PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT
“Ruined houses open to the street, whence, through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show: hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.”
—Charles Dickens, 1842
The Mandelbaums’ flight from Germany in 1850 was not a matter of choice but survival based on the potato blight, the failed German revolution, and growing anti-Semitism. A potato blight in 1840 left many like the Mandelbaums on the brink of starvation. Added to this was the failed revolution of 1848 that would have advanced more freedom to the poor and working classes of the country. Leading up to the revolution there had been intermittent hunger riots and violent disturbances but a concentrated insurrection did not come until early in 1848 predicated by the fall of the French king Louis-Philippe in Paris. Many of the rebellions against the German government were relatively minor although in the case of the Berlin uprising the fighting was harsh and gory. By the summer of 1849, the revolution was entirely extinguished. But it was the growing anti-Semitism that had its most dramatic impact on the Mandelbaums and other Jews like them.
Wolf Mandelbaum, Fredericka’s husband, was a peddler, dealing primarily as a go-between with peasants who lived in the countryside. He bought and sold livestock, grain, vegetables, and wine grapes. Despite his hard work, the Mandelbaums remained impoverished because on top of the failing German economy and political upheaval, there was growing anti-Semitism. Jews had their right to work, settle and marry severely restricted. Without special letters of protection, they were prohibited from engaging in many different professions, and so often had to resort to jobs considered unrespectable, such as peddling to survive. A Jewish man who wanted to marry had to purchase a registration certificate, known as a matrikel, proving he was working in a respectable job. The certificates were expensive and often out of reach for most Jewish men and as a result, most Jewish men were not able to marry legally. Added to this, many Jews were extortionately taxed. As a result, many German Jews immigrated to America. The Mandelbaums were among them. In 1850, the Mandelbaums packed up what little belongings they had and immigrated to America, sailing on separate vessels. Wolf left first on the Baltimore, which arrived in New York in late July 1850. Fredericka and their infant daughter sailed on the Erie and arrived in New York in September 1850. Fredericka had given birth to the couple’s first child, Bertha, nicknamed Bessie, in March 1849. Fredericka was just twenty-three years old.
Like her husband, Fredericka and Bessie traveled in steerage as third-class passengers. They were forced to endure the long, six-week journey below deck with the other lowly steerage passengers. It was an enormous physical burden for Fredericka who was nearly six feet tall and weighed close to 250 pounds. The space below deck consisted of a seven-foot-long passageway that was two feet wide with a ceiling of barely six feet. It meant that Fredericka spent most of her time hunched over in order to move around in what little space she was afforded. Provisions consisted of a daily small ration of water, hard bread, and salted meat. The close quarters below deck, along with the poor ventilation and lack of adequate waste disposal facilities frequently led to epidemics of typhus, cholera, dysentery, and other kinds of infectious diseases. Despite the torturous conditions, Fredericka and Bessie survived and arrived safely in the thriving port of New York City.
The New York City harbor was teeming with small ferries, barges, steamships, and schooners, and the East River was lined with vessels. By 1850, New York City was the largest and busiest port in America, bustling with people and goods being loaded and unloaded onto the congested wharfs. The narrow streets leading to and from the piers were also bustling, a hodgepodge of people—rich and poor, young and old, good and bad—coming and going. Men and women, couples, families, and young children navigated along muddy streets and cobblestone walkways. Some stopped to chat, exchange directions, offer help. Sometimes, if they had enough money to spare, they were able to buy roasted chestnuts from a street vendor. Peddlers of every type and variety hawked their wares along the streets, pulling their handcarts along behind them or carrying their goods on their backs, shoulders, and arms. Immigrants would stop and ask for directions, doing their best to make their intentions known, using the little English they knew. It was a cacophony of boisterous commotion. This was the all too human, dynamic city that Fredericka Mandelbaum and the other approximately two-million immigrants who landed in New York City in the 1850s found themselves—a world of endless possibilities.
And yet, the image of America as the land of opportunity and hope was shattered for most immigrant families as they tried to assimilate into the new world they had so unwittingly fled to. Fredericka Mandelbaum was one of them.
She, Wolf, and Bessie settled into Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) on New York City’s Lower East Side where a contingent of German-Jewish immigrants like them had settled. When the Mandelbaums arrived in 1850, the population of New York City was a little over 500,000 with immigrants comprising more than half of that. German Jews made up 56,000 of that amount. In ten years, from 1850 to 1860, the population of New York City nearly doubled to approximately 800,000, with immigrants once again making up more than half of that number.
