The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

by Margalit Fox

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593243855
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	16,632
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Margalit Fox originally trained as a cellist and a linguist before pursuing journalism. As a senior writer in The New York Times’s Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. Winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of four previous nonfiction books, The Confidence Men, Conan Doyle for the Defense, The Riddle of the Labyrinth and Talking Hands, Fox lives in Manhattan with her husband.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

“The Mere Privilege of Breath”

She came here with nothing.

One of seven children of Samuel Abraham Weisner and the former Rahel Lea Solling, Fredericka Henriette Auguste Weisner was born on March 28, 1825, in Kassel, in what is now central Germany. Her family, which appears to have included itinerant peddlers, had been part of the region’s Jewish community—numbering fourteen to fifteen thousand in a population of just over half a million—for several generations.

Jewish life there was far from easy. Restrictive laws in many German states of the period governed what trades Jews could ply and where they could live, which by extension restricted whom they could marry. Physical violence against Jews by their Gentile neighbors was not unknown: Jews sometimes paid protection money to keep themselves and their families safe.

“Jews occupied a distinct and inferior status,” a twentieth-century history has noted. “Except for a tiny, wealthy elite who had gained the special favor of Christian rulers or aristocrats, the Jewish people of Central Europe remained what their ancestors had been for centuries past: traditional, pious, generally poor Dorfjuden—village Jews. . . . With agriculture, most guild-based crafts, and other more secure and lucrative occupations traditionally forbidden to them, Central European Jews overwhelmingly earned their often meagre livelihoods as minor traders, small-scale moneylenders, or petty artisans in such crafts as tailoring.”

As a girl, Fredericka would have had a basic education in reading, writing and arithmetic, taught either at home or at a local Jewish elementary school. She would also have received training, standard for Jewish girls of the day, in childcare and domestic arts, which typically included sewing, spinning, knitting, lacemaking, laundering and cooking. “Whatever the precise circumstances,” the historian Rona L. Holub has written, “she developed a keen intellect, a strong work ethic, and confidence in her own abilities.”

In 1848, Fredericka married Wolf Israel Mandelbaum, an itinerant peddler a few years her senior. Wolf, possibly with Fredericka helping him, spent days on the road each week, peddling in the countryside before returning home in time for the start of the Sabbath on Friday nights. Whether gained from direct experience or simply from knowledge of her husband’s trade, Mrs. Mandelbaum’s understanding of the mechanics of salesmanship would greatly abet her career in the criminal underworld.

The birth, in 1849, of the Mandelbaums’ first child, Breine (also known as Bertha or Bessy), would have further strained their precarious finances: The region was in the midst of an economic depression and was affected by a potato blight. In 1850, the Mandelbaums joined the thousands of European Jews who had emigrated to America in search of economic opportunity: “Das Dollarland,” some Germans called the United States. Wolf left first, traveling overland to Amsterdam, where he embarked on the Baltimore, arriving in New York in July 1850. After traveling to Bremen with baby Bertha, Fredericka boarded the bark Erie.

The Atlantic crossing, a voyage of six weeks or longer under sail, was rigorous enough for the first-class passengers, who paid roughly $140 U.S. for cabin accommodations. Mrs. Mandelbaum traveled in steerage, paying twenty dollars to live below deck, crammed together in a low-ceilinged, badly ventilated space with scores of other immigrants, an arrangement that made spectacularly good business for owners of the shipping lines. Steerage passengers would have been supplied with only meager food and narrow wooden bunks in which to sleep—structures that Herman Melville, writing in 1849, described as comprising “three tiers, one above another . . . rapidly knocked together with coarse planks.” He added: “They looked more like dog-kennels than any thing else.”

In September 1850, Fredericka disembarked in the Port of New York. At the time, “New York City” denoted a far more modest entity than it would even half a century later: It comprised only Manhattan, with a population of just over half a million. The city, which had been expanding slowly northward since colonial times, had by 1850 advanced only about three miles from Manhattan’s southern tip. Most of the population lived below Fourteenth Street; above, the island remained partly pastoral.

