← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Story of 'The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum' (Women Behaving Badly)
00:29:21
We reair our conversation about a Jewish Mob boss who became famous for bank robberies in Gilded Age New York.
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- [00:00]
Casual Speaker
I' ma put you on, nephew.
- [00:01]
Margalit Fox
All right, unk.
- [00:02]
Alison Stewart
Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?
- [00:04]
Casual Speaker
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.
- [00:15]
Alison Stewart
Great brands, great prices. Everyone's got a reason to rack.
- [00:20]
Margalit Fox
You know, they have Marc Jacobs, Nike. Yes, just so many good brands.
- [00:25]
Alison Stewart
Join the Nordy Club at Nordstrom Rack to unlock exclusive discounts on your favorite brands. Shop new arrivals first and more.
- [00:34]
Casual Speaker
Plus, get an extra 5% off every.
- [00:36]
Alison Stewart
Rack purchase with a Nordstrom credit card. More perks, more value. That's why you rack.
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Margalit Fox
Listener support WNYC Studios.
- [01:00]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it from wnyc. I'm Alison Smith. Stuart, thank you for spending your day with us. On today's show, we'll have true life tales of murder, mob bosses, scandalous divorces and vengeful socialites, all based in New York City. We featured these conversations as part of our new series called Women Behaving Badly, a tongue in cheek title for our look at unruly women who left their mark on our city's history. Later this hour, we'll hear about the Manhattan socialites who were horrified to discover their dirty laundry was aired in a published short story by their dear friend Truman Capote. Their revenge was to cut him out of New York high society, which helped lead to Capote's downward spiral into addiction. And later in the show, we'll learn about the Staten island woman who was tried three times for the murder of her sister in law, plus a gilded age divorce that involves an affair, a potentially forced abortion and kidnapping. That's the plan. So let's get this started with a female mob boss in gilded Asia, 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 Frederica 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 a half a million dollars, equivalent to many millions in today's currency. And she managed to accumulate all 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 handful of diamonds? Just kidding, of course. Author Margalit Fox tells this remarkable story in her new book, the Talented misses The Rise and Fall of an American Organized Crime Boss. I began our conversation by asking how Marguerite first became interested in Frederica Mandelbaum's story.
- [03:18]
Margalit Fox
Well, she's almost unknown, even by true crime aficionados, which warms the cockles of my heart as a journalist. But 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. So that started me wondering two things. One, who was Frederica Mandelbaum? And two, how in the world was it possible for a nice zaftig, synagogue going, convivial Jewish mother of four to rise and make herself the boss of a criminal empire?
- [04:11]
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?
- [04:19]
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. And in this case, guess what? There weren't any. Frederica Mandelbaum was nobody's fool.
- [04:37]
Alison Stewart
I was about to say she's pretty smart.
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Margalit Fox
She would have known in her line of work, being a receiver of stolen goods, AKA offense, it would have been professional suicide to commit anything to paper. So I had to look elsewhere.
- [04:54]
Alison Stewart
Where would you find an abundance of detail, a place where you thought, oh, my gosh, I found everything.
- [05:00]
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. And still elsewhere, she was amply documented in memoirs by her 19th century contemporaries on both sides of the law.
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Interviewer
Let's start with her origins. Frederica Mandelbaum was born March 28, 1825, what is now central Germany. What do we know about her life before she came to the United States?
- [06:03]
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 Wolf 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 and in steerage in search of a better life. The region was very depressed economically, and as in Ireland, there was a potato famine.
- [07:10]
Interviewer
So 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?
- [07:20]
Margalit Fox
Well, for her first years, she was in legitimate business, threadbare though it was. The Mandelbaums settled in a part of the Lower east side that would soon be known as Klein Deutschland, 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. Wolf Mandelbaum resumed his work as a peddler, and Frederica 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 died. So I'm sure that grief strengthened her resolve. I'm not going to remain in poverty. This is never going to happen again.
- [08:40]
Interviewer
What made her a good fence?
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Margalit Fox
Fredrika 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. And so 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. And so, step by step, selling finer and finer and more desirable goods, she built her organization.
- [10:51]
Alison Stewart
My guest is Margalete Fox, author of the Talented misses The Rise and Fall of an American Organized Crime Boss. It's about a Jewish woman who ran an organized crime group in the Gilbert age of New York and is part of our series Women Behaving Badly. Let's talk about this. She was somewhat imposing, nearly six feet tall, somewhere between 250, 300 pounds. How do you think her physical attributes contributed to her reputation and her role.
- [11:23]
Margalit Fox
As a boss 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, zaftic 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. And down the other side, also in evening Dr. Would be her employees, some of the nation's foremost shoplifters, housebreakers and bank burglars. And she mothered them all. She stuffed them to the gills with food. She called her employees men and women, her chicks. And for this reason she was known as Marm Ma or Mother Mandelbaum.
