The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise And Fall Of An American Organizedcrime Boss,Used

America's first great organizedcrime lord was a ladya nice Jewish mother named Fredericka Mandelbaum.'[Fox has] a nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickenslevel gift for concisely conveying personality New York MagazineIn 1850, an impoverished 25yearold named 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 countrys most notorious fencea receiver of stolen goodsand a successful criminal mastermind. By the mid1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (the equivalent of nearly $300 million in todays 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 wasnt just a successful crook: She was a business visionaryone 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 chainsturning theft into a viable, scalable business.The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid image of Gilded Age New Yorka 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 oncefamous, nowforgotten heroine, a tale that exemplifies the cherished ragstoriches narrative of Victorian America while simultaneously upending it altogether.