From Fourteenth Street down to the Battery, the city teemed. The sidewalks teemed with pedestrians; the streets teemed with pushcarts and a tangle of horse-drawn vehicles—wagons, carriages, streetcars, omnibuses, hearses—the harbor teemed with ships and barges. On the Lower East Side, where the Mandelbaums settled, congestion was especially fierce, with slum tenements crammed alongside industrial buildings like factories, foundries and slaughterhouses. And while few immigrants, if any, believed the folk saying that New World streets were paved with gold, they were almost certainly unprepared for streets filled with ordure: garbage and manure lying uncollected, snapped at by bands of roaming pigs; sewage overflowing; horses, dead of overwork, lying where they fell, their rotting carcasses swarming with flies. As Charles Dickens observed dryly after an 1842 visit to America, New York was “by no means so clean a city as Boston.”

Let Dickens recount his tour of Five Points, the Lower East Side quarter that a modern history calls “the world’s most notorious slum.” Touring the neighborhood (an excursion he felt it necessary to make in the company of two policemen), he recoiled in bourgeois Victorian horror. In modern parlance, he was slumming, his visit of a piece with the voyeuristic tours of the district that well-off New Yorkers had begun making in the 1830s, and which became even more popular after Dickens’s account of his outing appeared in print. But while Dickens was clearly discomforted by the neighborhood’s myriad houses of prostitution—and by the lively social mixing of its white and African American residents—the poverty he described was real enough:

This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. . . . Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. . . .

What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies beyond this tottering flight of steps, that creak beneath our tread?—a miserable room, lighted by one dim candle, and destitute of all comfort, save that which may be hidden in a wretched bed. . . .

Here too are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep, underground chambers, where they dance and game . . . ruined houses, open to the street, whence, through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show: hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder: all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.

The Mandelbaums found lodgings in Kleindeutschland (“Little Germany”), an immigrant enclave on the Lower East Side covering about a square mile and eventually spanning the city’s Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth and Seventeenth wards. The couple lived at various addresses during their first decade and a half in the city—including 383 East Eighth Street, on a tenement block between Avenues C and D in the Eleventh Ward, and 141 East Sixth Street, near the Bowery in the Seventeenth—before settling permanently in the Thirteenth Ward in the mid-1860s.

In the tenements—dark, flimsy, badly ventilated structures—twenty families or more might occupy a single small apartment house. There was no running water: Residents hauled water up the stairs from pumps in the streets and relieved themselves in shabby, back-alley wooden privies. “The most modern and sophisticated” of the city’s plumbing facilities, a historian explains, “connected the outdoor toilets directly to sewer lines, flushing sewage directly and immediately away from the tenement yard. But . . . in 1857, only one-quarter of the city had sewer lines. . . . Raw sewage thus often sat festering in the backyards of the tenements for weeks or months at a time.”

Amid the crowded, unsanitary conditions, diseases like consumption, typhoid, dysentery, diphtheria and scarlet fever were rampant. Among immigrant families, infant and childhood mortality rates were especially high. And indeed, in haunting absence, little Bertha Mandelbaum’s name is missing from census records of the period: It is likely that she succumbed to one such disease.

For all its privations, Kleindeutschland—the first of the country’s large foreign-language settlements—offered much succor. “German New York was the third capital of the German-speaking world,” a historian has written. “Only Vienna and Berlin had larger German populations than New York City between 1855 and 1880. When the German Empire was created in 1871, the single New York city neighborhood of Kleindeutschland . . . would have been the empire’s fifth-largest city.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/20/2024

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. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Exuberant . . . fast-paced. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum’ serves up a platonic ideal of the criminal mastermind.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A vivid portrait of Mandelbaum in this rich recounting of her life and times. . . relishes Mandelbaum’s chutzpah while describing in forensic detail how an early American crime boss grew her business. A portrait of a woman who, before the term had even been invented, smashed through glass ceilings to get what she wanted.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Before Al Capone, there was Fredericka Mandelbaum . . . a scrupulously researched narrative.”—The New York Times

“Fox excels at telling a story that is rich in historical detail. . . When Fredericka Mandelbaum was buried, ‘it was reported afterward, some mourners deftly picked the pocket of others. Whether they did so in tribute to their fallen leader or simply from occupational reflex is unrecorded.’ A fitting end to a fascinating life.”—The Washington Post

“Her literal rags-to-riches story is presented with depth in this spectacular true story of ingenuity, business acumen and brazen criminality.”—Bloomberg

