
(2010).

As a biogrqaphy of Al Capone, this book is engrossing, as are at least two other Capone biographys that I have enjoyed:

"Capone" by John Kobler (1971) and "Mr. Capone" by Robert J. Schoenburg (1993).

Being a non-expert in Capone matters I only caught one mistake in this book and that is in a caption of a picture of Capone, father and son,at a inter- league charity exhibition game talking with Cub catcher Gabby Hartnet who is leaning over a brick wall at what is identified as Wrigley Field. In fact, Mr. Hartnet was wearing a Cub visitor's uniform and the wall is clearly part of Comiskey Park.

But I must applaud Mr. Eig for going after the legend of Elliot Ness and all
the fictional hoorah surrounding Ness and The Untouchables. Some of those stories
are sort of urban westerns, with about as much fact but plenty of good guys vs bad guys.

Otherwise it seems to me that Mr. Eig did a good job researching the facts of this book with one exception:

How could getting Al Capone on failure to pay income tax charges be a secret plot when his older brother, Ralph Capone, was convicted of the same crime a couple of years earlier?
Didn't Al Capone read any of Chicago's half dozen or so newspapers then? Was he that disconnected from his family's affairs?

Of course that isn't true, whatever the reason for Capone being convicted for
a relatively minor charge was not because he was unaware the federal government
was coming afer him. He and his advisors probably thought that he would have to pay a relatively small fine and do some light prison time at worst, if convicted.

So the title of this book is misleading at best. At worst, it's just another sensational attempt to sell books about a well worn, well covered topic, although many of us are always ready to hear tales of the twenties, even the Elliot Ness fictional kind.

So I have to reluctantly give this well written book a mere 3 and 1/2 stars,
the hype does not live up to the facts and there's really not much new here.Get more detail about Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster.