Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss-Fast Shipping

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Title: Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

Author: Margalit Fox

ISBN: 9780593243855

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2024

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

Number of Pages: 336

Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.

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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 Sisterhood

A PARADE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 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 country’s most notorious “fence”–a receiver of stolen goods–and a criminal mastermind. 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.