“The aim of the department store…was to foment desire,” Margalit Fox writes in The Talented Mrs. Mandlebaum, creating an “epidemic of longing” fueled by advertisements. The American housewife not only longed for a showplace home, it was socially required. But how could a middle class income support such a lifestyle?
Criminals stole goods and fenced them, and then they were sold at discount. The public was happy, and the criminal organization was very happy.
One of the most successful criminal operations was run by Mrs. Fredericka Mandelbaum in whose drawing room could be found the wealthy and priviledged class. She was a remarkable woman, beloved by her family, a philanthropist, involved in her synagogue; a successful business woman and crime boss with a loyal cadre of thieves who called her ‘Marm’–mother.
Margalit Fox takes readers deep into Marm Mandelbaum’s life and world, from her specially designed shopfront with hidden rooms for stolen goods to her luxurious black silk dresses dripping with diamonds. It took decades, but the Pinkertons finally introduced a mole into her operation to get evidence of wrongdoing. Then, she fled and lived for decades in Canada!
A large, imposing woman, characterized in cartoons and newspaper illustrations with grotesque Jewish characteristics, her intelligence must have been remarkable. As a German immigrant in the late 19th c. her options for providing for her family was limited. But I can imagine that had she been a man, she could have been anything–perhaps a tycoon of industry, a Pinkerton detective, or a political boss.
True crime lovers will relish this biography of a forgotten, once infamous, crime boss.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book.
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss
by Margalit Fox
Pub Date July 2, 2024
Random House
ISBN: 9780593243855
from the publisher
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.
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