Long before Al Capone turned his eye to bootlegging and well before Bugsy Siegl decided to take
his ill-gotten gains and cash in on the casino boom in Vegas, there was another boss in town.
This one was perhaps the most unassuming of ladies, and within just a few years of setting
foot on American soil for the first time, she had built up one of the largest organized
crime empires the still-new nation had ever seen.
When the papers talked about her — and they talked about her a lot — they called her
"Mother" Mandelbaum.
Why?
As she once said herself, "I am Ma because I give them what a mother cannot sometimes
give — money and horses and diamonds."
And she took care of her children, a vast network of criminals from all walks of life
and with all kinds of specialties.
She guided them, trained them, and when it was necessary, she protected them… as only
a mother could.
TITLE: Little Germany
Her story starts in the middle of the 19th century when people were coming from across
Europe to find a new life in the land of opportunity and promise.
Some were looking for a fresh start, some were trying to escape the dire conditions
of their homeland, and others were just looking for adventure.
What they found when they got to America was often a far cry from what they had imagined.
Fredericka Mandelbaum and her husband, Wolf Israel, were just two of the hundreds of thousands
of immigrants who poured into New York City in the mid-1800s.
Sources vary as to the exact date, but suggest they left Europe around 1848 and settled in
an area of New York City's Lower East Side known as Little Germany.
It wasn't a great place, but it was a place where like-minded and undoubtedly adventurous
individuals could find others who shared a history, a culture, and struggles.
And there were a lot of struggles.
The typical tenement apartment was a mere 325 square feet, and most were home to as
many as 15 people.
Life in America wasn't as much about living as it was about survival, and in order to
survive, Mandelbaum and her husband spent their days — up to 14 hours at a time — as
street peddlers.
This likely wasn't an entirely new way of life for them.
You see, Mandelbaum was from one of the handful of Jewish families living in the German state
of Hesse-Kassel, and they weren't just a minority, they also existed on the outskirts of more
mainstream society.
Jewish families like hers were often assaulted and extorted, forced to remain on the move
for their own safety — especially if they didn't pay the protection money thugs often
demanded in exchange for simply leaving them alone.
It's likely her father made his living as a merchant and a peddler, buying and selling
second-hand goods to support his family - but this is just speculation.
For the early years of their marriage, she and her husband lived the lives of wandering
peddlers as well.
It was a hard life, one where they could expect to earn an average of around $6 per week.
TITLE: From peddler to crime boss
In August 1857, a massive hurricane sank a ship called the Central America.
It had been carrying a huge amount of gold, and without that gold, the economy also started
to sink.
It was a huge deal and caused a major financial panic as businesses large and small started
to fail, investments crashed, and people realised they were suddenly facing unemployment and
ruin.
But something else happened, too.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and with more and more people facing empty
kitchens and even emptier bellies, crime rose.
A lot.
A surge of children took to the streets, often sent there by destitute parents desperate
to find some way to feed their families.
Little hands were perfect for picking pockets and stealing whatever wasn't nailed down,
and even in the face of economic ruin, there were a lot of opportunities for the most enterprising
young scavengers.
Children took to the dirty, littered streets of the city to find anything that might help
life become a little more bearable: a bit of cotton that fell from a bale, flour and
sugar carelessly spilled onto the street, and just general junk.
Sometimes these things were dropped and discarded.
Sometimes, they were stolen.
And all of those thieves needed a place to sell their stolen goods.
You can't eat jewelry, after all, and Mother Mandelbaum saw a brilliant business opportunity.
Forging ahead without any real help from her husband (who police would later describe as
a "nonentity"), Mandelbaum started buying and selling what those scavengers found, and
she also started buying from the female pickpockets and thieves that made their living nicking
stuff from some of the high-end department stores that still catered to the city's wealthy.
Mother Mandelbaum had a few things going for her, and one of those things was her experience
not just buying and selling, but haggling on prices.
When she bought, she offered about a fifth of what she could sell the item for — and
given that peddlers averaged only a few dollars a week at the time selling the standard sort
of fare, the markup that came with branching out into stolen goods gave her a serious boost
in income.
And she made the most of it.
Eight years after the crash, Mandelbaum had built up the cash — and connections — to
be able to lease a building that contained a dry goods store.
