American History Hit - Outlaws: New York's Criminal Mastermind

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

When was the first bank robbery? What does it take to be successful in organized crime? Is it possible to be non-violent? And how might you avoid getting caught? The story of Ma Mandelbaum, the mother of New York's criminal underworld, has the answer to these questions and more.Don is joined by Margalit Fox, former senior writer at the New York Times, to discuss the fascinating rise and fall of Frederica Mandelbaum, a 19th-century immigrant in New York who became one of the earliest and most successful figures in organized crime.Margalit's books is entitled 'The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Busy chatter in a soft light flickering from a golden candelabra spill from the windows of a second floor dining room in a building located at the corner of Clinton and Rivington on New York's Lower East Side. In a neighborhood otherwise characterized by cramped tenements and squalid poverty, within this room a team of servants hover.

Circling a long mahogany table, filling and refilling glasses with German wine, as guests clad in silk, diamonds and feather boas, tuck into a dinner of lamb and mint jelly. As their fineries indicate, these gilded-aged invitees represent the upper echelons of New York wealth, captains of business and industry. Others at the table, though, are of a different but no less powerful circle, the well-heeled lords of the criminal underworld. And presiding over the occasion, seated at the head of the table,

and wearing a shrewd smile, is the Queen Pin herself, the matriarch of organized crime, Mrs. Frederica Mandelbaum. But you can call her Ma. Everyone else does. It is American History Hit, and hello, welcome back to our regulars and greetings if this is your first time listening. Hope you like what you hear. One fascinating and ironic aspect of American life, frequently the subject of a throwback nostalgia, even romanticism,

is the storied industry of organized crime. It's, of course, the stuff of epic movies and television dating all the way back to the black and white noir pictures, to Bogart, Robinson, Cagney. But that cinema mythology is based on a singular understanding of organized crime as the result of immigrant egos, arriving on our shores to make their mark in the land of freedom and opportunity, using machine guns and brass knuckles to purvey protection, sex work, and illegal booze. But there was a woman who comes before all this,

whose life story offers up an alternative career in crime, one that was very profitable, far-reaching, and quite organized. She was an immigrant in New York, but that's about all she shares with those boisterous crooks who came along after her, because her criminal network operated in an entirely unique flavor and fashion based on the personality and wits of its famous founder. A woman who went by the less than criminal-sounding name, Frederica Mandelbaum. She is the subject of a new book entitled The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum about this renowned woman and the vast crimes she committed, authored by our guest today Marguerite Fox, former senior writer at the New York Times. Times. Hello, Marguerleit. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much, Don. Nice to be here.

Okay. So we should set the stage for this talk of intrigue and larceny. It would make sense at first to talk about her simple immigrant origins. Pretty typical stuff for the mid-19th century. But I think up front, we should just let listeners in on how big this story eventually gets as we tell it. Fair to say that Mrs. Mandelbaum is the mother of American organized crime. Am I right? I think that is accurate. There were other lower level, less successful bosses, whom we would now call organized crime bosses that preceded her. But they were all men. So we can certainly call her the godmother of organized crime. And we are also safe to say that she was the first truly major organized crime figure. What's so striking about her is she who had come here in steerage in 1850, with

with little more than the clothes on her back, within about a decade and a half, had built and presided over a criminal empire of shoplifters, jewel thieves, housebreakers, and eventually bank burglars that spanned not only New York City, but the whole country. This was a multi-million dollar concern,

and that's $1,800. dollars. And she operated pretty much in the open without spending a day in jail for 25 increasingly lucrative years. She was very famous in her day, a really big deal. Yeah. And such a big deal. It's surprising and telling that I have not heard about her until this book that you're putting out, which is going to be the story with so many people. That's why I want to start this interview by explaining where we're going, you know, sort of wet your appetite. If you're listening to this, because the extraordinary scale on which this woman works, especially given her beginnings, but really the times themselves, is amazing. And it all starts in the Lower East Side of New York City.

Her thing, I guess, would be the quick way of saying it, is that she's a big fence. She takes the idea of fencing goods to a whole another scale. That's right. She was a receiver of stolen goods known in slang terms as a fence. And one of the things that kind of warmed my 21st century heart about her is that when people of our time hear the phrase organized crime boss, they think of one of two things, either Tony Soprano or if they're a little bit older, they think of the big strapping nasty guy with spats and a tummy gun during prohibition off of the untouchables. and she was neither. Obviously, first and foremost, she wasn't a guy. But second, and happily for me, because it's somewhat redemptive and I felt it allowed me to tell her story, was that her brand of crime was almost entirely nonviolent. She wasn't having people whacked. She wasn't having people's kneecaps broken with baseball bats. She was a receiver of stolen goods. Her entire business model sent her. on property crime. Redistribution of properties.

