The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss
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- Synopsis
- America&’s first great organized-crime lord was a lady—a nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum.&“A tour de force . . . With a pickpocket&’s finesse, Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York.&”—Liza Mundy, author of The SisterhoodIn 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 country&’s most notorious &“fence&”—a receiver of stolen goods—and 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 wasn&’t just a successful crook: She was a business visionary—one 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 chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business.The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid portrait of Gilded Age New York—a 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 America&’s cherished rags-to-riches narrative while simultaneously upending it entirely.
- Copyright:
- 2024
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780593243862
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780593243855
- Publisher:
- Random House Publishing Group
- Date of Addition:
- 07/02/24
- Copyrighted By:
- Margalit Fox
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- History, Nonfiction
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.