Rent was steep, and adjusted for inflation, she paid an estimated $6100 and $6500 for
her first and second year there.
That's way more than her peddler's salary would have realistically supported, so clearly,
there was something fishy going on.
But this was 19th century New York, and looking the other way was a way of life.
The store was, indeed, just the front for her operation, and it wasn't long before she
was dealing in everything from jewels — particularly diamonds — to fine silk and lace, silver,
gold, and even horses and carriages.
Once, she even bought and resold an entire herd of goats, because if it made money, she
was in.
She was excellent at hiding what she was doing, too, employing other German immigrants and
listing them as "salespeople" on census records.
Technically, that was true.
It wasn't just merchandise lifted off the streets of New York that found its way into
her warehouses, either.
When the Great Chicago Fire swept through the city in 1871, there was — unsurprisingly
— a ton of looting and pillaging going on there.
A lot of what was stolen ended up passing through her hands and her warehouses, and
it was all adding to her bottom line.
TITLE: A little bribery goes a long way
If Mother Mandelbaum had simply been a fence, just someone who only bought and sold stolen
goods for a considerable profit, the story might have ended there.
But she wasn't just buying and selling stolen goods, she built up a massive network of connections
that stretched across the country and well up into Canada.
Even as she took more and more little pickpockets under her wing, she would also turn around
and greet cops and judges — particularly the ones that had a loose interpretation of
the law — with a friendly smile.
Even local politicians knew how popular she was, and they were sure to keep on her good
side.
There was some serious bribery going on there.
And let's be completely honest: at the time, New York City was filled with just as much
corruption as cockroaches.
It was a time when the city was under the watchful eye of the notoriously crooked politicians
of Tammany Hall, the entity behind the 1850's City Council nicknamed the Forty Thieves.
By the time Mother Mandelbaum's operation was in full swing, Boss Tweed was in charge.
Given that he was known for working in an office that he opened solely to have an official
place to take payments, it's safe to say he was fine with all kinds of unlawful shenanigans.
Tammany Hall in particular was well aware of her operation, and made it a point to keep
on Mother Mandelbaum's good side.
She couldn't vote, that's true, but she was rapidly becoming very influential — and
she knew plenty of people who could vote.
One hand washes the other, and Mandelbaum's empire continued to grow, while Tweed was
quite literally given the keys to the city's treasury in 1870 and started expanding on
his own criminal enterprises.
Tweed is a figure that history remembers as being one of the most corrupt politicians
to ever rise to power in the city.
A New York State Senator with a list of other titles and positions a mile long, Tweed used
his political clout to swindle and steal an unthinkable amount of money from the city's
coffers — a haul that would, in today's money, amount to around $3.5 billion dollars
in ill-gotten gains.
His Tammany Hall was a powerful ally for Mother Mandelbaum to have.
Meanwhile, Mandelbaum started hiring more than just a few hungry street urchins.
There was only so far they were going to be able to take her, after all, and acquiring
the loot was only half the job.
She had to get rid of it, too, and so she started building a team of associates to launder
her merchandise.
Engravers who could remove identifying marks from jewelry were taken into her confidence,
cab drivers were kept on call in case someone needed to make a fast escape, and partners
at a major law firm — Howe & Hummell — were kept on retainer… just in case.
She even had a special fund for her most trusted associates, and called it perhaps the most
honest name she could have used: the Bureau for the Protection of Criminals.
The face of the city was changing, and Mother Mandelbaum was there to take advantage of
it every step of the way.
TITLE: Branching out
Sure, Mother Mandelbaum increased her wealth exponentially when she branched out into selling
stolen goods, but she didn't stop there.
She was an entrepreneur, and entrepreneurs are always looking for the next big thing.
For her, it was bankrolling other criminal enterprises undertaken by some of the most
audacious criminals in her little black book of names.
You've got to spend money to make money, the old saying goes, and that's even true of crime.
The countless immigrants who moved to the young New York City helped build it on the
shoulders of talents brought from the Old World, and German immigrants excelled at engraving.
From woodcuts and prints it was just a short hop, skip, and a jump into counterfeiting,
and that was just one more aspect of her organization.
Even as her own finances continued to climb, she made it clear that if someone had a great
plan and even better skills, she was willing to bankroll jobs that would turn a profit.
