Title: The Story of a Gilded Age Jewish Crime Boss (Women Behaving Badly) [theme music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In Gilded Age New York, where theft and corruption ran rampant, one mob boss stood apart from the rest, literally. I'm talking about a six-foot-tall, Jewish woman named Fredericka Mandelbaum. Mrs. Mandelbaum, or "Marm" as she was sometimes known, came to New York from Germany in 1850. It didn't take her long to establish a reputation as a reliable fence for stolen goods and later, as an organizer of high-stakes bank heists.

By her death in 1894, she was worth at least $500 million, equivalent to many millions in today's currency. And she managed to accumulate all of that wealth as an immigrant and as a Jewish woman operating in 19th-century New York City. So what if that meant robbing a few banks and stealing a few handfuls of diamonds? Just kidding, of course.

Author Margalit Fox tells this remarkable story in her new book, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss. And she joins me now as part of our series, Women Behaving Badly. A tongue-in-cheek look at unruly women in New York history. Margalit, welcome to All Of It.

Margalit Fox: Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: How did you first become interested in Mrs. Mandelbaum's story?

Margalit Fox: Well, she's almost unknown even by true crime aficionados, which warms the cockles of my heart as a journalist. As with so many of history's women, she was always there, throwing off these little sparks, discernible just below the surface if one knew where to look. For instance, she makes several cameo appearances in Herbert Asbury's classic book, The Gangs of New York.

That started me wondering two things. One, who was Fredericka Mandelbaum? Two, how in the world was it possible for a nice zoftig, synagogue-going, convivial Jewish mother of four to rise and make herself the boss of a criminal empire?

Alison Stewart: Once you started to look into the research, what was one piece of research, one detail that you knew you had to include in this book?

Margalit Fox: The one I knew I had to include, I could never, ever get. When you're writing historical nonfiction, your first port of call is always personal papers. In this case, guess what? There weren't any. Fredericka Mandelbaum was nobody's fool.

Alison Stewart: I was about to say she's pretty smart. [laughs]

Margalit Fox: She would have known in her line of work, being a receiver of stolen goods, aka a fence, it would have been professional suicide to commit anything to paper so I had to look elsewhere.

Alison Stewart: Where would you find an abundance of detail? A place where you thought, "Oh, my gosh, I found everything."

Margalit Fox: No such treasure trove in a case like hers. It was always below the surface, but my research, which took over a year, was a process very much like panning for gold, where I would sift hundreds on hundreds of 19th-century newspaper articles, some online, others on microfilm so badly decayed that it was turning black. It looked as though pages were redacted. Elsewhere, historical court records.

We, in this age when lots of people are getting indicted, we found her original indictment, and there's a page of it in the book that was thrilling. Still elsewhere, she was amply documented in memoirs by her 19th-century contemporaries on both sides of the law.

Alison Stewart: Let's start with her origins. Fredericka Mandelbaum was born March 28th, 1825, what is now Central Germany. What do we know about her life before she came to the United States?

Margalit Fox: We know that she was from a family of poor Jewish peddlers. Jewish life in what became Germany was far, far from easy. There were restrictions on the trades that Jews were allowed to ply. Hence, many became peddlers and things like that. There were restrictions on the areas in which they could live, which, by extension, restricted whom they knew and whom they could marry. Violence against Jews was not unknown as well.

When she was 23, she married Wolfe Mandelbaum, also a poor Jewish peddler, a few years her senior and they had an infant daughter, Bertha. In 1850, when she was 25, the Mandelbaums joined many other German immigrants, both Jews and Gentiles, who were sailing to America in steerage in search of a better life. The region was very depressed economically, and as in Ireland, there was a potato famine.

Alison Stewart: How do we know? When do we know? What do we know about Mrs. Mandelbaum when she first engaged in what we consider illegal activity?

Margalit Fox: Well, for her first years, she was in legitimate business. Threadbare though it was, the Mandelbaum settled in a part of the Lower East Side that would soon be known as Kleindeutschland, Little Germany. It was one of the country's first important ethnic enclaves. They lived there in tenement poverty. 20 or more families crammed into a single small, dilapidated building, no running water, backyard outhouses overflowing with sewage, streets filled with garbage, snapped at by bands of roaming pigs, really desperate conditions.

