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

Margalit Fox, Saskia Maarleveld

eAudio - 2024

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 SisterhoodIn 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-18...80s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called “the... more