This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past two hundred and fifty years, and now it takes form in a new way. The twenty twenty six semi quincentennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint.
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Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories. Frederica Marm Mandelbaum was a German Jewish immigrant who rose from poverty to become one of the most powerful crime bosses in Gilded Age New York. She built a sophisticated network that bought and resold stolen goods, financed robberies, and cultivated connections with criminals, police, and politicians.
Her wealth and influence made her both a respectable philanthropist and a notorious underworld figure. Here to share the story of this forgotten figure in American history is Margalit Fox, a former New York Times obituary writer and the author of *The Talented Misses Mandelbaum*. Let's get into the story. A hundred forty years ago, on a hot July day in New York City in 1884, a group of Pinkerton detectives burst into a modest-looking haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and they needed to get into the safe. They demanded the keys from the shop owner, a towering fifty-nine-year-old woman, beautifully dressed in diamond earrings and a floor-length silk gown, named Frederica Mandelbaum.
And Mrs. Mandelbaum refused. No, she said in her German-accented English, "Just to think of such a thing." Undaunted, the Pinkerton detective summoned a blacksmith. He came with a hammer and chisel, started hacking away, and suddenly a pretty teenage girl runs in from the next room, Mrs. Mandelbaum's daughter Annie, and she says, "Stop!" She hands over the keys.
The one honest member of that family, the Pinkertons, unlock the safe, and what spills out but an Aladdin's cave—jewelry of every description: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, bracelets, cufflinks, necklaces. Earrings, a heap of gold watches and watch movements and cases, fine silverware. They'd never seen anything like it. Upstairs. In Mrs.
Mandelbaum's beautifully appointed bedroom, they found melting pots and scales for weighing gold and diamonds. Elsewhere, they found trunks full of fine silver, the most expensive cashmere shawls, bolts of expensive lace. Mrs. Mandelbaum. And an employee were promptly arrested, and with that, the Pinkertons managed to do what the New York police force had not done in twenty-five years: arrest the head of the biggest organized crime empire, not only in New York but in America.
And as Missus Mandelbaum. This upright widow, philanthropic synagogue goer, is being led away. One of the Pinkerton detectives kindly advises her. He says, "You are caught at last. The best thing you can do is to make a clean breast of things." And with that, the six-foot-tall Frederica Mandelbaum whirls and punches him in the face.
Friedrich Mendelbaum came to this country in steerage in 1850. Her people were poor Jewish peddlers and traders in Central Germany, and she married at 23, a poor peddler named Wolf Mendelbaum. The region was in the midst of an economic depression. As in Ireland, there was a potato famine, and Jewish life was particularly difficult. Jews were restricted as to the trades they could ply, and the regions in which they could live.
So, in eighteen fifty, Wolf and Friedrika Mandelbaum, with their infant daughter Bertha, made the long voyage under sail, more than six weeks, and they arrived. In the port of New York, they settled in a neighborhood of the Lower East Side that soon became known as Klein Deutschland, Little Germany. It was one of America's first important ethnic enclaves, and there, Jewish and Gentile neighbors alike could pass their days speaking their native language, dancing and drinking in beer halls, seeing German folk. Parades. It was very homy in that respect.
However, it was also full of poverty and privation in the tenements where Frederica lived with her young family. More than twenty families might be packed into a small, flimsy, shabby building. Workmen's cart horses would die and drop where they fell. Their carcasses mounded with swarming flies. Residential buildings were situated right next to industrial buildings like factories, warehouses, and slaughterhouses.
It was a very, very difficult place to live, and as the Mandelbeums quickly discovered, jobs for immigrants. Were severely limited. In her first years in New York, Frederica worked as a peddler, working in the streets, already masked with pushcarts and wagons, peddlers selling all kinds of wares. She sold lace door to door, but because she was smart. An ambitious and determined not to remain in poverty, realized she would have to do something different.
Now, what happened in that period if you were an immigrant and wanted to rise economically, wanted a better life? There were these few dangerous, ill-paying jobs in the world of so-called legitimate commerce. For men, there was another route, the so-called crooked ladder, which consisted of various kinds of underworld activity that offered, for better or worse, a way to support your family, a way to rise economically and in social status. For women, who, in desperate last resort or bold self determination, sought A criminal livelihood. There were only two choices: shoplifting, or prostitution.
Shoplifting was the bottom level of illicit commerce. There wasn't much money to be made, and for a proper married woman like Frederica Mandelbaum, prostitution was clearly out of the question.
So what was she going to do? She knew that she needed to expand her business, not only selling stuff but acquiring stuff through whatever channel, disguising it, and reselling it. In other words, becoming a receiver of stolen goods, also known as a fence. She apprenticed to two.
Well-known New York fences, and under their tutelage, she learned to appraise the value of the luxury goods like silk and sealskin and cashmere and lace that the city's newly emerging middle class was being taught to crave. And so, by about 1859, she was able to strike out on her own, receiving goods of dubious providence from small-time thieves and street scavengers, asking no questions, and selling the swag onward at a profit. Frederica Mabelbaum had become a fence. And you've been listening to Margalit Fox, author of *The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum*.
Tell the story of *The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum*, and my goodness, what talent she had, and what a sense of risk-taking and adventure she had. Coming to the United States with her husband and her baby in steerage, and being a peddler wasn't cutting it for her. The options for women at the time, when it came to criminality, well, there was shoplifting and there was prostitution. They're attracted.
