Today's Reading
Though she stole little to nothing herself, Mrs. Mandelbaum trained a cadre of acolytes to help themselves—and thereby help her—to the choicest spoils that Gilded Age America had to offer. She orchestrated decades' worth of high-end thefts, selecting the foremost men and women for each job, underwriting their expenses and advising them on "best practices" peculiar to their trade: why it's especially prudent for a thief to specialize in diamonds and silk; why, when entering an establishment like Tiffany & Company, it is supremely helpful to be chewing a piece of gum; how to dress for success—success, that is, in pilfering luxury goods from department stores; and, ultimately, how to relieve a bank of its contents.
"What plannings of great robberies took place there, in Madame Mandelbaum's store!" one old-time crook recalled fondly. "She would buy any kind of stolen property, from an ostrich feather to hundreds and thousands of dollars' worth of gems. The common shop-lifter and the great cracksman alike did business at this famous place."
Mrs. Mandelbaum bailed out her disciples whenever they were arrested, wined and dined them at her groaning table, supplied fistfuls of cash when they were down and out, and furnished getaway horses and carriages as the need arose. For her maternal devotion to her handpicked phalanx of foot soldiers—her "chicks," she called them—criminals and the press alike referred to her as "Marm," "Mother," "Ma" or "Mother Baum."
"There is still standing, I believe, a little...house at the corner of Clinton and Rivington Streets, which was for many years the headquarters of some of the greatest criminals in the country and in which many of the most daring robberies of the period were planned," an American newspaperman wrote in 1921:
The front part of the ground floor was devoted to the sale of cheap dry-goods but the parlor in the rear contained many articles of furniture and silver of a sort seldom seen in that quarter of town. It was in this room that "Mother Mandelbaum," as she was affectionately termed by more than one generation of crooks, transacted business....
Her place of business [was] a market in which jewelry, rolls of silk, silverware and other spoils could be disposed of for about half their real value, the old lady assuming all the risks of the transaction.... She looked as if she might have stepped out of the pages of a Viennese comic paper, yet she was a sort of female Moriarty who could plan a robbery, furnish the necessary funds for carrying it out and even choose the man best fitted to accomplish it.
If that isn't the textbook definition of an organized-crime boss, then I don't know what is.
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In any era, Mother Mandelbaum would have cut an imposing figure, but in her own time she fairly loomed over New York. About six feet tall and of Falstaffian girth (she was said to have weighed between 250 and 300 pounds), pouchy-faced, apple-cheeked and beetle-browed, she resembled the product of a congenial liaison between a dumpling and a mountain. She dressed soberly but expensively in vast gowns of black, brown or dark blue silk, topped by a sealskin cape, with a plumed fascinator or bonnet. She dripped diamonds—earrings, necklaces, brooches, bracelets, rings—but then, in her line of work, diamonds were as easy to come by as the ostrich feathers that waved gaily from her hats. "Her attire was at once gorgeous and vulgar," the Cincinnati Enquirer observed in 1894. "She often wore $40,000 worth of jewels at once."
Mrs. Mandelbaum lived above the shop, but the ground floor of her clapboard building, with its unremarkable public salesroom, did little to hint at the New World Versailles above. A look in on one of her famous dinner parties—sought-after affairs as opulent as anything Mrs. Astor might give uptown—starts to convey the full effect:
Inside Mrs. Mandelbaum's apartment, her guests, attended by her large staff of servants, are dining on lamb, accompanied by fine wines from her extensive cellars. Here, at the head of the mahogany dining table, Marm, swathed in silk and weighted down with diamonds, sits on a wide embroidered ottoman, making animated conversation. Down one side of the table, in full evening dress, are some of the most distinguished members of uptown society, leading lights of New York commerce and industry. Down the other, also in evening dress, are the crème de la crème of criminality: Adam Worth, a master thief who learned his craft at Mrs. Mandelbaum's side; the bank-burgling virtuoso George Leonidas Leslie; pretty, light-fingered Sophie Lyons, a shoplifter who under Marm's tutelage became "perhaps the most notorious confidence woman America has ever produced"; and Sophie's husband, the bank burglar Ned Lyons, who was said to have fallen in love with Sophie at one of Marm's parties, after she presented him with a gold watch and handsome stickpin she'd just lifted from another guest. In a corner, playing Beethoven on Marm's white baby grand, is "Piano Charley" Bullard, a trained musician who regularly turned his nimble fingers to safecracking.
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