Wolfe Mandelbaum resumed his work as a peddler, and Fredericka also became a street peddler, selling lace door to door. As smart and savvy as she was, she knew that if she remained a peddler, their family would stay in poverty forever. Tragically, amid the diseases that ran through the tenements like brush fires, their infant daughter, Bertha, died. I'm sure that grief strengthened her resolve, "I'm not going to remain in poverty. This is never going to happen again."

Alison Stewart: What made her a good fence?

Margalit Fox: Fredericka Mandelbaum became a fence by the end of her first decade in New York around 1859, where she moved from peddling to selling all sorts of items that were brought to her by street scavengers and petty thieves. She was smart enough not to ask where those items came from, and she disguised them if necessary, so they could be less easily traced back to their owners. She sold them on at a profit. She had become a fence. What made her so brilliant, and what fascinated me as a journalist getting into this story?

She was incredibly smart at putting her finger to the wind, seeing what the prevailing economic and social conditions were, and therefore what people wanted to buy. She came to her fencing career at the start of what would be called America's Gilded Age. She was brilliant at responding to the desires of the emerging middle class, who, amid this latter part of the industrial revolution, were craving all of the new luxury goods that were beginning to flood the market but didn't want to pay full price or even wholesale.

She started furtively, with her front being a modest haberdashery shop at the corner of Clinton and Rivington streets on the Lower East Side. She recruited first a cadre of female shoplifters who were already hard at work in the newly emerged department stores. She put them on salary. She gave them bail money when need be. She wined and dined them at her groaning table in her lavish apartments above the haberdashery shop. Step by step, selling finer and finer and more desirable goods, she built her organization.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Margalit Fox, author of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss. It's about a Jewish woman who ran an organized crime group in the Gilded Age of New York and is part of our series Women Behaving Badly. Let's talk about this. She was somewhat imposing, nearly 6 feet tall, somewhere between 250, 300 pounds. How do you think her physical attributes contributed to her reputation and her role as a boss?

Margalit Fox: There, I can only speculate, but clearly, in any era, she would have cut an imposing figure. In her own time, when people were not as tall as they are now, she must have loomed over New York. It also gave her a kind of motherly aspect, too. She was this big, zaftig Jewish woman. She would hold elaborate dinner parties in her deluxe apartment upstairs. Down one side of the table would be in evening dress, captains of industry, Wall Street men, titans of business and commerce, the so-called legitimate world.

Down the other side, also in evening dress, would be her employees, some of the nation's foremost shoplifters, housebreakers, and bank burglars. She mothered them all. She stuffed them to the gills with food. She called her employees men and women, her chicks. For this reason, she was known as "Marm Ma, or Mother Mandelbaum."

Alison Stewart: She became a master of organizing the shoplifting missions, as you mentioned, stealing things as small as diamonds to as large as bolt of fabric. She became very involved in stealing and selling expensive fabrics, silks. What was the process like for acquiring than selling these bolts of fabric?

Margalit Fox: Well, one of the reasons she was so smart about business is she knew, from the beginning, she had to choose a product line or one or two products in which to specialize. She chose diamonds and silk. Now, why would she choose those two things? Think about it. Because they both have enormous value in proportion to their weight. For someone commanding an army of thieves, it made the best business sense in the world.

Alison Stewart: When did Mrs. Mandelbaum graduate from shopping schemes to bank heists?

Margalit Fox: Well, again, she had her finger to the wind. During the Civil War, for the first time, the government printed a torrent of paper money, what became known as greenbacks. Before then, gold and silver had been coin of the realm. What struck me researching this story was bank burglary and safe cracking were, until the Civil War, very rare. Think about the onus on the man who hauls off a mess of stolen gold and has to go clanking laboriously and noisily down the street, much less the strain on the horse that has to haul his getaway carriage.

Alison Stewart: That's funny, the idea of that.

Margalit Fox: Right. Things we don't think of, but it's all about what was the going material culture in America then. What fueled the economy? Only with the advent of the Civil War, when the Union needed to print a lot of money quickly to wage war, was the country flooded with this new paper money. If you think diamonds and silk have great value proportional to weight, well, paper money does by its very nature. For Fredericka, the way forward was absolutely clear. The time had come to heist a bank.

Alison Stewart: Where were the police in all of this?

Margalit Fox: Right around her dining table, wining and dining, drinking her wine from her extensive cellars, eating her fancy food that was served by her servants, laughing along with the captains of industry and the captains of criminality. New York in those years was a wide-open town. It was the heyday of the Tammany Hall machine and everyone be they in so-called legitimate business, the upper world or in the underworld, was on the make.

