Fredericka Mandelbaum, or Marm as she was known, was one of 150,000 Jews who left Germany and came to America in the mid-19th century hoping to escape antisemitism, restrictive laws, and poverty. When she arrived in New York City in 1850, Marm found conditions for women even worse than in Europe. Or at least for law-abiding women. Prostitution was one of the few jobs available for women in America. Marm preferred helping her husband and selling stolen goods. Although Marm started out in New York almost penniless, she died in Hamilton, Canada, in 1894 with a fortune of between $500,000 and $1 million — worth between $14 million and $20 million today. Her story is the subject of the new historical biography The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss by Margalit Fox.
Marm and her husband, Wolf, settled in Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), a Lower East Side slum. They had four children. Wolf worked as a peddler selling rags, dented pots, tattered old clothes, and broken pottery, most of which had been mended — probably by Marm. “About six feet tall and of Falstaffian girth…,” Mandelbaum was singularly unattractive, according to Fox. “Pouchy-faced, apple-cheeked, and beetle-browed, she resembled the product of a congenial liaison between a dumpling and a mountain.”
Fortunately, Marm was smart. She could speak English as well as German. She knew how to manipulate politicians, the police, and the courts regarding her handling of stolen goods. She was also, according to a New York police chief, “shrewd, careful, methodical in character. And to the point in speech. … Wary in the extreme.”
During the financial panic of 1857, businesses failed, banks closed, and many New Yorkers despaired. Marm, though, saw an opportunity buying, repairing, then selling stolen items from street children whom she mentored and who later as adults specialized in picking pockets and shoplifting.
Soon they graduated into robbing banks. Marm always had their backs (this is why she was called Marm or Mother) and would pay the police to turn a blind eye to their illegal dealings. She would also hire the notorious lawyers William Howe and Abraham Hummel to defend them in court. She would even pay their bail and otherwise come to their aid.
Buying and camouflaging stolen items, Marm stored them in hidden rooms in her dry goods and haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Later, she added a warehouse, then several warehouses, to stash her hidden loot.
For 25 years, she worked as a fence and an organized crime boss, reigning “as one of the most infamous underworld figures in America.” Then, in 1884, she was caught, not by the police — most of whom were on her payroll — but by the Pinkerton detective Gustav Frank. When Frank accused her, she denied involvement in criminal activities. But soon detectives came upon Marm’s multimillion-dollar accumulation of lace, silk, diamonds, jewelry, silver, and gold. The game was up, and she was arrested.
Her lawyers had her case postponed for months. When the trial finally began, she, her son Julius, and her assistant had escaped to Canada where, according to laws at the time, she could not be extradited to America. She spent her remaining years in Hamilton, Ontario, where she started a small dry-goods store.
Fox is adept at finding facts and providing insightful quotes that bring the reader into the case that made international headlines in its day but then was forgotten. As a biography, though, the book never breathes the same life into Marm herself as a character. Fox doesn’t get inside her head and skimps on her emotional life. The only glimpse into Marm’s feelings occurs at the death of her youngest daughter, Annie, but that happens toward the very end of this book, not early on when it would have had a greater impact.
Building her narrative around Mandelbaum’s work, however, Fox goes wider than mere biography, offering a discerning social and technical history of crime in New York from the early 19th to the 20th century. One of Fox’s key sources is Danger! A True History of a Great City’s Wiles and Temptations, which came out in 1886. It was written by William Howe and Abraham Hummel, Marm’s trial lawyers. The book, which purports to be a safety manual for tourists, could, as Fox mentions, also serve as a handbook for illegal activities.
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Now back in print, Danger is engagingly written and offers an intriguing look at “criminals and their haunts” as well as their habits. It seems to have inspired Fox, whose book borrows from Danger and includes discussions of criminal activities in America and in England from picking pockets to shoplifting and robbing banks. For instance: The bank burglar, Fox explains, was “the aristocrat of the underworld.” Bank burglary was a covert, painstaking operation and required “subtlety and supreme skill” to keep “ahead of the safe-makers.” Bank robbery, though, was an armed daylight job and considered thuggish.
Fox also notes that the pickpockets were among the lowest of the criminal class with the shoplifters and the “shakedown workers” above them. She even describes ways of distracting a department store clerk by asking to see yet another item on a shelf that’s somewhat out of reach. While the clerk was thus occupied, the shoplifter hid the items (often diamonds) inside the lining of her hand muff and her skirt pockets which opened from under the skirt. These well-dressed ladies, many in Marm’s employ, would then politely thank the clerk for her help, smile, promise to return after considering the purchase, and cautiously exit the store with no one the wiser. It worked until it didn’t.
Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins Osher program.