A MINGLED YARN
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”
—William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
Fredericka Mandelbaum, a German-Jewish immigrant, became the most influential crime figure in New York City during the Gilded Age, accumulating more money and power than any woman of her era at a level inconceivable for any women engaged in any legitimate business. As the country’s premier fence (receiver of stolen property), she became the head of one of the country’s first organized crime rings. Hailed by the New York press as “Queen among Thieves” she was a driving force behind New York City’s festering underworld for more than twenty-five years.
A July 1884 New York Times’ article called her “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York City.” Her lengthy reign was enabled by both a corrupt New York City police department and an unscrupulous political and judicial system. But it was her cunning intellect and association with the best criminal minds in the city that allowed her to attain such prominence. The engine that drove her to the top of her criminal profession was fueled by her devotion to her family as well as the crime family she surrounded herself with: her own family because she loved and cherished them and her crime family because they were the source of her wealth and power. Her immersion into a life of crime, as opposed to one of legitimacy, was a backlash against the cruel treatment she and her husband had endured at the hands of German authorities before being forced to immigrate to America. That abuse and distrust of authority kept her on the wrong side of the law throughout her life. She also had the keen realization that a woman, no less a Jewish woman facing all the native prejudices of the era, could never find acceptability or the kind of wealth and power she attained in any legitimate business.
Mandelbaum immigrated to New York City from Germany in 1850 with her husband, who was a peddler, and her first child, after German authorities imposed a series of laws restricting travel and trade by those of the Jewish persuasion. She began her climb to the top of the crime world in America as a peddler on the rough-and-tumble, bustling streets of the city. Because of her height (she was close to six feet tall) and her massive girth (she weighed close to 300 pounds), she easily stood out among the throng of street vendors. But it was more than just her physical presence that drew people to her. She quickly established a reputation as a fair trader among legitimate customers as well as a trusted ally to criminals trying to sell their stolen wares. It was this latter quality that led her to become the most sought after fences in New York City and propelled her to a place of prominence among the criminal element. She was savvy enough to realize, even in the earliest phase of her climb to power, that she could not carry on her business without the support of the city’s corrupt political powers, the police, from the cop on the beat to those in command and the judicial system. Knowing full well the power of the almighty dollar and how it fed the ongoing corruption at every level, she paid tribute to these three forces (politicians, police, and judges) religiously, which allowed her criminal operation to grow and thrive unabated throughout the years.
By 1864, her enterprise, buying stolen merchandise from criminals and reselling it at a profit, had become so successful, she was able to move off the streets and buy a three-story building at Clinton and Rivington Streets, where she opened a haberdashery shop on the ground floor. For decades, it served as a respectable front for the biggest fencing operation in the history of the country.
She bought and sold a variety of stolen goods including silk, securities, and diamonds. She was viewed as an “honest crook,” one who made fair deals with her cadre of criminals. She was the person to see if you wanted to move stolen goods or needed protection from the law or money to finance a caper. Mandelbaum kept the prestigious law firm of Howe & Hummel on a $5,000-a-year retainer and whenever one of her gang got into trouble, she was there to back him up with her money and connections. Mandelbaum offered her criminal cohorts bail and legal defense if they needed it and bribed police and judges to fix cases. She ran a well-organized criminal enterprise, enlisting the services of an extensive network of criminals. At the height of her criminal career, every New York thief knew their best chance to realize a profit from their ill-gotten gains was to trust “Marm” Mandelbaum. She was also partial to helping young women get a foothold in the criminal world. She was once quoted as saying that she wanted to help any women who “are not wasting life being a housekeeper.” Because of her efforts to help women find work, even if it was in the world of crime, some contemporary feminist historians view Mandelbaum as a Gilded Age heroine for her willingness to assist women finding work and helping them make more money than they could have as housekeepers, maids, seamstresses or factory workers.
Mandelbaum and her family, her husband, Wolf, sons Julius and Gustav, and daughters, Annie and Sarah, lived on the top two floors of the Clinton and Rivington Streets building she purchased. As her business flourished she was able to furnish the living quarter lavishly with expensive furniture, draperies, paintings, and silverware that had been stolen from some of the finest homes and mansions in New York City. Mandelbaum, though at first begrudgingly, was accepted in polite society, despite everyone’s knowledge of her criminal enterprise. She held ostentatious dinner parties at her home where many of the country’s most celebrated criminals mingled freely with countless of members of New York City’s fashionable elite, including politicians, judges, police, and legitimate businessmen. Everyone who was anyone cherished the opportunity to be invited to one of her many soirées.
She opened a school for crime on Grand Street, where young boys and girls were taught the intricacies of the criminal trade by professional pickpockets, burglars, and sneak thieves. The school offered advanced courses in burglary, safe-cracking, blackmailing, and confidence schemes. She allegedly had to close the school when it was discovered that the son of one of the city’s most prominent police officials was enrolled in it.
