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

A Jewish mother of four, a gracious society hostess, a beloved member of her community—and the first widely renowned crime boss in America. Discover the true story from the bestselling author of The Confidence Men.

In 1850, Fredericka Mandelbaum traveled to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a widow with four children, a fixture of high society, and an admired philanthropist. What had enabled a woman on the margins of American life to ascend from tenement poverty to immense wealth?

In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum, as she was known, had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a successful criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (the equivalent of nearly $300 million in today’s money) had passed through her modest haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York City” by the New York Times, she planned, financed, and profited from robberies of cash, gold, diamonds, and silk throughout the city and across the United States.

But Fredericka Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful crook: She was a business visionary—one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the formerly scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of New York's foremost bank robbers, housebreakers, and shoplifters, and neatly bribing anyone who stood in her way, she handled logistics and organized supply chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business.

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid image of Gilded Age New York—a city teeming with delightful rogues, capitalist power brokers, and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all of whom straddled the line between underworld enterprise and the realm of “legitimate” commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable story of a once-famous, now-forgotten heroine, a tale that exemplifies the cherished rags-to-riches narrative of Victorian America while simultaneously upending it altogether.