The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss - Margalit Fox
Category: True Crime
Tags: True Crime
Americas first great organized-crime lord was a ladya nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum., A tour de force . . . With a pickpockets finesse, Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York.Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood, 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 countrys most notorious fencea receiver of stolen goodsand 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. Ma
