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Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. Margalit Fox joins the Gangland Wire podcast to discuss her book, “The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized Crime Boss” which delves into the story of the early fence Mrs. Mandelbaum. Mrs. Mandelbaum operated a successful New York City criminal empire focusing on stolen luxury goods and bank robbery for 25 years, evading jail time. Margalit explores how Mrs. Mandelbaum treated property crime as a business, offering discounts on luxury goods to cater to the middle class. The interview highlights Mrs. Mandelbaum’s organizational skills, elaborate front shop for her operations and involvement in major bank robberies. The discussion showcases Mrs. Mandelbaum’s strategic planning, financial investments, and the blurred lines between legitimate business and criminal enterprises at her dinner parties. The interview provides fascinating insights into Mrs. Mandelbaum’s pioneering role in early organized crime, shedding light on forgotten aspects of women’s history and criminal entrepreneurship in the 19th century. #newyorkcity #organizedcrimegroups #organzedcrime
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[0:00]Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Sergeant. And I have a another story for you today from the author of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. Now, you guys know what fencing is. If you don’t, a fence is a person that buys stolen goods from a criminal. And it’s extremely lucrative. I mean, it’s really, really lucrative and it’s hard to investigate, hard to really make a case on anybody. And my guest today, Margalit Fox, has written a book about one of the earliest fences in the United States who was, again, immensely successful. So Margalit, welcome. I really appreciate you coming on the show and telling the guys about The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. Thank you so much, Gary. It’s my pleasure. So The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, which was just published by Random House last week, tells the true story of the first major organized crime boss in America. Now, all of us, when we think of a crime boss, we either think of Tony Soprano, or if we’re a certain age, we think of something from The Untouchables, a big, strapping, tough guy with spats and a Tommy gun during prohibition and emphasis on the word guy. However, the first.
[1:28]Big deal. Crime boss in America was none of those things. It was a nice, zoftig Jewish mother of four named Mrs. Mandelbaum, who came here in steerage in 1850 with nothing more than the clothes on her back, and two decades later was running the most successful, most lucrative, one of the most extensive crime networks in America. She operated with complete impunity for 25 years, not spending a day in jail. Her modest haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, disguised a criminal empire that centered on stolen luxury goods like silk and silver and diamonds, and eventually diversified into bank robbery. She had working for her an army of the country’s foremost shoplifters, housebreakers, and bank burglars whom she had personally recruited.
[2:46]She was so motherly with respect to her cohort, bailing them out if they were arrested, providing getaway horses and carriages when they needed to flee a robbery they committed on her behalf.
[3:01]Whining and dining them at her groaning table.
[3:13]
Beginning of Mrs. Mandelbaum’s downfall
[3:05]So motherly was she that the press and criminals alike called her Mother Mandelbaum or Marm Mandelbaum. And she operated this way until 1884, when the tide turned in New York, reformers came in, and she was finally arrested. But there’s more to the story even than that.
[3:28]Really, she was quite a character. I love this description, the product of a congenial liaison between a dumpling and a mountain. Frederica Mandelbaum was a big woman. Even now, she would be considered big. And back then, when people were generally smaller, she must have towered over New York. She was described in contemporary accounts as being almost six feet tall and weighing between 250 and 300 pounds. She dressed impeccably and elegantly because she could afford it. In sweeping floor-length gowns of the finest silk, ostrich feather-topped hats, sealskin capes. And just to give you an idea of how lucrative fencing was, as Gary pointed out, her.
[4:24]Storefront haberdashery shop, which was the front for her clandestine business, in the 25 years she operated, was said to have handled $10 million worth of stolen merchandise. Now, that’s $10 million 19th century dollars. It’s equivalent to about $300 million today. day. When Frederica Mandelbaum died in 1894, she had a personal fortune of up to $1 million. And again, that’s $1 million 19th century dollars. So she did very well. I know y’all know everybody likes something that fell off a truck that you can buy for about half price. And she took advantage of that. We like those, especially those luxury goods, those things that make us appear that we are more wealthy than what we really are, a fur, some kind of diamond jewelry or silver or gold jewelry. And you could buy those really cheap from somebody, a fence. And that’s what she took advantage of. She saw the market and tapped into that market, wouldn’t you say, Margalit?
[5:34]Absolutely. When I first came to this story as a journalist a couple of years ago, I knew, Obviously, it was a historical true crime story. I knew it was a story about old New York, and I knew it was a story about this forgotten piece of women’s history, because few people know Mrs. Mandelbaum’s name today. day. What I hadn’t realized, and the epiphany I had when I got into researching the story, was this is a business story, almost more powerfully than anything else. Friederike Mandelbaum, who would have been educated…
[6:15]At home probably in the old country in what is now Germany. Her family were poor Jewish traders and peddlers. They had nothing. So she certainly didn’t have a college education. She certainly didn’t have a business school education, but she was clearly incredibly smart and incredibly savvy once she got to America about putting her finger to the wind and seeing what the social climate of the times was encouraging people to want to buy. And for instance, she got into silk right away. At the time, there was no ready-to-wear clothing for women. I learned to my amazement that a woman could not go into a shop and buy a skirt or shirtwaist off the rack until the 1890s, And she couldn’t buy a dress off the rack until after World War I.
