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
A PARADE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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.
