The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss
By Margalit Fox
Random House, 336 pp.
The subject of this biography is as enigmatic at the end of the book as she is at the beginning. This isn’t a grievous flaw, since the book’s account of Fredericka Mandelbaum’s improbable career as a virtuoso criminal in the late 19th century is engrossing throughout. Mandelbaum was female and Jewish, two attributes that were disdained at the time not only in America’s respectable gentile society but even in its underworld. Nevertheless, she surmounted those taboos, penetrated both that society and that underworld and, for much of her adult life, was a wildly successful crook.
At the same time, apparently, she was also a pillar of New York City’s law-abiding Jewish community. If nothing else, hers was an extravagant (if feral) life.
Mandelbaum’s adopted city was a marvelous, irresistible toy store for a cunning, hard-working fence who could feed people’s hunger for luxury goods.
Mandelbaum was born in 1825 in Germany. In 1850 she and her daughter joined her peddler husband on Manhattan’s squalid Lower East Side. They were part of a six-decade-long mass migration of Central and East European Jews who came to the United States to escape antisemitism and obtain better jobs and better lives. The Mandelbaums settled in a neighborhood called Kleindeutschland (“little Germany”), which Fredericka came to love and where she lived for the rest of her 34-odd years in America, even after she became wealthy.
How did she become a criminal? Margalit Fox, a thorough researcher, New York Times obituarist and the author of five previous books, says only, “Sometime during the 1850s, she appears to have become a protégée” of two topnotch fences. A fence obtains stolen goods and sells them to people who want them. “Under [their] tutelage,” Fox writes, “Mrs. Mandelbaum became expert in appraising the value of the lace, silk, cashmere, sealskin and other luxury goods that passed, fleetingly, through their hands. The skills she acquired laid the foundation for her criminal career.”
This is frustratingly incomplete, though I’m sure that the author, a thorough researcher, would have delved more deeply into the relationship between teachers and students if the relevant information were available. Without it, the issues raised by Mandelbaum’s entry into the underworld are vexing. For instance, how did a married woman with children, whose husband eschewed criminality, end up as the apprentice of two such egregious figures? One of the fences was certainly Jewish and the other one probably was, so antisemitism wasn’t an obstacle. But wouldn’t Mandelbaum’s gender have made her persona non grata? In any case, “by the end of the 1850s” she went into the fencing business for herself and ended up outdoing her teachers.
Once she became her own boss, Mandelbaum worked out of a storefront in Kleindeutschland where she sold purloined merchandise. In its labyrinthine back rooms she examined goods, hatched robbery schemes (“Mrs. Mandelbaum was disinclined to steal things firsthand”), and gave orders to her subordinates. After achieving success, she and her family lived in luxurious digs above the store. “For Mrs. Mandelbaum, trafficking in other people’s property was staggeringly good business,” Fox writes. “At her death in 1894, she had amassed a personal fortune of at least half a million dollars (in some accounts as much as a million), the equivalent of more than $14 million to $28 million today.”
Mandelbaum was clearly a shrewd operator, but she was also lucky in her timing: Post-Civil War America (the conflict ended in 1865) was the Gilded Age, an era when the country transformed itself from an agrarian to a manufacturing society. “Upper- and middle-class Americans now owned much better personal property, and far more of it, than ever before,” Fox writes. “But for the first time in the country’s history, the chance to amass personal property wasn’t confined to the upper class. By the mid-1800s, an American middle class had begun to emerge, a product of industrialization, urbanization and the growth of professional work. Its members soon began to crave more, and better, things of their own. Once mere purchasers, they were now consumers.” With different groups on the move and striving for wealth and power, and the boundaries between them becoming less clearly marked, Fox notes, the nation—particularly Mandelbaum’s adopted city—was a marvelous, irresistible toy store for a cunning, hard-working fence who could feed people’s hunger for luxury goods.
Fox cogently elucidates the suggestive similarities between “scientific management” (“increased profitability through increased efficiency”)—a beloved doctrine of the Gilded Age’s businessmen—and Mandelbaum’s own practices. She recruited only elite crooks, and not just for forays into posh emporiums; she also orchestrated bank robberies (Mandelbaum cherished negotiable securities). And just as new technologies were integral to the country’s remarkable nascent industries, Mandelbaum ensured that her bank robbers possessed “’the finest kit of tools ever used in a bank burglary.’” Not included in the tenets of scientific management: She bribed everyone she thought could help her, from judges to politicians to cops. She was “adored” by her nefarious employees for her fair dealings—which was more than can be said for “decent” society’s robber barons.
“The late 1860s through the mid-1870s were the apex of [Mandelbaum’s] career,” Fox writes, but by the 1870s, “The nation’s increasingly powerful bourgeois elite were now urging the law to take a harder line [against property crime], especially when crime interfered with commerce.” Fox also sees the resultant reform movement in New York, as a class war between that elite and the new immigrants over who would wield hegemony in the city. Maybe the masses were also disgusted by the corruption that pervaded New York; withal, in 1884 a crusading Manhattan district attorney was determined to put the infamous Mandelbaum behind bars. He knew that the police department was so venal it couldn’t be trusted, so he hired the Pinkertons, a private detective agency, to investigate Mandelbaum’s empire. The Pinkertons deployed an undercover agent in Mandelbaum’s store-headquarters, and he accumulated enough evidence to arrest her in July 1884.
It made the front pages of newspapers in the United States and abroad. A few days before the trial began in December 1884, she and two codefendants skipped bail and escaped to Canada. She thwarted deportation and set up shop in Hamilton, Ontario, fencing and bribing police and customs officers. But her heart wasn’t in it. She hated Canada, missed New York and was ill the last few years of her life. She died of nephritis in February 1894, still good copy: Her death, Fox writes, “made headlines around the world.”
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum is engaging and often rather droll, though Mandelbaum remains an inscrutable subject. The crooked lawyers and redoubtable robbers who were her cronies come off as more vivid and interesting than their boss, which makes for a good if somewhat perverse read. Fox conscientiously tries to trace a relationship between Mandelbaum’s Jewish background and her career: “Unlike many immigrant women of the mid-nineteenth century,” she writes, “Jewish women were expected to be employed outside the home, and even to work as entrepreneurs…Many immigrant women from other backgrounds were smart, hardworking and ambitious, of course. But in mid-nineteenth century America, few other traditions so overtly prescribed a woman’s role as embodying personal confidence, bold activism and singlemindedness of purpose.”
Even stipulating, for the sake of argument, that all this is true, to my mind they explain Mandelbaum’s expertise, but not her wallowing—reveling—in criminality. Despite her membership in synagogues in New York and Hamilton, her career suggests religion must have been tangential to a worldview better described as nihilist.
Howard Schneider has written book reviews for the Wall Street Journal, the Humanist, the Progressive, Art in America, Undark, and many other publications.