[7:14]So every woman in America, rich or poor, either sewed her own clothes at home or had them made by a dressmaker. That meant that fine fabrics at discount prices were in great demand. The economics of a transaction, which again, Frederica Mandelbaum put in place in her business operation very early, worked this way. A thief would steal a load of fine silk from a New York waterfront dock or a textile emporium at night.
[7:51]The swag would be brought covertly to Mrs. Mandelbaum. She knew the wholesale price of every one of the luxury goods that passed through her hands. Silk, diamonds, silver, sealskin, cashmere, all of the stuff that the emerging middle class in the second half of the 19th century was being taught to crave, but didn’t want to pay full price for. A thief brings her bolts of silk, she pays the thief 25% or even less of its wholesale price, say 10% to 25%. The thief can now exit the equation in relative safety. She’s the buffer between him and the cops. She then covertly, through her agents, sells to one of her extensive list of waiting customers that same silk at half cost.
[8:47]To two-thirds of wholesale. So the client is thrilled. He’s getting an enormous discount, and Mrs. Bandelbaum is still making a huge profit. And it became very clear to me that there had always been property crime, but she was one of the first, and the only one I know of to do it in such a complete and sustained way in that period, she was one of the first to treat property crime as a thriving capitalist concern and as a scalable business.
[9:22]
Mrs. Mandelbaum’s organizational skills
[9:23]Interesting. Yeah, she did. And she organized. Another thing I found interesting as I went through your book is how she organized people and looked out for them. It’s like this is before the mafia, guys. As you know, the Italians don’t arrive on the scene until late 1900s and turn of the century and you know they’re gonna move in on these kinds of of uh rackets if you will but this is before them and and so as it’s the immigrant way you’re kept out of the normal kind of businesses but crime is always there and you can always make money and and that’s she figured that out because she was you know she couldn’t have gone and got a job she couldn’t opened a store, uh, couldn’t have done anything, but this was open to her. And then she starts organizing all these guys. She, she saw beyond just a slam bang crime. She saw beyond it and organized pickpockets and burglar gangs and bank robbery gangs. So tell us a little bit about her organizational skills, if you will. That’s right. To speak first to your point about there being few opportunities in the so-called upper world, the world of legitimate commerce, that was true, of course, for all immigrants, men and women. There was tremendous xenophobia. Friedrich Mandelbaum was disenfranchised three times over. She was a foreigner. She was a woman. She was Jewish. There was also tremendous anti-Semitism.
[10:52]In the upper world, men, immigrant men, were pretty much only able to get jobs that were dangerous, dirty, and demeaning, digging ditches, hauling hods of bricks on their shoulders. There was no job security. If the weather was bad in construction, there was no pay. People got injured and killed all the time. For women, there were even fewer opportunities in the upper world, mostly back-breaking domestic work for little more than a dollar a week, or working as a seamstress and going blind, making these tiny hand stitches by the thousands by candlelight.
[11:32]So some immigrants, as you say, turn to the underworld, the so-called crooked ladder, as a way to provide for their families and to advance socially and economically. But here again, there were vastly more choices for men than for women. Whatever we think of that life, women who chose for whatever reason to enter it really barely could. Men could run bucket shops, run numbers rackets, run all kinds of gambling joints. They could be hired muscle. They could be people who got out the vote for Tammany Hall ward healers. Women, there were literally only two job opportunities open in the underworld. And guess what they were? Shoplifting, which was not lucrative, and prostitution. Clearly, Frederica Mandelbaum resolved not to remain in poverty. That eliminated shoplifting. She was a proper married woman. That eliminated prostitution. So she…
[12:37]In order to ascend the crooked ladder, first had to build her own ladder because she was a woman. That I find fascinating. So what she did, as any good solo entrepreneur would do, was she started small. You don’t come straight out of business school and expect to be made the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You start at the bottom. So she started with the cohort of female shoplifters that were already circulating in department stores. Department stores had started to blossom in big American cities in the mid-19th century. She recruited them to work for her. She gave them steady employment, the promise of bail, coaching if need be. She worked out all sorts of modus operandi to help women steal things efficiently. They would bring the swag to her, and she would disguise things if necessary so they couldn’t be traced back to their owners and sell them on at a profit. When that proved not lucrative enough, then she expanded into silk. Now, silk comes in these big, heavy bolts, 40 or more yards of fabric wrapped around a stiff cardboard core. So you can’t just have a woman sweep that off a department store counter and stash it under her long skirt. So then Mar Mandelbaum recruited a cadre of men.