Alison Stewart: You note that her prime was from the 1860s to 1870s, that was about the right time and she bought the building that you mentioned on Clinton and Rivington. What else did she do with her money?

Margalit Fox: Oh, my goodness, what didn't she do? She bought not only that building, but actually, a series of adjoining buildings. Her front, literally, the front for her illicit business was a public haberdashery shop on the street. Very modest. Anyone could go in there unsuspectingly and buy a length of lace or a yard of fabric or a spool of thread. They must have wondered why everything was so deeply discounted, but I'm sure they were quite happy with that.

In the back of that ground floor, separated from the public shop by a heavy oaken door and iron or steel bars, was a warren of secret rooms and that was the heart of her operation. She had one room in which a hand-picked team of German artisans labored to efface any identifying marks from silver and other jewelry. In another room, she had employees packing barrels and crates to send this disguised stolen merchandise to waiting customers around the country.

Still, another room had beds and a washstand. It was a dormitory for visiting thieves from out of town. What she had back there was an efficient mail-order fulfillment house. What fascinated me most about this story, I knew going in, it was a true crime story. I knew going in, it was women's history. What I hadn't realized is this is a business story. This is the tale of someone who came over in steerage with the clothes on her back and through her own smarts and her own sense of what the market wanted, made herself into what one historian calls "A mogul of illegitimate capitalism."

Alison Stewart: You are listening to my conversation with author Margalit Fox about her new book, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss. Well, here how Mrs. Mandelbaum finally got taken down after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our conversation with Margalit Fox, author of the new book The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss. It's part of our series Women Behaving Badly, a tongue-in-cheek title for our look at unruly New York City women. Let's dive back into my conversation with Margalit about the female crime boss, Fredericka Mandelbaum.

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Alison Stewart: She worked with so many men, often bossing them around. What do we know about the way she was able to command the respect of men, people who would listen to her orders?

Margalit Fox: When you are running a criminal organization, there are basically two ways in which you can command the sustained respect of the people who work for you. One is the tender, lovey-dovey way, by wining and dining in them, by giving them getaway horses and carriages when they need to run out from a robbery, by giving them bail money on those occasions they got arrested. Of course, she did that.

The other way is the iron fist inside that velvet glove where you have all sorts of dirt on them. Because of the nature of the work they do for you, you could throw them as sacrificial lambs to the police anytime. That threat is very well known to hang over the heads of anyone who works for a crime boss, particularly, a criminal receiver.

Alison Stewart: You write in the book, the fact that "Marm" was not only a woman, but also a Jewish woman turned out to have enormous implications for her professional prospects. How so?

Margalit Fox: Well, in the old country, Jewish women were expected to contribute to the family economy. They were expected to work, often to be the sole support of the family, which freed their husbands to study Torah. That skill set was taken by all of these women, Mrs. Mandelbaum included, to the New World, and obviously for her, in the New World, it took a very different form but it turns out that the managerial skills that you need, the budgeting skills, the economic savvy to run a household, are not all that different from the skill set you need to run a crime family.

Alison Stewart: Did she face antisemitism?

Margalit Fox: Undoubtedly. Even just reading newspaper articles in the major papers, The New York Times among them, The Tribune. There was reflexive antisemitism in some of the coverage in 1884, when she was finally arrested and brought to trial in covering many of the pretrial hearings at which she appeared. The newspapers would say things like, she is a German Jewess with heavy, dark, gross features. All of those stereotypes were in play, and likewise in play, in the editorial cartoons of her in that time.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you have. Some of the cartoons. They're bad. I'll just say that.

Margalit Fox: Yes, they are.

Alison Stewart: Before I get to her downfall, who was a typical client of Mrs. Mandelbaum? Did they care that it perhaps was owned by someone else?

Margalit Fox: Well, her clients came in two varieties. They were the people who naively walked in off the street to buy a spool of thread and to them, it was just an ordinary transaction in a very highly discounted haberdashery shop. On the other hand, there were the people who furtively sought her out by night, the bourgeois housewives who amid the explosion of material culture in the second half of the 19th century, were under great pressure to acquire every new piece of furniture and every new tchotchke.