She had her people robbed from the rich, and she gave, or rather, sold at a deep discount, to the country's newly emerging middle class. But we don't want to undersell the size of her personality as well. I mean, this woman is a huge character, and it's a fascinating to explain, which we will do later on. Let's go back to the beginnings. She comes over in 1850 from Germany, right? And she settles into the neighborhood.

called Klein-Deutschland. That's right. She, her husband, and their infant daughter were poor village Jews. They each came from families of peddlers, which was one of the few trades that Jews were allowed to practice in the old country. Very poor. There was a depression. As in Ireland, there was a potato blight in the 1840s. So they came from what is now central Germany, sailed six weeks under sail in steerage below deck, you know, filthy, crowded, dark, disease-ridden conditions and settled in this new immigrant enclave on New York's Lower East Side, known as Klein-Deutschland, Little Germany,

where German immigrants, Jews, and Gentiles lived and worked side-by-side, almost all of them in dire poverty. In those days, she is, it goes by the name of Frederica Henriette, Auguste, Wiesner. Is that the right pronunciation? That was her name at birth, indeed. Frederica Mandelbaum was born Friedricha Wiesner or Wiesner in central Germany in 1825. At 23, she married an itinerant Jewish peddler named Volf Mandelbaum. They had an infant daughter, Bertha.

They sailed separately. Volf went first, as was common then, among immigrant families, but by the summer of 1850, they were both settled in the Klein-Dorchland neighborhood of the Lower East Side. Poverty was absolutely dire. You'd have 20 or more huge families crammed into a single flimsy tenement, no running water, backyard outhouses with sewage overflowing because they weren't hooked up to the city. sewer system, garbage-filled streets snapped at by bands of roaming pigs, you know, really like something out of Dickens only transplanted to New York. And tragically, amid the communicable diseases like typhoid and cholera and consumption that ran through the tenements like brush fires,

their baby daughter Bertha died. So she came, lived in enormous poverty with this enormous loss. We know the look of these neighborhoods from the movies, but again, it's romanticized. This is a horror show down there. I mean, that's what eventually comes to pass when Theater Roosevelt and Jacob Rees start taking pictures of the place. To imagine anyone making it anywhere out of that kind of squalor is amazing, let alone having the vision that she obviously has. Right. And let's think about the odds against making it for someone who, like Frederica Mandelbaum, was dissonable. enfranchised from the process three times over, foreigner, woman, Jew, and xenophobia,

anti-Semitism, misogyny are nothing new today. They're terrifyingly present today. But of course, they go way back and they were very much present in her time. Now, obviously, she doesn't come to create organized crime. She comes to find a job. She's just to start a new life. What does she start out doing. In America, her husband, Wolf, resumed his work as a peddler, the trade he applied in the old country, and Frederica, too, goes to work as a peddler. She sells lace door to door in streets thronged with men, women, and even very young children peddling everything from fiddle strings and cigarettes to apple pie and ice cream. And Frederica, who would have been educated growing up, either at home or in a Jewish day school for girls, she was very smart. And she clearly had

good business smarts. She would have seen right away that if she were to remain a peddler, she and her family would stay in poverty for the rest of their lives. So she knew she had to do something else, but what could she do? Physically, she is striking as well. She's about six feet tall, right? I mean, she's a large person. She would be striking even for today. And in the mid-19th century, when people were not as tall as now,

she must have been a really dominating presence. Reports describe her as approaching six feet in height and weighing between 250 and 300 pounds. So she was a big, zoftig-imposing lady. Where's the pivot point for her? When does she start to think in terms of finding another means of a living? I think it's still within the 1850s. So within her first few years, she's still working as a peddler, but what she starts doing is she starts also selling,

or rather reselling, merchandise that is covertly brought to her by this whole infrastructure of pickpockets and scavengers and petty thieves that forms this kind of alternate subterranean economic system among New York's poor. And she's smart enough not to ask any questions about provenance. She sells it on as a profit. She splits the proceeds between herself and the thief with her getting the lion's share. That's the beginning of it. And by the end of the 1850s, she has amassed enough capital to give up peddling altogether and go to work as a solo entrepreneur, taking a range of increasingly lucrative goods from her growing

cadre of pickpockets and thieves, both men and women, reselling them to a list of waiting customers at a profit. Friedricha Mandelbaum had become a fence. She was called Marm, right? Where does that nickname come from? She was called Marm Mandebam or Ma or Mother Mandelbaum. It was from the fact that she was considered very motherly, both in her appearance. She would go on to have four more biological children of her own, and by all accounts was a very devoted mother to them.