What did was becoming what we now know as a fence, developing appraisal values and knowledge and a network to become, well, as we'll learn, one of the most powerful underworld bosses in New York City. When we come back, the rest of the story of the talented Mrs. Mandelbaum here on Our American Story. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past two hundred and fifty years, and now it takes form in a new way.
The twenty twenty six semi quincentennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new. Official coins at usmint.gov/semiq.
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Indeed dot com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And we return to our American stories, and to the story of crime boss and philanthropist Frederica Mandelbaum.
Let's get back into it. Here again is author Margalit Fox.
So, Frederica was smart. She knew that in order to go out on her own, she would need to expand the range of merchandise she had been offering as a peddler, and she would need to stock better stuff.
Well, without capital, how could she do that? She turned to the cohort of petty thieves and street scavengers that were forming an underground economic system in New York. She had the women shoplifting in the city's fine department stores by day.
Now the men breaking into docks, at warehouses and textile emporiums, stealing bolts of silk by night. And they brought them to Frederica. She disguised them, if necessary, so that they could be less readily identified by their owners, and she sold them onward at a profit. Frederica Mandelbaum was brilliant at putting her finger to the wind and seeing. What was in fashion, and therefore what the public wanted to buy at deep discount, so she knew she had to go for swag in a proper jewelry store, like Tiffany and Company, which was one of her first stomping grounds.
She would go in beautifully dressed. Look at the diamond counter, where in those days a lot of loose diamonds were sold that could later be set any way the owner wanted. She didn't buy anything, but she was getting a sense of the lay of the land of the store and what the staff was doing, who was where, and someone as elegantly dressed as she was by this time would have aroused no suspicion. She then. Worked out a method by which a very elegantly dressed pair of her thieves—first an elegant man, and following him by some minutes an elegant woman—could steal an enormous loose diamond from the diamond counter at Tiffany's using no other weapon.
Than a piece of chewing gum, a piece of chewed chewing gum, and I will leave what happened to the imagination. The whole modus operandi is explained in the book. Fridrika Mandelbaum, cautious as ever, starts small. In 1869, she floats a trial balloon. She underwrites.
Part of the expenses to buy a set of bank burglars' tools, and you know the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars worth of tools in today's money, for a cohort of men to knock over the Ocean National Bank in Lower Manhattan. Possibly with Mrs. Mandelbaum's backing, they put up rent money to rent an office. In the basement level of the bank, that conveniently was under the office of the bank president, where the vault was. And using Mrs.
Mandelbaum's tools, they slowly chip away at the ceiling of their rental office until they're able to cut through the floor by night of the bank president's office. Go into the vault, and they go after paper, cash, and bonds. That operation is so successful that she bankrolls several more bank burglaries around the country, and this continues until her arrest in eighteen eighty four. The police of New York City were very much aware. Of Fridrika Mandelbaum and her crimes and how she earned her living, by the 1870s she was literally world famous.
She would be the subject of newspaper and magazine articles that would at least hint at her illicit enterprise.
Sometimes they would out and out call her the notorious fence of the Lower East Side, and two different stage plays had characters based on her. That was how famous she was. When she died, her death was covered in every major American newspaper, and as far away as London. And so let's just say. She made it very much worth the while of everyone, from the cop on the beat to some of the highest police officials in the upper echelons of the department, to let's say look the other way.
In. Eighteen eighty-four, a reformist DA, a man named Peter Olney, was appointed in New York, and he decided at long last that somebody should go after Mrs. Mandelbaum. Well, he knew he couldn't trust the police; they were her lapdogs.
So the new DA enlists the Pinkerton firm, and in the summer of 1884, the sting operation finally works. The agent who is undercover is able. To seize a tiny strip of marked silk and covertly puts it in his pocket, and that becomes Exhibit A in her pre-trial hearings after she is arrested. An irony of ironies, in the twenty-five years she operated, something like ten million dollars worth of stolen merchandise passed successfully. Through her shop, and that's ten million eighteen nineties dollars.
It would be something like three hundred million in today's money. But all it took in the end to bring her down was a single little strip of silk. She is arrested. The case comes to trial. The courtroom is packed with spectators.
The DA is there. Silk merchants are there with their exhibits to match the silk that was recovered in her shop. The clock strikes eleven. The court clerk calls, "Frederica Mandelbaum." There's silence. Julius Mandelbaum.
Silence. Hermann Stauder. Silence. They're all gone. They slip the jurisdiction, and now she has to flee not only the neighborhood and the city, but the country.
In 1894, she dies in Hamilton, Ontario, at the age of 69, and her coffin was brought back to New York, and she was buried in the family plot in Queens. Alongside her husband and daughter, and it is said that at her interment, some mourners who had known her professionally deftly picked the pockets of other mourners. And a special thanks to Margalit Fox, a former New York Times obituary writer and the author of *The Talented Misses Mandelbaum*, and what a story about a time period and how this particular lady became the greatest fence. In New York history, in the 19th century, at least, and my goodness, how she started—just seed capital to bank robbers, and ultimately wandering around the top retail spaces to see what's going on, to develop a sense of what the fashion world is moving and not moving, and then, of course, that new reformist DA who didn't want to put the police on her because, well, she owned the police.
So the Pinkerton stepped in. One scarf ended up being her undoing. The story of the talented Misses Mandelbaum here on Our American Stories. Grandparents, listen up. Your grandkids' home address could be online right now, exposed for any stranger to find.
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Cogni. dot com slash Lee. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 semi-quintennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint it celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage.
Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins. At usmint.gov/semiq. That's usmint.gov/semiq. Ready to feel energized and in control again?
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