Likewise, the small businessman, the dressmaker, the tailor. In an era before ready-to-wear, when women either made their own clothes at home or had them made by a dressmaker, both the women and their dressmakers were very eager to acquire fine fabrics at below wholesale prices. Those people knew exactly what they were getting, although, of course, it was a don't ask, don't tell transaction.

Alison Stewart: When did the legal tide finally begin to turn against Mrs. Mandelbaum?

Margalit Fox: The country had changed and the city had changed. When Mrs. Mandelbaum first came to New York and for quite a few decades after, cities and city governments tended to be run by these scrappy immigrants, Germans, the Irish, the Jews. By the 1880s, municipal governments were increasingly the province of moneyed bourgeois WASP men, people who had been educated at Harvard, in Princeton, and Yale.

They grew very distressed that operators like Mrs. Mandelbaum, especially Mrs. Mandelbaum, were seriously cutting into their profits in industries like textiles, jewelry, and banking. Of course, it was all about the almighty dollar and this new powerful bourgeois elite pressured the incoming DA, who was from their background, to bring Mrs. Mandelbaum down. That process began in about 1884.

Alison Stewart: It was a sting that brought her down ultimately.

Margalit Fox: Indeed, it was the newly appointed district attorney, Peter Olney, who was also from a very prominent high WASP background, knew that he could not enlist the police to arrest Fredericka Mandelbaum. They had barely arrested her and never brought her to trial in 25 years. She was operating pretty much completely in the open. I could not find any case between the late 1850s, when she started fencing, and 1884 when she was arrested, where she had actually been in jail overnight. He knew he couldn't enlist the police. They were all her lap dogs. Many of them were on her payroll. What did he do? He enlisted a private detective firm, the Pinkerton Agency.

Alison Stewart: We're going to let people read about the takedown. My guest is Margalit Fox, author of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss. We're talking about a Jewish woman who ran an organized crime group in the Gilded Age New York and is part of our series Women Behaving Badly, [unintelligible 00:23:54] tongue-in-cheek. I won't give it away, but she ultimately ends up in Canada. We'll say that. What do we know about her final years of her life?

Margalit Fox: Well, we do know that although she was arrested and indicted here in New York, crafty to the end, she, with the help of her deliciously crooked lawyers, the New York firm of Howe and Hummel, staged an 11th-hour act of self-preservation that ultimately brought her over the border and north to Canada. She lived there until her death in 1894, and it wasn't long before she was up to her old tricks.

In 1884, when she had not been in Canada long, a reporter from one of the American newspapers visited her at her home and shop in Hamilton, Ontario, near Toronto and Fredericka Mandelbaum was hard at work selling silk and jewelry silverware. She said to this young reporter, "I have agents in New York who buy these job lots so cheap you wouldn't believe. Here are some beautiful watches. Can I sell you anything?"

Alison Stewart: When you think about the story of Fredericka Mandelbaum, what do you think it tells us about the state of the American dream during this period in history?

Margalit Fox: The American dream, although the phrase would not be coined until decades later, clearly that imperative to make a better life for oneself and one's children, with all of the materiality and acquisition of goods that implied was already hard at work in the New York of Fredericka Mandelbaum's day. People who were born here, who were not immigrants, not up against the pervasive xenophobia of that day and other days, could pretty much make it in the so-called upper world, the world of legitimate commerce.

For immigrants, people like Fredericka, who was disenfranchised three times overdose, foreigner, woman, and Jew, there were very few opportunities in the upper world. Domestic work was pretty much the only thing so many immigrants turned to the so-called crooked ladder, making it in the underworld. For men, the choices were plenty. They could run numbers, they could be hired muscle for Tammany Hall, they could stage gambling operations, you name it.

For women, and this fascinated me. The gender disparity of the upper world transferred to the underworld, too. For women, the only two choices were shoplifting and prostitution. For Fredericka, clearly, both were out of the question. One was not lucrative and the other was deeply, deeply dangerous. A prostitute at that time in New York had a life expectancy on the street of only four years.

Alison Stewart: Meanwhile, she had a life of diamonds.

Margalit Fox: She had a life of diamonds until practically the very end. Her shop was said to have handled $10 million worth of stolen goods. That's $10 million in 19th-century money, about $300 million today. Her personal fortune was estimated at between $500 million and $1 million. Again, tens of millions, at least in today's money.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss. It is by my guest, Margalit Fox. Thank you so much for joining us.

Margalit Fox: Thank you for having me.

[00:28:08] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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