She adored them. They adored her. But she was also wonderfully motherly to the co-womeness. of thieves and eventually bank burglars that formed the foot soldiers of her empire. She would supply bail money if they were ever arrested. She would whine and dine them at her groaning table in her by now opulent private apartments above her modest storefront on the Lower East Side that was the front for her real business. She would, and this I love coming to it as a postmodern person, she would supply them

with getaway horses and carriages when they need to flee the scene of a crime, which I love. Of course, what else could you do in the 1860s? But if you think for a minute, you've knocked over a bank. The police are coming. You have to get away. You get into your carriage and go clippy clop, genteelie down the street, kind of the original white bronco chase. So she looked after her thieves. She called them my chicks, and hence the name Marm Mandelbaum. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover anything specifically,

if you have any ideas of subject matter, we should be looking at, send us an email at a.H at historyhit.com. We'd love to hear from you. It's so much the stereotype where at least, the image that we have of the pickpockets, the crime in those days was such a common thing. And it really created a level or a layer of culture in America that extends out west and becomes the outlaws out there. It's just a fact of life. But a lot of that had to do with the caste system that certainly New York was, let alone other cities in the country,

where you really had the super rich of the Gilded Age and then this lower class that was, you know, going to have to do what they needed to do to get by. And that inevitably led to a life of crime. It also had a lot to do with the police, didn't it? That's right. One of the terms that I encountered in my research that I love is something historians called the crooked ladder, which is the means by which immigrants of this period who were denied well-paying, safe, respectable jobs in the upper world, that is the world of legitimate

commerce, had to resort to underworld activity to advance themselves economically and socially and provide for their families. And indeed, being friends with upper world figures who had power, Tammany Hall politicians and members of the police force, which was effectively an arm of the Tammany Hall machine in those years, that was very vital. Underworld commerce doesn't work unless there are these simultaneous ties forged with upper world brokers. You built a network of people on the take, essentially, all the way up the line. And that was really a system in those days. It wasn't just the aberration.

It was kind of the way, how New York was really run. That's exactly right. And whether you were a legitimate business who wanted to build a railroad or erect a building or run a steamship line, or you were a fence or a murderer for hire, who wanted to make sure you and your foot soldiers stayed out of jail. The way to do it was to grease the palms of people in power, in this case, the Tammany guys. And around Mrs. Mandelbaum's groaning table, drinking fine wines from her cellar, being waited on by her staff of servants under these glittering crystal chandeliers, were not only her cadre of thieves and bank burglars and

jewel heisters in evening dress, but down the other side of the table in evening dress were the leading lights of legit commerce, Wall Street men, tycoons, Tammany Pals, and very high ranking members of the police force. So it was pretty much all of a seamless hole in the New York of those years, which was a wide open town where everyone was on the make. Later on, I guess, out of a front, which is at, I think, Clinton and Rivington streets, right? A building that actually still exists, if I'm not mistaken. Her original building no longer stands. It was made of wood, so it survived only into the first decades of the 20th century.

There is, of course, another building there. It's a busy urban block. Not her original building, but her setup entailed a street-level haberdashery shop, which, to all appearances, was an ordinary, modest shop. and indeed any unsuspecting person could come in off the street and buy a length of silk or a spool of thread. They must have wondered at why everything was so deeply discounted. But the real operation went on in locked rooms in back of the shop where she had storage rooms for all of the swag that her foot soldiers were coming in. you know, huge bolts of silk, silver, loose diamonds, the size of peas, cashmere shawls, lace.

And in another room, she had a hand-picked team of German artisans effacing any identifying marks on silver and jewels. If one of her people stole a beautiful pocket watch that had the owner's name engraved on the back, no problem. Her artisans would just engrave a lovely little picture over the name, totally obscuring it. She had another room with beds that was a dormitory for visiting thieves from out of town. And then on the upper floors, she had her private apartments, which were furnished along the lines of the palace of Versailles. And this is someone who came here with only the clothes on her back. Right. She gets very, very wealthy.

