THE TALENTED MRS. MANDELBAUM: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN ORGANIZED CRIME BOSS BY MARGALIT FOX

Details

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 ofThe 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. Mandelbaum wasnt just a successful crook: She was a business visionaryone of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chainsturning theft into a viable, scalablebusiness.

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaumpaints a vivid portrait of Gilded Age New Yorka city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and legitimate commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies Americas cherished rags-to-riches narrative while simultaneously upending it entirely.

HARDBACK BOOK