She was connected to some of the biggest bank robbers at the time, including people like
Wesley Allen and Michael Kurtz, and she also provided the startup funds for a job that
would turn into one of the biggest robberies of them all.
A known associate of George Leonidas Leslie, she provided him with around $65,000 in today's
money to get the people and tools he needed to rob the Manhattan Savings Bank in 1878.
And rob it, he did, netting $2,747,700 from the bank frequented by people with names like
Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie.
To put that in perspective, you'll have to adjust that for inflation.
Today, that one score would be worth around $72 million… give or take.
TITLE: Mother Mandelbaum's School for Enterprising Criminals
There was a certain sort of symbiosis to the whole setup: without Mother Mandelbaum, the
city's thieves and pickpockets would have nowhere to launder their stolen goods.
And without her ring of thieves, Mandelbaum wouldn't have had a steady flow of goods to
buy, mark up, and flip.
It's no wonder she wanted to take care of them, and in order to make sure her thieves
were the very best they could be, legend says she opened Mandelbaum's Grand Street School
in 1870.
It's an unassuming name, perhaps, but anyone who walked through the doors of the storefront
on Clinton and Grand Street was walking into a school designed to give the city's street
children some valuable life lessons — the sort that involved checking your morals at
the door.
And there were plenty of children who needed to learn if they were going to survive, as
the city was teeming with orphaned children known to the more fortunate as "street rats".
The school started with the basics, and kids were taught criminal life skills like pickpocketing
and the art of misdirection.
While there's no official transcripts from the school — which isn't really surprising,
it's not the sort of thing you'd really want to leave a written record of — it's believed
that Mandelbaum recruited some of the city's finest adult thieves and conmen to teach the
children criminal skills.
Those that showed an innate talent were taught other things: blackmail, the art of the con,
burglary, and even safe-cracking.
And Mandelbaum recruited the best of the best to come work directly for her, including one
young woman who would become known as the Princess of Crime.
Sophie Lyons was one of Mandelbaum's star students, and after getting her start learning
from her pickpocket parents then being taken under Mother's wing, Lyons became notorious
as a con artist and thief who ran some seriously brazen scams.
One of her favorites was reportedly using her feminine wiles to lure men into a hotel
room, sweet-talk them out of their clothes, then blackmail them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Lyons#/media/File:Sophie_Lyons_in_Professional_Criminals_of_America.png
Lyons eventually gave up her life of crime, and condemned Mandelbaum for taking advantage
of the lonely, hungry, and desperate, setting them on a path of crime they may never have
gone down otherwise.
That's certainly one way to look at it, but not everyone was so critical.
In fact, most people had quite the opposite view of their matronly crime lord.
And as for the school, that was fairly short-lived.
Mandelbaum shut it down herself in 1876, after only six years.
Why shut down something so successful?
That’s because she got wind of a new student who had enrolled, and she was too smart to
let the son of a police officer in on their secrets.
TITLE: Tea and crumpets, anyone?
Mother Mandelbaum's massive criminal empire spanned from the lowliest pickpocket to the
upper echelons of New York City's political landscape.
No one can be at work all the time, though, and when Mandelbaum wasn't dealing in stolen
jewels or herds of goats, she was far from frightening.
She didn't prowl the streets with a gun, just looking for trouble, she didn't rule her neighborhood
with an iron fist, and in fact, by all accounts, she was quite nice.
When her obituary ran in the German-language paper the New York Volkszeitung, it described
her as "honorable and reliable", and as someone whose "word was as good as gold".
When New York City's law enforcement was asked about her character, Police Chief George W.
Wailing described her this way: "As a woman and a mother, [she] is spoken of with respect."
Others spoke of her as a "wonderful woman", a "woman of ability and nerve," and lauded
her for her generosity.
It wasn't just her generosity people spoke highly of, it was also, her parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredericka_Mandelbaum#/media/File:Fredericka_Mendelbaum2.jpg
At the same time she was buying and selling and dealing, Mandelbaum was living in a house
on the Lower East Side, where she held soirees and sent out invitations from "The Honorable
and Mrs. William Mandelbaum".
The parties were sometimes elegant, formal affairs, sometimes summertime picnics, but
always exciting.
