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Marm kept no written records: No fool, she clearly knew it would have been professional suicide to do so. As Chief Walling observed: "She was shrewd, careful, methodical in character and to the point in speech.... Wary in the extreme." But her career turns out to have been amply chronicled, not only in the news accounts of her day, but also in the reminiscences of her contemporaries on both sides of the law. As a result, she can be conjured whole from the glittering nineteenth-century city in which she operated—the redoubtable star of an urban picaresque awash in pickpockets and sneak thieves, bank burglars and high-toned shysters. And from her glittering presence it is possible in turn to conjure the city: a wide-open town careering its way through "the Flash Age," a time when the mantra of one suspiciously well-heeled pol, "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em," was a guiding principle for many New Yorkers.

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When twenty-first-century Americans hear the phrase "organized crime," it almost always evokes the Prohibition-era, "guns-and-garlic" gangsterism of  Scarface and The Untouchables. But the term was first attested in the United States in the 1890s, and, as Mrs. Mandelbaum's career makes plain, the practice was a going concern here well before that—in Europe, earlier still.

Unlike the organized crime of the tommy-gun age, Fredericka Mandelbaum's profession entailed little violence. She was, from the first, a specialist in property crime, buying, camouflaging and reselling a welter of stolen luxury items. Beginning her ascent in the late 1850s, she quickly established her reputation as a criminal receiver—a "fence," in popular parlance. There had been legions of fences before Marm Mandelbaum, and there have been legions after. But what she accomplished had by all accounts not been done before in America on so broad a scale, in so sustained and methodical a fashion: Fredericka Mandelbaum transformed herself, almost singlehandedly, into "a mogul of illegitimate capitalism," running her operation as a well-oiled, for-profit corporate machine. Strikingly, she did so more than half a century before the Prohibition-era syndicates celebrated in popular culture, a milieu in which women, if they featured at all, were little more than gangsters' molls.

"Crime cannot be carried on by individuals," a longtime member of the Mandelbaum syndicate wrote in 1913. "It requires an elaborate permanent organization. While the individual operators, from pickpockets to bank burglars, come and go, working from coast to coast, they must be affiliated with some permanent substantial person.... Such a permanent head was 'Mother' Mandelbaum."

 

Late-nineteenth-century newspapers reveled in Marm's doings, and liked to say she could "unload" anything, including, in one account, a flock of stolen sheep. But it is beyond doubt that by the mid-1880s as much as $10 million had passed through her little haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side. The full story of her rise to underworld stardom as "the undisputed financier, guide, counsellor, and friend of crime in New York"—and her ultimate fall at the hands of the city's increasingly powerful bourgeois elite— is a window onto a little-explored side of Gilded Age America: the world of Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York from the perspective of a sharp-witted, fiercely determined woman.

Some modern observers have called Mrs. Mandelbaum a proto-feminist. Perhaps she was, though she appeared as committed to wifely and maternal duties as any woman of her era. What can be said with certainty is that she was among the first—quite possibly the very first—to systematize the formerly scattershot enterprise of property crime, working out logistics, organizing chains of supply and demand, and constructing the entire venture first and foremost as a business. And in so doing, she simultaneously embodied and upended the cherished rags-to-riches narrative of Victorian America, starring, on entirely her own terms, in a Horatio Alger story of a very different kind.

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Arriving in New York in 1850 with little more than the clothes on her back, Fredericka Mandelbaum began her working life as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. Professional advancement, to say nothing of great wealth, seemed beyond contemplation for someone who, like her, was marginalized three times over: immigrant, woman and Jew. (Organized crime, as a twentieth-century writer has sagely noted, "is not an equal-opportunity employer.") Yet before the decade was out, she had established herself as one of the city's premier receivers of stolen goods; by the end of the 1860s she had become, in the words of a modern-day headline, "New York's First Female Crime Boss."