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PROLOGUE: A GLITTERING HOARD

They were detectives, accustomed to plunder, but they'd never seen anything like this.

It had taken some doing to open the safe. After bursting into the modest haberdashery shop on Manhattan's Lower East Side, they'd demanded the keys from the shopkeeper, Fredericka Mandelbaum. But Mrs. Mandelbaum, a towering woman of fifty-nine, tastefully attired in diamond cluster earrings and a lace-trimmed gown of dotted blue, held firm. "No," she declared, in her heavy Germanic English. "Just to think of such a thing!"

Her refusal forced the detectives, employees of the storied Pinkerton Agency, to become safecrackers themselves. They summoned a blacksmith, who arrived at the shop with hammer and chisel. He attacked the safe; amid the din, a pretty teenage girl ran in from the next room—Mrs. Mandelbaum's daughter Annie.

"Stop!" Annie cried. She handed over the keys and the safe was unlocked. An Aladdin's Cave spilled out.

There were gems and jewelry of every description: rings, chains, scarf pins, bracelets, glittering cufflinks and collar buttons—"almost every ornament you could mention," one detective recalled. Beside them were "heaps of gold watches" and, wrapped carefully in tissue paper, watch movements and cases. There was a clutch of fine silverware. There were loose diamonds the size of peas.

Elsewhere in the shop's clandestine back rooms—protected by a metal grille and linked to the outdoors by a set of secret passages—the detectives came upon priceless antique furniture, a trunk brimming with shawls of the finest cashmere and curtains of exquisite lace, and bolts of silk worth thousands of dollars alone. Concealed under newspapers were bars of gold, fashioned from melted-down jewelry. Upstairs, in Mrs. Mandelbaum's gracious bedroom, they found melting pots and scales for weighing gold and diamonds. She and an employee were promptly arrested.

With that, the Pinkerton detectives, who had staged the raid at the behest of the city's district attorney, accomplished in a single outing what New York's police force had not managed to do in more than twenty years. "You are caught this time, and the best thing that you can do is to make a clean breast of it," one of the Pinkertons, Gustave Frank, advised Mrs. Mandelbaum as she was led away.

In reply, Fredericka Mandelbaum—upright widow, philanthropic synagogue-goer, doting mother of four and boss of the country's most notorious crime syndicate—whirled and punched him in the face.

* * *

For twenty-five years, Fredericka Mandelbaum reigned as one of the most infamous underworld figures in America. Working from her humble Manhattan storefront, 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 date for organized crime in the United States—her empire extended across the country and beyond. In 1884, the New-York Times called her "the nucleus and centre of the whole organization of crime in New-York."

Revered in some quarters, reviled in others, Marm Mandelbaum, as she was known, towered over the city as an earthy, expansive, diamond-encrusted presence: self-made entrepreneur, generous philanthropist, thieves' mentor and gracious society hostess who plied her illicit trade largely in the open. A swath of the public admired her. Many criminals adored her. Over the course of her long, lucrative career, she would spend scarcely a day behind bars. "Without question," a twentieth-century criminologist has written, "the fullest attribution of energy, presence, and personal magnetism in the literature of criminology belongs to 'Ma' Mandelbaum."

For Mrs. Mandelbaum, trafficking in other people's property was staggeringly good business: Her network of thieves and resale agents was reported to extend throughout the United States, into Mexico and, it was said, as far away as Europe. At her death, in 1894, she had amassed a personal fortune of at least half a million dollars (in some accounts as much as a million), the equivalent of more than $14 million to $28 million today. As the New York police chief George Washington Walling, who knew her well, recalled, "The ramifications of her business net were so widespread, her ingenuity as an assistant to criminals so nearly approached genius, that if a silk robbery occurred in St. Louis, and the criminals were known as 'belonging to "Marm Baum,"' she always had the first choice of the 'swag.' "

In her heyday and for some years afterward, Marm was a storied figure, the subject of news articles, editorial cartoons and more than one stage play. The world press covered her criminal prowess with a kind of grudging admiration; it covered her downfall with post-hoc smugness. But despite her renown in her own time, she is far less well known today, an all-too-common fate for history's women. Though there are passing references to Mrs. Mandelbaum in a spate of books on New York City history, there are few in-depth studies of her life and work.