The guest lists would include all of New York's most prominent judges and politicians… along
with some of her criminal empire.
It would allow "business acquaintances" to rub elbows, schmooze over cocktails and ultimately
further their own movements upward through the hierarchy of crime, and that was fine
by her.
At any rate, aside from the whole criminal empire thing, Mother Mandelbaum was almost
shockingly conventional.
She was a generous and respected member of her synagogue, she invited her "associates"
into her home to visit with her children, and when those in her organization needed
help, she provided it.
And that's likely one of the things that allowed her to stay in business for so long.
When it came to dealing with those in her own community, she was known for offering
jobs when they were needed, and even undercutting the prices offered by legitimate wholesalers,
and giving struggling families the help they badly needed.
When it came time for law enforcement to bring her down, they knew they were on their own
- her close-knit community would not betray her.
TITLE: One bad apple to spoil the bunch
So, here's a question: where were the police in all of this?
Surely, bribery can only get you so far, and it just takes one person who's not willing
to take some cash and look the other way.
New York City's police department was fairly new at the time, and they hadn't quite figured
out what their role was in the growing city.
When they were on the streets, they were looking for some specific things: gang-related brawls,
drunk and disorderly disruptions, and the vocal, troublesome crowds that tended to congregate
when social reformers and the like got a little too preachy on their soap-boxes.
When it came to criminals like Mandelbaum, she was parked firmly in the blind spot of
a police department who would only negotiate for the return of stolen goods if the victim
paid them to do so.
And this was an official policy, not just some corrupt cops doing some shady stuff to
see what they can fill their pockets with.
Since it was sometimes easier for victims to just forget about what they'd lost, thieves
and fences dealing in stolen goods knew they weren't a high priority.
Still, it's wildly impressive that Mother Mandelbaum managed to stay out of any real,
serious trouble for around 30 years.
So, what was it that finally brought down her criminal empire?
A bolt of silk and the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
It wasn't until 1884 that a New York District Attorney named Peter Olson had finally had
enough of the Queen of the Fences, and turned to the Pinkertons for help.
They sent Detective Gustave Frank, who got an introduction through someone perhaps not
as loyal as Mandelbaum had thought.
When police finally raided her warehouse, they found the silk that the undercover Pinkerton
had sold her, and a ton of stolen merchandise.
How much stolen loot?
One contemporary journalist wrote, "It did not seem possible that so much wealth could
be assembled in one spot.
There seemed to be enough clothes to supply an army.
There were trunks filled with precious gems and silverware.
Antique furniture was stacked against a wall."
And keep in mind, this is at a time when children were playing in the streets alongside the
decomposing remains of carriage horses left where they had fallen, and when many parents
weren't sure how they were going to feed their families.
Most wouldn't have been able to envision holding a single earring, much less be able to imagine
a whole suitcase of precious jewels.
There should have been enough there to put her away for a long time, but remarkably,
that didn't happen.
Mandelbaum, her son, and her clerk insisted that they were simply running a dry goods
store… which technically was almost true.
She claimed she had never stolen anything, which again… you've got to give her that.
In all her career, she never did steal anything herself.
Mandelbaum was let out on bail, which she promptly jumped and headed north into Canada.
And the story still isn't done.
Ten years later, Mandelbaum had set herself up as a respectable sort of citizen living
in Hamilton, Ontario, working in her hat shop and participating in the Anshe Sholem Hebrew
Congregation.
Was there more to it than that?
Possibly.
At any rate, by 1894 she had found herself pining for her old stomping grounds in the
13th Ward.
She made that known, too, telling friends and acquaintances just as much.
Then, in February of that year, Mandelbaum passed away.
A coffin was headed from Ontario to New York City… but here's the thing.
No one really knew if it was actually her body or just one more brilliant cog in the
well-oiled machine that had allowed her to stay a free woman for so long.
Did she fake her death so she could return to her beloved city in peace?
People thought she might have.
Was she now calling herself Madame Fuchs, and returning to her roots as a simple peddler?
It's entirely possible.
No one ever really knew, just as no one knows just how much money she handled in her lifetime.
Estimates vary, with one suggesting that when she fled New York in 1884, she left behind
merchandise that, in today's money, would be worth around $24 million.
Give or take.