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Interviewer
She became a master of organizing the shoplifting missions, as you mentioned, stealing things as small as diamonds to as large as bowls bolt of fabric. So she became very involved in stealing and selling expensive fabrics, silks. What was the process like for acquiring then selling these bolts of fabric?
- [12:48]
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. So 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. So for someone commanding an army of thieves, it made the best business sense in the world.
- [13:26]
Interviewer
When did Mrs. Mandelbaum graduate from shopping schemes to bank heists?
- [13:33]
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. And what struck me researching this story was bank burglary and safecracking 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.
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Alison Stewart
That's funny, the idea of that, right?
- [14:19]
Margalit Fox
And so 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. And if you think diamonds and silk have great value proportional to weight, well, paper money does by its very nature. So for Frederica, the way forward was absolutely clear. The time had come to heist a bank.
- [14:56]
Alison Stewart
Where were the police in all of this?
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Margalit Fox
Right around her dining table, whining 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.
- [15:34]
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?
- [15:48]
Margalit Fox
Oh, my goodness, she. What didn't she do? She bought not only that building, but actually a series of adjoining buildings. And 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. So what she had back there was an efficient mail order fulfillment house. And 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. But 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.
- [17:50]
Alison Stewart
You were listening to my conversation with author Margalit Fox about her new book the Talented misses The Rise and Fall of an American Organized Crime Boss. We'll hear how Mrs. Mandelbaum finally got taken down after a quick break. This is all of it. You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our conversation with Margalie Fox, author of the new book the Talented misses 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 Marga Leite about the female crime boss Frederica Mandelbaum.
- [19:06]
Interviewer
She worked with so many men, often bossing them around. What do we know? What do we know about the way she was able to command the respect of men? People who would. Who would listen to her orders.
- [19:20]
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. And 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. And that threat is very well known to hang over the heads of anyone who works for a crime boss, particularly a criminal receiver.
- [20:24]
Interviewer
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?
- [20:35]
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. And so 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.
- [21:29]
Interviewer
Did she face anti Semitism?
- [21:32]
Margalit Fox
Undoubtedly. Even just reading newspaper articles in 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. And likewise in play in the editorial cartoons of her in that time.
- [22:17]
Interviewer
Yeah, you have. Some of the cartoons are pretty. They're. They're bad. I'll just say that.
- [22:23]
Margalit Fox
Yes, they are.
- [22:26]
Interviewer
Before I get to her downfall.
- [22:28]
Alison Stewart
Who was a typical client of Mrs. Mandelbaum? Did they. Did they care that it perhaps was owned by someone else?
- [22:37]
Margalit Fox
Well, her clients came in two varieties. There were the people who naively walked in off the street to buy a spool of thread. 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.
- [23:36]
Alison Stewart
When did the legal tide finally begin to turn against Mrs. Mandelbaum?
- [23:43]
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 and Princeton and Yale. And 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. So, 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. So that process began in about 1884.
- [24:51]
Alison Stewart
And it was a sting that brought her down ultimately.
- [24:54]
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 Frederica 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. So he knew he couldn't enlist the police. They were all her lapdogs. Many of them were on her payroll. So what did he do? He enlisted a private detective firm, the Pinkerton Agency.
- [25:49]
Alison Stewart
We're gonna let people read about the takedown. My guest is Margalite Fox, author of the Talented misses 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. Said, Tongue in cheek. She ultimately, 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?
- [26:18]
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 the American newspapers visited her at her home and shop in Hamilton, Ontario, near Toronto. And Frederica 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?
- [27:30]
Alison Stewart
When you think about the story of.
- [27:33]
Interviewer
Frederica Mandelbaum, what do you think it tells us about the state of the American dream during this period in history.
- [27:42]
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 that implied, was already hard at work in the New York of Frederica 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 Frederica, who was disenfranchised three times over, 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. And for Frederica, 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.
- [29:33]
Interviewer
Meanwhile, she had a life of diamonds.
- [29:35]
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. And her personal fortune was estimated at between half a million and 1 million. Again, tens of millions, at least in today's money.
- [30:00]
Interviewer
The name of the book is the Talented misses The Rise and Fall of an American Organized Crime Boss. It is by my guest, Margalit Fox. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [30:11]
Margalit Fox
Thank you for having me.
- [30:12]
Casual Speaker
I'm gonna put you on, nephew.
- [30:14]
Margalit Fox
All right, unc.
- [30:14]
Alison Stewart
Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?
- [30:17]
Casual Speaker
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.
- [30:27]
Interviewer
Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. Since then, New York Public Radio's rigorous journalism has gone on to win a Peabody award and a DuPont Columbia Award, among others. In addition to this award winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.