The Mandelbaums lived with relatives and friends in Kleindeutschland while they searched for a place of their own. This was the usual practice for newly landed immigrants to the city. In 1857, they settled into a tenement at 383 Eighth Street, in what is now the East Village, in the Eleventh Ward of Kleindeutschland. The neighborhood was bordered on the east side by the East River, on the west end by the Bowery, bounded on the north by 14th Street and the south by Division Street. At the time, more than 130,000 people lived in Kleindeutschland which was made up of the Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth, and Seventeenth wards. More than half of the people living in the neighborhood were German or Jewish. The next largest ethnic group living there were the Irish.
The Mandelbaums’ Eighth Street home was an airless, lightless single room in a decrepit tenement that housed more than twenty families. The building was approximately twenty feet wide by seventy-five feet deep. There was no indoor plumbing or central heating. Wooden outhouses were located in the alley behind the house and water to be used for cooking, drinking, bathing, and washing had to be carried from hand pumps along the sidewalk up a narrow, dark flight of stairs. The city’s infrastructure was crumbling. It was not able to keep up with the enormous population growth. Wharves and piers were falling apart, some sinking into New York Harbor, traffic caused gridlock in the downtown streets, increasing numbers of people needed to be housed, and all kinds of garbage from individuals, families, and businesses had no place for disposal. Communicable diseases, the by-products of crowded and unsanitary conditions, spread through communities. New York City of the 1850s was beleaguered with growing slums, overcrowding, disease and escalating crime.
In 1850, the city was made up of five separate boroughs. It wasn’t until 1898 that these boroughs were incorporated into the single metropolis now known as New York City. Brooklyn and Queens made up the western portion of Long Island, while Staten Island and Manhattan remained on their own land mass. The Bronx, to the north, was attached to the New York State mainland. Within each of these boroughs there was a series of neighborhoods each given their own distinct name, each with their own distinct variety of crime. Five Points was known for its murder-for-hire. The Tenderloin district was the center of the city’s prostitution rings. The Gas House was filled with opium dens. Hell’s Kitchen was the hub of saloons and gambling houses. These notorious slums and dens of crime flourished just below the more fashionable apartments, homes, mansions, parks, stores, and banks of the well-dressed, high society residents living in the lap of luxury along Broadway and Fifth Avenue.
Thousands of impoverished immigrants like the Mandelbaums lived together in overcrowded unsanitary slums like Kleindeutschland. Thousands settled into this and other rat-infested, crime-ridden neighborhoods where garbage was discarded out of the windows and onto the streets, piling up so high that it surged over the tops of pedestrians’ boots. Chamber pots were also emptied into the streets, producing pools of human excrement. The putrid stench filled the air. Half-starved and sickly immigrants dressed in rags, carrying everything they owned, gravitated to the cheap tenement housing. Many, like the Mandelbaums, were fortunate to have a single room to live in. Others lived in boardinghouses where dozens of people shared a single room and often slept on straw-covered floors. They were charged exorbitant rates and if they could not pay, their possessions were confiscated and they were thrown out onto the streets. Surviving in this environment meant that all members of the family had to find ways of earning a living by whatever means possible. Some were forced to resort to a life of crime or prostitution in order to survive. Alcoholism was rampant and frequently children were left to fend for themselves, roaming the streets, joining criminal gangs, all of them destined for a life of desolation. According to one report, “One aghast minister in 1866 estimated that the city’s all-told population of 800,000 included ‘30,000 thieves, 20,000 prostitutes, 3,000 drinking houses and a further 2,000 houses dedicated to gambling.’”
Health department reports from the period indicated that nearly 75 percent of the children under the age of two died each year. Rampant strains of typhus, cholera, chicken pox, measles, and tuberculosis killed many of these poor immigrants and their children. Still others died from poor nutrition and unsanitary conditions. Sixty-five immigrant children died to every eight non-immigrant children.
TENEMENT HOUSES FULL STATISTICS OF THEIR INMATES HUMAN BEINGS CROWDED LIKE SHEEP INTO PENS 112 FAMILIES IN ONE HOUSE
A committee of the Legislature having been appointed to visit the City to make examination as to the propriety of legislation in the matter of tenement houses, they have applied to the Mayor for information wherein to base their calculations. The Mayor accordingly issued a general order to the Police, requiring a report of “the legality, and street, and number of houses, of the most populous tenement in each patrol, district or ward. The returns have been received at the Central Office, excepting only that from the Eleventh Ward . . . In the Fourth Ward there were reported 47, one of which, Capt. Ditchett remarks, (No. 38 Cherry street) when full has 112 families in it . . . In the Seventh District are 65 front and 10 rear tenement houses, containing in the aggregate 1,232 families, averaging 16 families in each house . . . Cherry-street has 233 families penned up in a dozen houses . . .
