“I was like ‘Wow! I had no idea,’” Maggie White says, her voice filled with mock wonder. When she tells me her version of Matt’s story, one tiny detail she adds is that Capone’s residency at the Briarcliff took place while the gangster was “in hiding.”

Maggie is one of the founders of Young Blood Boutique, a shop on North Highland that sells indie-made goods, but back in 1995, she was a student, studying sociology at Georgia State University. She and Matt lived a block from each other on Ponce and spent a lot of time on Maggie’s front porch at the corner of Penn Avenue, cracking each other up and watching johns from the suburbs pick up transvestite prostitutes on what was still a fairly wild corridor of the city. The Atlanta Eagle — the city’s oldest leather bar — isn’t far away. The Olde Spaghetti Factory was across the street, and the Department of Corrections’ Transitional Center is just across Argonne, past the Krispy Kreme. Maggie says Matt’s lies were always just normal enough to be believable.

“He loved a good tall tale,” she says, “and usually I was sharp enough to see through it.” Usually.

“I’ve passed that story on to two, three dozen people at least,” says Maggie, sitting on a couch in a well-appointed front room a couple blocks off Moreland Avenue. “And who knows how many people they’ve passed it along to.”

Monroe worked as a cook at Eats, but he also occasionally tended bar at the Local, today a hipster magnet standing across the street and a few doors down from the Clermont Hotel. If the Briarcliff Summit was an obvious setting for a fib about Capone while sitting down the street at the Righteous Room, the Clermont — with the famous strip club in its basement — was an even easier one from the front porch of the Local.

Opened in 1924 as an apartment building, the Clermont Motor Hotel would have had rooms on offer to Capone should he have dropped by. The building is a big brick box crowned with a triangular radio tower that glowers over Ponce. Junkies and exotic dancers stayed there alongside working class folks. The filthiest punk rocker in history, the late GG Allin, stayed there and wrote a song about it a few months before he OD’d and died in 1993. It’s the kind of place where one would expect to find an infamous gangster. And it was Capone’s supposed move into the Clermont that took this scrap of urban lore to the presses.

“The Clermont Hotel went up for sale [in 2012], and a couple news articles appeared about it,” says Doug Monroe, “and they included the sentence: ‘Urban lore has it that Al Capone once lived in the Clermont Hotel.’ And the Associated Press picked it up, and I found it on WSB’s website, and the Atlanta Business Chronicle had it. And my son was laughing about it because about 20 years earlier, he made the story up for fun.”

Doug is, of course, Matt Monroe’s dad. He’s written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and he’s former senior editor of Creative Loafing, Atlanta’s free weekly paper. He’s a contributor to Atlanta Magazine. He’s been writing about the South for a long time. As he tells me about these legitimate news outlets reprinting this tall tale his kid conjured up, he giggles with a fatherly mixture of glee and pride.

“I got very tickled by it,” Doug says. He tells me he’s been in the news industry his whole life, and he chuckles again, searching for words. “He just made it up as a prank,” he says, “and people have embellished it.”