The American Bar Association conducted a retrial of Al Capone in 1991 with a real jury, and presided over by Chicago Federal District Court Judge Prentice Marshall, an outstanding jurist and professor of trial advocacy at the University of Illinois Law School. The verdict: "Not Guilty on all Counts!" All of the evidence presented in the retrial had been available at the original trial in 1931, yet that trial resulted in a guilty verdict for which Al Capone was sentenced to eleven years in prison. Among the things that came to light in the retrial was the utterly incompetent defense presented by Al Capone's lawyers in the original trial in 1931, as well as an interesting fact that the Federal Government tortured a witness until he agreed to testify against Capone. Okay, so he may not have been guilty of income tax evasion, but what about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and all the other alleged killings masterminded by Al Capone? The key word here is "alleged." It was never proved that Al was responsible for any killing. And we don't convict and sentence people to prison based purely on allegations. The fact of the matter is that Al Capone had a $50,000 price on his head (about one million dollars in today's money), placed there by rival gang leaders. In just one afternoon alone he dodged over 1,000 machine gun bullets. It happened while he was having lunch with his bodyguard in the Hawthorn Cafe in Cicero, Illinois. Seven cars pulled up in front of the restaurant and for several minutes about a dozen men fired their Tommy guns through the plate glass windows at them both. Al and his bodyguard dove to the floor and, amazingly, both survived without a scratch. Unfortunately some innocent people were wounded from the barrage of gunfire but Al came to their aid by paying their medical expenses even though neither Al nor his bodyguard fired a single shot. There were many other attempts by his enemies to kill him; including paying his chef to poison him, and a plot to blow up his house on a Sunday afternoon as he and his whole family were having dinner. In her book, Uncle Al Capone...The Untold Story From Inside His Family, Deirdre Marie Capone, Al's great niece and the only author of a book about Al Capone by someone who actually knew him, sets the record straight on who really was responsible for the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and reveals a side of the most notorious mobster in American history that the public has never seen. As the last person from Al's family born with the name Capone, Deirdre puts forth a persuasive case to justify her claim: "Al Capone was a mobster, but not a monster. He was a victim, not a villain." For more information visit www.unclealcapone.com or see a recent article on the book at: http://chicagoist.com/2012/02/08/al_capones_great-niece_wants_him_pa.php. ### TIP SHEET: Jonathon Eig, author of Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster: "A lot of people think Al Capone was a psychopath. A lot of people think Robert De Niro captured the true nature of America's most notorious gangster. A lot of people seem hell bent on clinging to a bunch of mythology that plain and simple makes no sense. A lot of people are fools. Deirdre Marie Capone is not one of them. With this lovely, personal, heartfelt story, she takes a stand. She's not nominating Capone for sainthood. She's not asking you to pardon him his crimes. She's simply and honestly telling the story she knows best--the story of her family. Do yourself a favor: read it. You'll be glad you did. And when you're done, you can judge Al Capone for yourself." Katerie Prior, ForeWord Reviews: "…Throughout the book, Capone tries to reconcile what she knows about her family with recorded history. Early in the book she writes, "I will not pretend to be able to paint a rosy picture of my uncle Al. I cannot make him out to be a perfect man, or even a good man. But what I want people to know is that he was a complex man. He was human and he had a heart." Capone succeeds, balancing both the public history of Al, from the Valentine's Day Massacre to his incarceration at Alcatraz, with personal photos, family recipes, and her own memories…It's not always an easy task as the author recounts losing friends, jobs, and other opportunities, once people learned she was a descendant of the notorious Al Capone… (it is) a memoir that is as complex and human as the man that it's about. It brings a fresh perspective to the other Al Capone biographies, and finally gives the larger-than-life gangster the one thing that may have eluded him in life: to be seen as simply a human being." Ascot Media Group, Inc. provides PR and Marketing Services for Authors and Publishers of books.