The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum
The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
America’s first great organized-crime lord was a lady—a nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum.
“A tour de force . . . With a pickpocket’s finesse, Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York.”—Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood
In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?
In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime,” she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country.
But Mrs. Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful crook: She was a business visionary—one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business.
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid portrait of Gilded Age New York—a city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and “legitimate” commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies America’s cherished rags-to-riches narrative while simultaneously upending it entirely.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Fox (The Confidence Men) pieces together a captivating biography of Fredericka Mandelbaum (1825–1894), who oversaw one of America's first large-scale criminal enterprises. Characterizing Mandelbaum as a crook with a conscience whose "reputation honesty in criminal matters was absolute," Fox showcases how her skyrocketing success over several decades—which eventually propelled her into the highest echelons of New York society—was due to her careful masterminding of complex heists, talent for bribery, cultivation of loyalty among her associates, and innovation in the business of property crime, which Fox says Mandelbaum elevated from a scattershot local operation to a national network. Beginning with a stable of mostly female shoplifters, Mandelbaum, who worked behind the scenes as a fence for the stolen goods, expanded her operation to include home burglaries and bank robberies. Her greatest caper was the 1869 burglary of New York City's Ocean National Bank ("a canonical example of the bank burglar's art"), which netted $800,000 and required monthslong planning: a shell company rented an office below the bank, where a team of thieves invented new tools to cut through the cement ceiling. In the 1870s, Pinkerton private detectives began investigating property crimes on behalf of wealthy clients who distrusted corrupt police; Mandelbaum was arrested in 1884, but escaped to Canada before her trial. Fox's detailed descriptions of intricate heists make for a transfixing tale. Readers will be swept up.
Customer Reviews
Interesting period piece
Who knew this was going on in lower Manhattan whilst the bluebloods (see “the gilded age”) were just about to move uptown. I just read “ the first tycoon” and this was a good addition to info about that era. And to think slavery was going on in the south not much earlier. We are a young country.
Windy!
It was fascinating at times, but oh way way too long, and whoever heard of a book with 300 pages of notes! I enjoyed most the stories about New York City police corruption, and boss Tweed. I frankly got tired of all of the references to diamonds, silk and lace.