—The New York Times, March 14, 1856
The dilapidated tenement on Eighth Street where the Mandelbaums lived was a whitewashed, wooden structure, six stories high, not including the dirt-floor basement, which also housed families. It was built to accommodate ten families. It housed double that amount. The apartments were reached by an unlighted, wooden staircase that ran through the center of the building. The rooms were darkened by the closeness of the tenements on either side. There was no toilet, no shower, no bath, and only a small stove to cook on. There was a small fireplace to heat the single room apartment. According to a New York Times article published in 1856, boxes of garbage were tossed out on the street and in the alleys and were “. . . composed of potato-peelings, oyster-shells, night-soil, rancid butter, dead dogs and cats . . . one festering, rotting, loathsome, hellish mass of air poisoning, death-breeding filth, reeking in the fierce sunshine . . .”
Sewage backed up in backyard privies and rats ran wild through the filthy muck. The unsanitary and overcrowded conditions characteristic of the tenement slums were the leading cause of outbreaks of disease in Little Germany and other congested ethnic neighborhoods. Most native-born New Yorkers from the middle and upper classes blamed the immigrants for bringing disease to America and endangering the well-being of their “innocent hosts.” Whenever an epidemic broke out, the most convenient scapegoat was whatever immigrant group was the largest, most feared, and most visible at the time. It’s no surprise, then, that tuberculosis became known as a “Jewish disease.”
Sometime while the Mandelbaums were living on Eighth Street, Bessie, the child who had endured the long, hazardous journey in steerage with her mother to America, died. Bessie, like so many of the other poor, immigrant children had succumbed to one of the many diseases born out of the city’s unsanitary conditions. Even after the Mandelbaums moved into a better home in the 1860s, a large building on the corner of Clinton and Rivington Streets, they were still not out of harm’s way. That neighborhood had some of the highest rates of disease. However, the Mandelbaums were more fortunate this time around. Their second child, Julius, as well as two girls and another boy, all lived to adulthood.
The streets of the New York City slums were infested with “street-rats”—orphaned or abandoned children without any formal education, who lived on the streets, slept in alleyways, vacant buildings and warehouses, and plied their criminal trade on unsuspecting victims. Some worked, if they could, at menial jobs, sweeping sidewalks or selling newspapers, but mostly they survived by scavenging or turning to a life of crime. Picking pockets was a popular criminal endeavor for these children. They waited outside saloons, hotels, post offices, banks and the congested railway stations that were known as “pickpockets’ paradise.” The train stations were especially fertile grounds for these criminals in training since it was a literal playground of unsuspecting, naïve tourists. In 1860, New York City Police Chief George Matsell estimated that somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 children, boys and girls both, lived on the streets and that a majority of them were engaged in some form of crime or vice. According to Matsell, “crime among boys and girls has become organized, as it never was previously. The bad times have driven a small army into our streets.”
According to a report issued by the Children’s Aid Society—an organization started in New York City in 1853 by the Presbyterian minister Charles Loring Brace to help the needy—street children “. . . gnawed away at the foundations of society undisturbed. In a country which identified geographic mobility and physical movement as freedom, the street kids represented the logical nightmare—the replacement of community, familial and even spiritual bonds with the rootless individualism of the nomad.” Harper’s Weekly claimed that the street children were the breeding grounds for more criminal activity: “Those who have once adopted the semi-savage and wandering mode of life in early youth seldom abandon it.”
These children first gravitated toward petty crimes, picking pocketing and shoplifting. They later graduated to more serious crimes, including murder, bank robbery, and extortion. Girls as young as twelve years old worked as prostitutes in whorehouses, dance halls, and seedy dives. Many of these children, if they lived, often ended up with any number of the criminal gangs that inhabited the underbelly of the city. These children quickly became thugs, hoodlums, robbers, murderers, and ruffians who took refuge in the dark alleys and damp cellars of the gritty hovels. They lurked in halls, saloons, and darkened doorways preying on strangers with legitimate business to tend to in the tenement district along the waterfront and harassing and robbing tenement dwellers, poverty stricken immigrants, and sickly old men and women. Gang wars were deadly and frequent in the slums.