[14:05]Daytime shoplifting continued as a mainstay of the business, but now she expanded into after-hours nighttime burglary from warehouses, from textile emporiums, from docks. After that, She eventually expanded into housebreaking, and what’s so wonderful is she would have these elaborate dinner parties at her palatial apartments above the modest haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side. The invitations were as sought after as to any party Mrs. Astor might give up town. Down one side of her long mahogany dining table would be the leading lights of upper world commerce, Wall Street men, captains of the mercantile world, captains of industry, in evening dress, laughing, whining and dining. Down the other side of the table, also in evening dress, would be the creme de la creme of the criminal world. Housebreakers, bank burglars, shoplifters, all whining and donning and laughing together. And so the question becomes, was there really that much difference between what these two cohorts were doing? It’s just that the work of one was considered legal and the work of the other was not.
[15:29]
Mrs. Mandelbaum’s fencing front
[15:29]Eventually, she recruited into her employ the foremost bank burglars in the nation, and as the book explains, she staged several lucrative bank burglaries where she served beforehand as a kind of angel, giving them seed money, buying them tens of thousands of dollars of bespoke burglar’s tools, and then after the fact, also a crucial job for fences as a laundress, laundering that dirty money into clean.
[16:05]She even had a dormitory or something that she had as part of her headquarters there, secret compartments to get in and out. Describe that fencing front that she had back at the back and down underneath. need. That’s right. If you walked into her haberdashery shop on the corner of Clinton and Rivington streets on the Lower East Side, you would just see an ordinary-looking shop where people in all innocence would walk in off the street, and you could buy a length of lace or a piece of ribbon or a spool of thread, although I suspect the customers must have of marveled at how deeply discounted everything was, but that was a plus.
[16:50]At the back wall of the haberdashery shop was a stout oak door and also a window overlaid with iron bars. And behind that door and window was a whole secret warren of rooms where the real criminal operation took place. She had, for instance, in the parlor, just on the other side of the barred window.
[17:14]A fireplace whose chimney had a concealed dumbwaiter in the back. So if Marm, looking through the window into the shop, saw a rare police raid take place or saw any kind of suspect character enter the shop, if she was in back there going over a load of swag, she could just pop it into the dumbwaiter, hoist it up out of sight to the floor above. There was a warren of rooms that together comprised the infrastructure of her business, which was really to run a wholesale mail order fulfillment house. There were rooms where employees packed goods into crates and barrels to dispatch
[18:02]
Mrs. Mandelbaum’s secret criminal operation
[17:59]to waiting customers around the country who were buying them on the cheap. There was indeed a dormitory with beds and a washstand for visiting thieves from out of town. There was probably the most interesting room, which I called the effacement chamber, in which a hand-selected team of German artisans very carefully removed stolen stones from their settings and effaced any engravings. If a watch was engraved with the owner’s name, well, obviously, it would be too dangerous to sell that on. But these brilliant artisans would engrave a whole picture over the back.
[18:39]Completely obscuring the name of the man from whom the watch had been stolen.
[18:46]
Mrs. Mandelbaum’s entry into bank robbery
[18:44]That was her business model. So Mrs. Mandelbaum got into bank robbery. One of the most important robberies she bankrolled was in 1869, the burglary of the Ocean National Bank in Lower Manhattan.
[19:03]It took months of planning and the investment of many tens of thousands of dollars on her part, including putting the bank burglars in a rented office on the basement level of the bank, conveniently below the office of the bank president, and surveilling the bank, the comings and goings of bank employees, people on the street, the cops on the beat for months months at a time, and then buying a set of bespoke burglar’s tools with which her foremost bank burglars from the basement could slowly chip their way into the bank president’s office through his floor, and then at night, working by the light of a cigar so they wouldn’t be seen through the windows outside, getting into the bank president’s office.
[20:05]Stringing the lock on the vault, which they had already figured out how to do, and getting themselves into the two safes within the vault. That was a very lucrative robbery, earning them hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is.
[20:29]Mrs. Manderbaum then boyared, keeping in some accounts 50% of the proceeds. All of this and more is discussed in my new book, The Talented Mrs. Manderbaum, which is just out from Random House and available through Random
[20:50]
Conclusion
[20:47]House or at any place where you buy books. So thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Those are some great stories. And guys, you know, I’ll have show notes or links in the show notes to get this book. That was Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. It’s a really interesting book and a really interesting look at back in the days when fencing first started. And it’s an overall good view of early days of organized crime in the United States before the mafia people even got here.
[21:23]Before the, actually the early Jewish mob got here. She was the first. And so I highly recommend you get that book. It’s entertaining as heck to read. A lot of good images in it. And she did a lot of great research. Thanks a lot, guys. And don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. And if you have a problem with PTSD, be sure and go to the VA website. And if you’ve been in the service, then you can get a hotline number there. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, hall go see our friend mr rugiano down in florida he’s a former gambino guy anthony rugiano i have a, hotline number up there if you’re on the youtube and his website has a hotline number his youtube channel has a hotline number don’t forget to like and subscribe share this with your friends that’s the best way for me to get new listeners and more new listeners we get the better we like it And I appreciate all your support as it is. Thank you, guys.