She does. It's known that her fencing enterprise as a whole over 25 years moved about $10 million worth of stolen goods, which is $300 million in today's money. And when Frederica died in 1894, she had amassed a personal fortune that was estimated as high as a million dollars. Again, that would be tens of millions today. And yet, she stayed put in the Lower East Side because that was where she was most comfortable. That's exactly right. She never forgot her roots. She was so happy there. She could speak German, although she did master English. She had her people there. Her neighbors adored her because she provided jobs and largesse. When she was starting out and swag was coming in before she could afford to buy her entire building, she would pay rent on various neighborhood apartments. and let families live there for free in exchange for storing her swag in one room. And she was considered this great benefactress, one of the few people who really made it,

never mind how she did it. Her neighbors adored her. They would watch the street for her if they ever saw the cops coming on those rare times when the police felt compelled to make a raid for show. They would warn her. and she'd pull down her shades and lock her door. So she never wanted to leave until the very end. Fast forward to 1884.

When a reformist government comes in, she's finally indicted and she's about to be brought to trial. She has to make the painful decision to go on the lamb. Okay, hold on with that story because I just want to back up a little bit because I want to understand we're applying the term organized crime to Marm Mendemont. In her case, it's really organized in terms of her relationships with the network of thieves and crooks that she has developed, but it's also the relationships with the city politicians and with the police. It is her personality, the quality of her personality that basically enables all of this. What was that quality? What did she have? Well, the one obstacle I faced is when you're writing historical nonfiction, your first port of call is always your subjects, papers. Guess what? There weren't any here because she was so smart. She would have known that it would have been professional suicide to commit anything to paper. So I was fortunately able to

amass her life from hundreds and hundreds of period newspaper accounts, from court records, from memoirs by both cops and crooks. I can only infer about personality, of course, but based on sources who knew her during her lifetime, it is clear that she was very smart, she was tireless, she was fiercely loyal. Within the context of criminality, she was considered honest if she said she was going to pay a thief X percent for the swag. She would pay him X percent for the swag. She could be counted on for bail money. She was warm and convivial. She held company picnics in the countryside for her larcenous crew. She was this kind of larger than life, very warm, earthy, but also tough as nails figure.

Yeah, a mother figure, really, wasn't she? A mother figure, but there was, let it not be forgotten, the iron fist inside that velvet glove. Yeah, exactly. Well, any good salesman does have that, or at least peddler, and she drives a hard bargain, I would imagine on the wholesale level? Well, her rates were very consistent, which is one reason thieves like to do business with her because they always knew what to expect. So the economics of a transaction were as follows. A thief would bring her the swag. And she was such an acute businesswoman. She knew the wholesale value of any bolt of silk, any piece of jewelry they were going to bring her.

she would pay the thief 10 to 25% of that item's wholesale value, and then the thief could exit the equation safely. That's one of the things fence does is provide a layer of protection between the thief and the cops. The word comes from defense in its British spelling. She would then turn around and take that same swag, sell it to a waiting customer for half to two-thirds of wholesale. So, both she and the customer could exit the deal satisfied. She was getting a good profit and the customer was still paying way below all sale. She starts to build this business towards more ambitious crimes, right? I mean, about 1869, she's working bank heists.

And when I say that, she's not the criminal. She's not the person doing these things. She's hiring people to do this sort of thing. She becomes much more ambitious. That's right. One of the things that's so striking about Friedricha Mandelbaum was what an acute businesswoman she was. You know, there had always been crime. There had always been theft. There had always been fencing. But before she came on the scene, it had been kind of ad hoc,

what I call disorganized crime, opportunistic, not especially lucrative. And she really put her finger to the wind and must have said to herself, how can I build a criminal enterprise as a scalable business. And one of the things that happened in the 1860s was the country was flooded with paper money for the first time. The U.S. had been on the gold standard before that. And until the 1860s, bank burglary and safecracking had actually been rare crimes. You know, think about the onus of the man who plunders a mess of gold and then has to go clanking noisily and heavily down the street. It's not a good investment of your time. Then along comes the Civil War and the union needs to raise a tremendous amount of money quickly to wage war. So Lincoln endorses the printing of paper money,

greenbacks. Suddenly the country is flooded with millions and millions of dollars worth of greenbacks and the underworld snaps to attention. And one of those people who snapped to attention was Mrs. Mandelbaum. and in the late 1860s, she realizes the time has come to heist a bank. Okay. If I was listening to this podcast and I walked away with one thing from this conversation is that that the greenbacks lead to the increase in bank robbery. I had never put two and two together there. Nor had I until I started my research.

And it is one of those deterministic ways of looking at history that in this case is actually true. And right, we think from the movies that bank robbery was always around. It was much rarer than it became safecracking, same thing, counterfeiting same thing, because the underworld was not stupid. They realized that from this tsunami of paper money, there was money to be made illegally as well. Wow, that's cool. The one bank heist that I'm thinking of specifically in my notes here is Ocean National Bank, June 1869, Lower Manhattan. And Oceans, is that a reference that was being made by those Oceans 11 movies?

