The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum

The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

    • 3.7 • 39 Ratings
    • $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.

GENRE
Nonfiction
RELEASED
2024
July 2
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
336
Pages
PUBLISHER
Random House Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
40.7
MB

Customer Reviews

Tom Hay in Boulder ,

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.

YBqueen ,

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.

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