New Yorkers and tourists alike were warned against venturing into these dangerous sections of the city at night. Even the police assigned to these sordid areas patrolled the streets in pairs. Crime grew and spread in and among the squalor of the tenements, flop-houses, warehouses, old factories, seedy saloons, gambling dens, and houses of prostitution.
LIVING UNDERGROUND VIEW OF CELLAR LIFE IN THE METROPOLIS THE FOUL DENS AND THEIR INHABITANTS THOROUGH CLEARING OUT BY THE HEALTH AUTHORITIES SUNSHINE IN DARK PLACES
Among the good works which the Board of Health has quietly but energetically pressed forward during the past year, has been the improvement of the homes of the cellar population of this Metropolis . . . It has been determined by an accurate census that there are about 2,000 basements or cellars used as residences in this City . . . the real underground residents, the troglodytes, were found associating themselves together in large numbers in a single room. No one can have even a remote idea of the filth, crime, drunkenness, debauchery and . . . During the day they leave their miserable loathsome dens and earn, beg or steal sufficient to eat . . .
—The New York Times, December 5, 1869
One of the most notorious areas in New York City was the Gashouse District from 14th to 27th Street where the huge gas tanks loomed over the landscape blotting out the skyline. Built in 1842, rows of ugly giant tanks rose up in the neighborhood. The tanks leaked gas day and night filling the air with noxious fumes and dark clouds. The gashouse gangs, made up of dangerous, uneducated, out-of-work young men, terrorized the community and often plundered other unsuspecting neighborhoods.
If they were looking for trouble they would find it soon enough in Mulberry Bend, a one-block stretch that ran through Little Italy. The alleys between the rows of filthy tenements were barely wide enough for a person to walk through and nearly knee-deep in garbage. Many of these torturous paths led to dives and cellars where every sort criminal lurked. The crisscrossing, interconnecting alleyways with names like “the rat trap” or “bandit’s roost” were safe havens for these criminals from the long arm of the law. Day and night, murder, rape and mayhem exploded in the Mulberry Bend alleys. The New York Tribune called it “New York’s Black Hole of Calcutta.”
Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side was another spawning ground for gangs. It was filled with saloons, whorehouses, gambling dens, slaughterhouses, and dance halls crammed in among the rows upon rows of crumbling tenements. It ran from 23rd Street to 42nd Street, down Seventh Avenue to the Hudson River. A section of 28th Street was known as “The Tub of Blood” because of the explosive violence and murder that erupted there. It became known as the most lurid slum in America. The Hell’s Kitchen gangs were mostly Irish thugs, often armed with brass knuckles. They were considered the toughest gangs that roamed through New York City slums.
The worst of all the slums was the villainous Five Points in the Lower East Side, a den of almost unspeakable gore and horror. It was the home to the city’s most vicious criminals, robbers, prostitutes, and confidence men. Five Points derived its name from the crisscrossing intersection of Anthony, Cross, Mulberry, Orange, and Water Streets. There were no legitimate businesses in Five Points except for a very few grocery, dry goods, and clothing shops. It was filled with narrow streets and alleys running every which way, saloons, beer cellars, stables, slaughter houses and whorehouses. The nearly falling down tenements and sheds there housed hundreds of poor immigrants who were at the mercy of the gangs, many of which worked for absentee landlords collecting rents. Anyone who couldn’t pay the high rents were physically tossed out and often beaten severely as a warning to those who could not come up with their weekly rent payment. Day or night Five Points was the scene of an uncontrolled abundance of murder, mayhem, robbery, and theft. No one, including the police, dared to venture into this den of thieves and murderers. And the police stood by and watched as crime rose in the slums and elsewhere. And for good reason—most of them were getting a piece of the action one way or another.
“New York City in the mid-1860s was one of the most corrupt metropolises on earth. Its politicians were bribed, its constabulary paid off, and thieves, pickpockets, whores, gamblers and anyone else wanting life easy and fat and rich were prime clients. Graft was an accepted procedure and the golden key to finer clothing, tastier food and higher social standing. Crime raged and those who controlled it, many of the politicians and police chiefs, zealously fed it.”