Or was that related at all? I doubt it. I mean, the ringleader of that larceness crew was Mr. Ocean, if I remember right. So I just riffed on that for the title of that chapter because there were four principal members of her crew involved in that robbery. So I called the chapter Oceans 4. But it does speak to the fame that she had, which is really remarkable. I mean, she's so well known. all of those. You can't imagine that the police wouldn't come knocking, but she already knew the

police wouldn't. That was the whole idea. That's right, because a lot of them were on her payroll, and they wanted to protect her, at least in those years. One of the things that fascinated me was, although, like so many people in women's history, she is largely forgotten today, in her own time, certainly in the 1870s and 80s, she was big news. She was covered routinely not only by the New York papers, but by papers all over the country. There's a wonderful quote that says her attire was both gorgeous and vulgar. She often wore $40,000 worth of jewels at once, which is, by the way, over a million dollars today. That quote is from one of the Cincinnati papers.

You know, her name meant something there. When she died in 1894, her death was covered as far away as London. And the thing that really thrilled and astounded me was she was the subject not only of news articles and editorial cartoons, but there were two late 19th century stage plays that featured characters clearly modeled on her. That's how big she was. I'm delighted by this subject. I mean, you can go in any direction with this woman. and it's a movie waiting to be made.

I just want to circle back just to explain the fact of that heist. I mean, they took $800,000 out of that bank, which is valued today at $17 to $20 million plus jewels and gold. I mean, and all of this would have been, I suppose, known by her, which is why they were doing it. It is important to sort of nail down the fact that we're talking about a woman being such a famous woman at a time when women really weren't in this position very often. And so in that way, she's kind of a proto-feminist, isn't she?

Well, in a way, certainly women were not lauded in that era for being successful capitalists in whatever vein. And what Mrs. Mandelbaum became, as one historian so brilliantly says, is a mogul of illegitimate capitalism. She was doing in the underworld what these robber barons, the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Rockefellers, who built these marble palaces on Fifth Avenue, were doing. in the upper world. And one of the things I hope people take away from the book is, was there really that much difference between those two cohorts? Because these titans of industry with their marble homes on Fifth Avenue, they won their uptown fortunes by cornering markets, breaking strikes, often violently, with fatal consequences, making hostile takeovers, bribing public officials, and yet what they were doing was considered above the law. What she was doing was not.

And really, what's the difference? Right. Never mind the anti-Semitism of the day. I mean, she would have been suffering that as well. Absolutely. Marguerle, this story is so fascinating and so colorful, but like all rises, she must fall. And this comes in the 1880s. She became a little too ambitious, I suppose, or had the times caught up to her. The culture had really changed, both in New York and in America as a whole, where in the time that Friedricha was making her rise, city governments were increasingly controlled by scrappy, working class immigrants that were pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and often ascending economically through copious graft. Tammany Hall is the canonical example. By the 1880s, the control of the control.

of cities was passing increasingly to native-born patrician white men, men who had been educated at Harvard and Princeton and Yale, and they wanted to push out this scrappy immigrant cohort that was repugnant to them. And even more crucially, they became aware that operators like Mrs. Mandelbaum, especially she, were cutting seriously into profits in industries like banking, textiles, and jewelry. And in 1884, a reformist district attorney, Peter only, takes office in New York City, and he too is from this patrician background. And so the new bourgeois elites say, aha, we can finally encourage a DA who will go after Mrs. Mandelbaum, and Peter only made that his mission. Now, he was smart. He knew he could not entrust the cops to bust Frederica Mandelbaum because many of them were on her payroll.

Many of them were her friends. So what did he do? He enlisted a private concern, the Pinkerton Agency, to bring her down. Well, those Pinkertons. Those Pinkertons. They play quite a bigger role than people give them credit for these guys. And they create basically sting operation and catcher in the act of doing this. But, you know, I don't want to go into detail because I want people to read this book. It's a really fun read. Like, this is a fascinating woman. And as you go, you're getting not just the biography of this personality, but also a picture of the Times in a completely, you know, unique sort of way through someone you've never probably even heard of before.

So I'm just going to encourage people to grab a hold of this book. It's brand new. It's called the talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. And leave it at that, if that's okay with you, Marguerly. That is more than okay with me. I'll never say no to anyone's encouraging people to buy my book. Well, it's not just one book. You've written a number of them, and your career is remarkable.

So I thank you so much for this conversation. Marguerleet Fox has been the guest, a writer of great experience and renown, and it only goes on. Thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure. Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. each week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Bye for now. Thank you.