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

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... A Jewish mother of four, a gracious society hostess, a beloved member of her communityand the first widely renowned crime boss in America. Discover the true story from the bestselling author of The Confidence Men. In 1850, Fredericka Mandelbaum traveled to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a widow with four children, a fixture of high society, and an admired philanthropist. What had enabled a woman on the margins of American life to ascend from tenement poverty to immense wealth?In the intervening years, Marm Mandelbaum, as she was known, had become the countrys most notorious fencea receiver of stolen goodsand a successful criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (the equivalent of nearly $300 million in todays money) had passed through her modest haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side. Called the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York City by the New York Times, she planned, financed, and profited from robberies of cash, gold, diamonds, and silk throughout the city and across the United States.But Fredericka Mandelbaum wasnt just a successful She was a business visionaryone of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the formerly scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of New York's foremost bank robbers, housebreakers, and shoplifters, and neatly bribing anyone who stood in her way, she handled logistics and organized supply chainsturning theft into a viable, scalable business. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid image of Gilded Age New Yorka city teeming with delightful rogues, capitalist power brokers, and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all of whom straddled the line between underworld enterprise and the realm of legitimate commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable story of a once-famous, now-forgotten heroine, a tale that exemplifies the cherished rags-to-riches narrative of Victorian America while simultaneously upending it altogether.