“A fun and fascinating read that blends history and heist.”—The Boston Globe

“Entrancing.”—The New York Post

“A transfixing tale. Readers will be swept up.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Fox succeeds in rescuing a once-notorious public figure from historical obscurity. An engrossing portrait of an unlikely criminal mastermind.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A genuinely fresh story of American crime and culture.”—BookPage​

“The astonishing story of this woman who wasn’t just a criminal mastermind, but a surprisingly successful entrepreneur – albeit in the unconventional field of stolen goods… captivating.”—Jewish Business News

“Very entertaining. It’s a trib­ute to Fox’s sto­ry­telling tal­ents that this unique and mys­te­ri­ous woman has come to life.”—Jewish Business Council

“A tour de force . . . With a pickpocket’s finesse, Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York. The portrait of Marm Mandelbaum is irresistible: In Fox’s lush prose, you can feel the softness of the silk and see the brilliance of the diamonds she amasses and profitably passes on. This book is pitch perfect.”—Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood

“Mandelbaum was not only a schemer but a dreamer, who saw running a crime ring as the rare way a woman could get ahead in a ruthless metropolis. This book is so full of twists, it makes you want to break out the popcorn.”—Rachel Syme, staff writer at The New Yorker

“A true-crime saga from America’s golden era of graft and grift that reads like the prequel to Oceans 11.”—Daniel Schulman, author of The Money Kings

“Who but Margalit Fox could have come up with this delicious Gilded Age tale of Marm Mandelbaum, a diamond-laden Jewish mother who ran America’s biggest crime syndicate, and her decades-long battle of wits with those trying to bring her down?”—Lynne Olson, author of Empress of the Nile

“Fox constructs a heist of her own in this richly detailed, captivating portrait of a penniless woman who rises to the ranks of criminal mastermind.”—Graham Moore, Academy Award–winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game and author of The Last Days of Night

From the Publisher

This relatively brief audiobook chronicles one of New York City's most colorful and flagrant criminals. German Jewish immigrant Fredericka Mandelbaum rose to shadowy eminence after the Civil War. Six feet tall, stout, and supremely wily, "Marm" Mandelbaum operated out of a store whose stock consisted mainly of stolen goods. Narrator Saskia Maarleveld keeps to a steady pace throughout a narrative that falls a little short on biographical information and fills in the gaps with background. The history of the Pinkerton agency, the evolution of modern crime-fighting methods, the rise of a leisure class in New York City are all fascinating but hardly fresh research. Maarleveld, happily, is a spirited narrator who holds the story together and keeps it moving, however wide its leaps. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

JULY 2024 - AudioFile

2024-04-20
A biography of "the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime" in late-19th-century New York City.

Fredericka "Mother" Mandelbaum (1825-1894) and her family worked as “itinerate peddlers” in central Germany before emigrating to the U.S. in 1850, settling into a community of fellow German Jews on the Lower East Side of New York. Mandelbaum found her calling as a "criminal receiver," a fence for stolen goods, systemizing property crime in what developed into a lucrative business. At the time, professional crime was proliferating due to the advent of easily transferable "greenbacks," paper money, in the 1860s. Mandelbaum was seen as an upstanding member of the community, a generous donor to her synagogue, who hosted many a corrupt police officer and Tammany Hall official at her glamorous dinner parties. She was soon seeding the money needed for sophisticated bank heists. Fox, the author of The Confidence Men, describes the Mandelbaum-sponsored 1869 robbery of Ocean National Bank at length. Entrapped and arrested for trading in stolen silk, Mandelbaum jumped bail and escaped to Canada. Because there was no extradition treaty between Canada and the U.S., she evaded prison, though she considered expatriation "a kind of living death." Throughout this extraordinary life story, Fox explores larger issues of how organized crime grew during the Gilded Age of municipal corruption and stark inequality. The author shows how Mandelbaum “was marginalized three times over: immi­grant, woman and Jew,” but nevertheless became New York's first female crime boss by having the right skill set as criminal professionalism blossomed. Renowned for both her "motherliness" and business acumen, Mandelbaum headed what became the "de facto Ladies' Auxiliary of Tammany Hall.” A former accomplished writer of in-depth obituaries for the New York Times, Fox succeeds in rescuing a once-notorious public figure from historical obscurity.

An engrossing portrait of an unlikely criminal mastermind.

Kirkus Reviews