By 1880 she had become the premier receiver of stolen merchandise in the country and one of the most powerful figures within organized crime, amassing a personal fortune estimated at more than $1 million. She owned tenements in the city as well as warehouses in New Jersey and Brooklyn where she stored stolen merchandise that she openly bought and sold. Her exploits have been well documented in the press of the times. One of Mandelbaum’s most infamous protégés, Sophie Lyons, became one of America’s most successful confidence women. After Lyons retired from her criminal life in 1913, she published her memoirs called Why Crime Doesn’t Pay. Mandelbaum also gave Lena Kleinschmidt, known as Black Lena, her start as a thief, pickpocket, and blackmailer. Kleinschmidt moved to fashionable Hackensack, New Jersey, where, posing as a wealthy widow, she threw elaborate parties, imitating Mandelbaum’s style and opulence. Black Lena used the parties to size up her next victims.
Mandelbaum once paid to break her favorite piano player, the notorious safecracker Piano Charlie Bullard, out of jail since she missed the piano concertos he gave at her extravagant parties. She financed one of the greatest bank robberies in America by fronting the operations of George Leslie and his gang of burglars. Leslie, who became known as “The King of Bank Robbers,” took three years to plan the heist of the Manhattan Savings Institution and in October 1878, the robbers broke into the bank and stole close to $3 million in cash and securities, comparable to approximately $50 million in today’s currency.
Mandelbaum was a close friend and partner with Adam Worth, nicknamed “the Napoleon of Crime” by Scotland Yard detectives. He was reportedly the prototype for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarity, the nemesis of Doyle’s legendary literary character, Sherlock Holmes. In England, Worth stole a priceless Thomas Gainsborough painting from a London gallery and he stole more than $500,000 worth of uncut diamonds from a bank in South Africa.
In 1884, Mandelbaum’s reign as the “Queen among Thieves” came to an abrupt and exacting end at the hands of some of the very people she had so steadfastly cultivated over the years for protection. Even several of her criminal protégés turned against her. Time had run out on her as the Gilded Age ended, tarnished by the greed of supposedly legitimate businessmen who came to be known as “robber barons,” and as the inept and corrupt police and judicial system came under the harsh scrutiny of a new breed of law abiding citizens. Mandelbaum became a figurehead of everything that this new breed of New York City reformers detested.
The story of Fredericka Mandelbaum and her rise to power takes place during what has been named the Gilded Age. The term “the Gilded Age” comes from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 book by the same name. It refers to the ancient process of covering an object with a superficial layer of gold. In this case, it described an American society, from approximately 1870 to 1890, in which a small number of businessmen acquired great fortunes, put on outlandish and lavish displays of wealth, and built enormous, ostentatious mansions while the majority of Americans were poor, hungry and living in crime infested squalor.
Besides Mandelbaum, New York City during the Gilded Age was inhabited by a plethora of colorful criminals, all of whom worked for her. Among them was Piano Charlie Bullard, a handsome, raffish, classically educated, piano playing safe-cracker, who squandered his ill-gotten gains on wine, women, and gambling. After robbing $450,000 from the Boylston Bank in Boston, Bullard fled to London, where he married a beautiful seventeen-year-old Irish barmaid named Kitty Flynn. They moved to Paris where Bullard opened a popular expatriate bar called “The American Bar.”
There was Adam Worth who was Piano Charlie Bullard’s partner in crime. Worth was credited with stealing Thomas Gainsborough’s famous painting, “Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire.”
There was the well-dressed, international burglar and safecracker Max Shinburn who thought of himself as a European aristocrat and ultimately bought the title of Baron Shindell of Monaco with his illegal gains.
There was John “Traveling Mike” Grady, Mandelbaum’s chief competitor in the fencing business. Grady was a frugal, penny-pinching man, despite being worth an estimated $4 million in stolen merchandise and property, who carried his money and wares in a wooden peddlers’ box that he had slung over his shoulder.
There were Mandelbaum’s notorious lawyers, William Howe and Abraham Hummel, two of the most devious and successful criminal lawyers the country has ever known. Howe was flamboyant and boisterous while Hummel was drab and quiet.
Two of the most corrupt and powerful politicians populated New York City during the era: Mayor Fernando Woods, considered the most corrupt mayor in the city’s history and William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, the prototypical corrupt political boss.
Along with these criminals there were incorruptible reformers, like New York City’s District Attorney Peter Olney, who was instrumental in ending Mandelbaum’s career and the somewhat dubious Police Detective Thomas Byrnes, one of the department’s most colorful, outspoken, and successful law enforcement officers.
All of these true-life characters were an integral part of the fiefdom within Fredericka Mandelbaum’s sovereign criminal monarchy where she reigned for nearly 25 years as “Queen among Thieves” until her forced abdication in 1884.
--
Author’s Note: I have included headlines and portions of newspaper articles from the period. These pieces are replicated exactly as they appeared. The typos and misspellings appear just as they were published in newspaper sources including The New York Times, the Brooklyn Eagle, and other period pieces.