The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum

AmericaΓ’s first great organized-crime lord was a lady, a nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum. ΓÇ£A tour de force . . . With a pickpocketΓÇÖs finesse,Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York.ΓÇ¥ΓÇöLiza Mundyauthor of The Sisterhood In 1850an 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 yearsΓÇ£MarmΓÇ¥ Mandelbaum had become the countryΓÇÖs most notorious ΓÇ£fenceΓÇ¥ΓÇöa receiver of stolen goodsΓÇöand 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 ΓÇ£the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crimeΓÇ¥ she planned robberies of cashgold and diamonds throughout the country. But Mrs. Mandelbaum wasnΓÇÖt just a successful crook: She was a business visionaryΓÇöone of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbershousebreakers and shopliftersshe handled logistics and organized supply chainsΓÇöturning theft into a viablescalable business. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid portrait of Gilded Age New YorkΓÇöa city teeming with nefarious roguescapitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigsall straddling the line between underworld enterprise and ΓÇ£legitimateΓÇ¥ commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebratedMargalit Fox tells the unforgettable true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies AmericaΓÇÖs cherished rags-to-riches narrative while simultaneously upending it entirely.