Meet ‘The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum:’ America’s first gangster

They were branded the “Jewish Mafia,” or the “Kosher Nostra” — four violent street-tough Jews with lots of criminal smarts who dominated tabloid headlines and the Wanted posters that festooned the bulletin boards of US post offices across the land.

Among them was Meyer Lansky, dubbed the kingpin of organized crime in America; Arnold Rothstein, known as “The Brain” and considered the pioneer executive of the nation’s crime wave in the Roaring Twenties; Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, handsome, hot-headed and ruthless with Hollywood good looks; and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called “he most dangerous criminal in the United States.

But decades before their crimes made them legends, there was Fredericka Mandelbaum, a portly German immigrant mother of four — the ultimate Jewish mother who a Drew Barrymore of the mid to late 1800s might have lovingly called “Mamala.” Except for her looks.

At a mannish 6 feet tall, apple-cheeked and of Falstaffian girth, she weighed between 250 and 300 pounds and resembled “the product of a congenial liaison between a dumpling and a mountain.”

She dressed in voluminous black, brown or dark blue silk gowns, topped with a sealskin cape, a bonnet of ostrich feathers and covered, eventually, in diamonds estimated at a worth of more than $40,000 (some $1.3 million today) — earrings, necklaces, brooches, bracelets and rings.

Before long, Mandelbaum, who started in New York’s immigrant alleys on the Lower East Side as a street peddler, became America’s first major organized crime boss.

Once, when Pinkerton detectives raided her storefront and opened the safe, a fortune spilled out: rings, chains, bracelets, silverware, loose diamonds the size of peas. In hidden passages, there were bars of gold and equipment to weigh the stash.

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Her greatest caper — the 1869 burglary of Manhattan’s Ocean National Bank, masterminded by Mandelbaum — netted her $800,000 (some $23 million in today’s money).

And those wages of crime were just the tip of her years-long spree, often protected by a corrupt police leadership and Tammany Hall power brokers.

The strange story of Mandelbaum and her criminality is detailed in journalist Margalit Fox’s entrancing new 336-page book, “ The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss ” (Random House).

“For 25 years, Fredericka Mandelbaum reigned as one of the most infamous underworld characters in America,” writes Fox, a former New York Times obituary writer and author of four other nonfiction books. “Working from her humble Manhattan storefront, Rivington and Clinton Streets, she presided over a multi-million-dollar criminal operation that centered on stolen luxury goods and later diversified into bank robbery. Conceived in the mid 1800s — long before the accepted starting time for organized crime in the United States — her empire extended across the country and beyond.”

Having caught the attention of the press, The New York Times would call her “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York.”

Arriving in steerage in 1850 from Kassel, Germany, Mandelbaum was an impoverished 25-year-old. She settled into Kleindeutschland, a community of fellow German Jews on New York’s Lower East Side, with her husband and began working the streets as a rag peddler. Selling lace door to door, she quickly learned there was no future in street peddling.

According to the author, Mandelbaum hooked up with a veteran criminal thief and fence, “General Abe” Greenthal, who taught her how to appraise luxury goods — which became the foundation for her future career.

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Women were the most skilled shoplifters at the time and Mandelbaum mentored these underworld ladies to steal and promised them bail if arrested.

With employees doing the stealing for her, Mandelbaum was “availing herself of choice items from one bourgeois home so that they might adorn another or lifting bolts of silk from large textile concerns for sale to neighborhood tailors,” writes Fox.

She fenced anything “from silks to securities” — even 50,000 stolen cigars. But her specialty was diamonds removed from the era’s fashionable stickpins, easily extracted from a cravat or lapel by a nimble-fingered thief. Back at her shop, the gems would be removed and sold to witting and unwitting customers.

But there was no great fortune here, so she turned to shoplifting with a skilled crew of foot soldiers before moving on to become “a large-scale receiver of stolen luxury goods, an orchestrator of theft-to-order and before long, an impresario of bank robberies,” writes the author.

“She sold to dealers and dressmakers in Trenton, Albany, Buffalo, Cincinnati — she had agents everywhere,” according to a Pinkerton agent, and owned warehouses across the tri-state area.

Over the next two decades, according to Fox, Mandelbaum had become a criminal mastermind and the country’s most notorious fence — buying, camouflaging and reselling stolen luxury goods through her modest haberdashery shop with a network of hand-picked burglars and thieves. As the author points out, Mandelbaum had established herself as one of the city’s premier receivers of stolen goods, even as she was marginalized for being an immigrant, a woman and a Jew.

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Widowed in 1875, she became the sole support of four children. Thus, with police and politicians on her payroll, the crime boss began planning nocturnal bank burglaries — all while still reigning as a popular Manhattan society hostess and philanthropist, and running a storefront of a sprawling criminal enterprise.

When New York became the garment center of the country, it was time for the talented Mrs. Mandelbaum to expand her business into stealing silk.

With the growth of crime in big cities like New York, local law enforcement needed help. It arrived in the form of Allan Pinkerton’s aggressive National Detective Agency whose motto was “We Never Sleep.”

His son Robert took over when his father died and was conscripted by New York district attorney Peter Olney to nail Fredericka Mandelbaum through entrapment.

The plan was to slip an agent into her shop and catch her handling stolen goods.

Pinkerton Agent Gustave Frank led the operation, introducing himself to Mandelbaum as a shady silk jobber and eventually worming his way into her confidence. Unearthing a piece of silk that still had private markings, he urged her to come clean and she punched him in the face. She was arrested, indicted and given a trial date. On the day of her trial, she jumped bail and fled to Toronto, Canada.

Fredericka Mandelbaum died in Canada in the spring of 1894 from paralysis, at age 68. The Fall River Daily Evening News of Massachusetts reported that the “Queen of Crooks … had lived like a princess since she escaped from New York.”

Mandelbaum finally made it back to New York, the city where she began and ended her career of crime, in a coffin.  She was buried in the family plot at the Union Field Cemetery in Queens.

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