Harmless as a Puppydog : MR. CAPONE: The Real--and Complete--Story of Al Capone, <i> By Robert J. Schoenberg (William Morrow & Co.: $23; 365 pp.)</i>

This is a different Al Capone--chummy, sentimental, philosophical, the kind of fellow you’d invite over for Sunday brunch to talk boxing and baseball.

Author Robert J. Schoenberg acknowledges in a new macro-biography, reverently titled “Mr. Capone,” that “the Big Guy” (the favorite sobriquet among the Chicago gang) usually liked to sit home nights in his robe, play board games with his little boy Sonny and listen to opera on the gramophone.

Jule Styne, who wrote “Three Coins in the Fountain” and multitudinous pop tunes, recollects how Capone hired his band during a week of party-party at the Palm Island estate in Florida to commemorate the second Tunney-Dempsey fight in the mid-1920s. Capone loved George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and “shyly” asked Styne if he could direct it.

Styne says the tempo was shaky, “but all his life it must have been something he had wanted to do and by the end of the number he had tears in his eyes.” (Capone tipped the band players each $100 and Styne $1,000.)

This revisionist image may come as a shocker, since for pure evil Capone has always been celebrated up there with Attila, Adolf Hitler and the Bad Boys from the Detroit Pistons.

Schoenberg has done massive research, so much that his 365 pages of story comes with 94 more pages of attributions. There are rich descriptions of many of the apocalyptic events of the roaring Chicago ‘20s. Schoenberg seems possessed, trying to separate the facts from the legends--at least those facts that can be determined as facts after this expanse of time. He makes a solid indictment of Capone’s lawyers for slovenly representation during the battles with the tax men. (A group of legal scholars, whom Schoenberg interviewed, put on a mock trial of Capone in 1990 using evidence from the 1931 case. In the original case, Capone was given an 11-year sentence on tax charges; in the later trial, he was acquitted.)

The fascination with Capone hasn’t abated, and may never. Film producer Roger Corman, who knows about Chicago fireworks (he made “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre”), will start shooting there in November on “Dillinger and Capone,” and Paramount Studios is readying a new incarnation of “The Untouchables” television series. Of course, in the grand Hollywood tradition, these will stretch history to fit the dramatic form--no facts required.

This book invigorates our visions of the thugs: Bugs Moran, in whose honor the St. Valentine’s Massacre was held (he didn’t show up), was “big, meaty, slow moving and slow thinking.” Hymie Weiss, once Earl Wojciechowski, chief psycho for the rival Deany O’Banion gang, took an oddly Jewish-sounding name, Schoenberg says, “for a convinced Catholic who wore a crucifix and often used a rosary as worry beads.” We begin to understand why Capone’s “business manager,” the pimp Jack Guzik, has been so widely detested (his onetime driver, George Meyer, still alive, remembers Guzik’s incredible BO).

One reporter found Capone “intelligent, happy-go-lucky, affable . . . (with) a dark, kindly face, sparkling eyes . . . harmless as a big St. Bernard dog.” Another found his eyes “ice-gray” and “ice-cold”; they projected a menace like “the stirring of a tiger.”

Schoenberg falls in love, as many fervent reporters do, with an awful lot of his information, and at times it seems as if you’re wearing overshoes and stomping through heaping drifts of detail.

Likewise, the author makes several assertions that you could fight him on. He is disdainful of the federal investigators credited with dethroning the Big Guy (yes, publicity hound Eliot Ness, too) and boldly asserts that the feds were never, ever under any actual threat from the cautious Capone mob.

Wow. Schoenberg seems inordinately generous in such assessments. His fondness for the Big Guy overtakes his book. “In Chicago the standard apology held that gangsters only killed each other,” he writes, buying into a most ridiculous logic. “Certainly Capone never killed or ordered killed anyone whose absence impoverished the world.”

Later he finds quotes from Capone admitting “preemptive strikes” and insisting that “the law of self defense, the way God looks at it, is a little broader than the law books have it.” Capone explained, “Maybe it means killing a man in defense of your business--the way you make the money to take care of your wife and child.”

The author omits a lot of telling testimony, for example District Attorney George E. Q. Johnson’s rousing response to defense claims that Capone was a great human being, a benefactor of the down-and-out, a veritable Robin Hood. In his closing argument, which is missing here, Johnson scoffed: “Was it Robin Hood who bought $8,000 worth of diamond belt buckles to give to the unemployed? (These were gifts for his cohorts.) Was it Robin Hood who bought a meat bill of $6,500?. . . . It went to the home on Palm Island . . . where there was poker. Did he buy these $27 shirts to protect the shivering men who sleep under Wacker Drive at night?”

The reader is struck by the wonderful similarities between the foppishly dressed Capone (he wore a different flashy ensemble every one of his 11 days on trial) and today’s dapper Mafia boss John Gotti. Both were tough and brutal. (With Gotti under a heavy sentence, perhaps he can be put in the past tense.) Both had loyal constituencies despite their deadly deeds. Both flaunted their boldness and invited celebrity. (Crime watchers theorize that syndicate leaders have always despised the glare of publicity that these men have brought on the brethren.)

And both men felt that they were being mightily hounded by the Federals. Before his trial in 1931, Capone grumbled, “Why don’t they go after these bankers who took the savings of thousands of poor people and lost them in bank failures? Isn’t it lots worse to take the last few dollars some small family has saved . . . than to sell a little beer?”

Well, there are a lot of savings & loan and banking executives mighty free today, and a lot of people are poorer for their failures. Maybe Al had a point.