—Joseph Geringer, “Adam Worth: The World in His Pocket”
Fredericka Mandelbaum began her life of crime as a peddler on the busy, crime-infested streets of Kleindeutschland. She hauled her goods, mostly bits of silk and other fabrics, on her back. At close to six feet tall and 250 pounds, she was a formidable presence. She was easy to pick out of any crowd. The Mandelbaums did not have enough money to purchase or rent a storefront or to buy a horse and cart which many peddlers used. Instead, Fredericka and her husband, Wolf, who also peddled on the streets, used the busy streets as their shop, moving through the crowds, hawking their wares. She became readily adept at peddling and used her experiences on the street as a tool to learn what she needed to know in order to find a better way to earn a living for herself and her family. Mandelbaum’s work as a street peddler gave her and her husband an ongoing source of income, even during the most difficult economic downturns of the mid-to-late 1850s. In 1857, the country was hurled into a financial panic, the world’s first economic crisis was caused by an over-extension of the country’s economic expansion, fueled by an economic panic in England. Many once flourishing banks, investors, and businesses in America had over-invested and taken substantial risks with their money. When the markets began to fail, caused by the declining international economy, hundreds of businesses closed, banks failed, investors lost millions—the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company alone is reported to have lost $7 million—and tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, except for those like the Mandelbaums. In fact, the Mandelbaums’ opportunities grew as more and more people became unemployed and were driven to the streets looking for work, bargains, and ways to feed their families. As a street peddler, Fredericka Mandelbaum came in constant contact with poor men, women, and children who rummaged the neighborhoods for what they could use or sell.
Mandelbaum’s role as a street peddler was typical for many New York German-Jewish immigrants, more so than other ethnic groups. In Germany, many German-Jews had already gained experience as peddlers and later, just as the Mandelbaums did, as dry goods merchants and shopkeepers. The Mandelbaums began by peddling when they first arrived in New York City and later opened their own small dry goods shop on the corner of Clinton and Rivington Streets in the mid-1860s. The streets peddlers worked were often unpaved, muddy, and littered with garbage. Nonetheless, peddlers with carts and others like Mandelbaum, who carried their wares on their shoulders, filled the streets and byways, haggling old-world style with buyers, sellers, and each other. They called attention to themselves by ringing bells, blowing horns, singing, dancing, juggling, and even dressing their horses in outrageous costumes. Their voices rang out with, “Rags! Rags! Any old rags!” or “Hot corn! Get your lily white hot corn. Corn hot straight from the pot!” All of the activity created a carnival atmosphere. Fredericka Mandelbaum didn’t need any props or gimmicks to call attention to herself. Her height and weight made a distinct impression.
“Chinese men sold candy and cigars. Men in general sold tobacco, socks, suspenders, hose yarn and gloves. Women sold most of the food . . . Boys sold ties, pocketbooks [and] pocketbook straps and photographs. Little girls sold matches, toothpicks, songs and flowers. Italians dispense ice cream; Germans dealt in sausages . . .”
—New York Magazine, August 12, 1991
Garbage picking, scavenging, picking pockets, all manner of theft and robbery and shoplifting allowed the destitute street people to eke out a living with the help of keen-eyed peddlers like Mandelbaum, who knew a bargain when she saw it. She was always able to wring the most out of any deal. It was said that Mandelbaum never purchased anything for more than half its worth and always sold it for twice as much. She was also clever enough to know that buying merchandise meant you had to sell it and although she was particular about what she bought, she was even more particular about what she sold. She reportedly never bought anything for which she didn’t already have a buyer. Street savvy, smart, and a born entrepreneur, Fredericka Mandelbaum flourished on the streets of New York, constantly increasing her profits and her contacts. This shady street economy, with everyone in need of cash, gave Mandelbaum ample opportunities to ply her stock and trade, legally and illegally. She quickly became known on the streets as a useful and resourceful “middleman” when it came to the buying and selling of ill-gotten gains. She was always ready to buy the stolen merchandise criminals had to offer and just as ready and able to resell it to legitimate buyers looking for a bargain. Buyers and sellers could find just about anything they desired on the bustling streets.
The Mandelbaums’ worked with an endless supply of unscrupulous sellers as well as an endless contingent of legitimate buyers, including dry goods merchants, and business people of all types who were on the constant lookout for a bargain. Their legitimate suppliers often charged twice as much for the same product they could buy at cost from the Mandelbaums.
Everyone was looking for a bargain—legitimate businessmen and women, street urchins, professional thieves, shoplifters, pickpockets, burglars, the cop on the beat, lawyers, politicians, and judges—and over time, Mandelbaum encountered, engaged, and wooed many of these divergent personas as part of her growing criminal enterprise. People of every ilk liked Marm Mandelbaum. Her prices were low and she didn’t ask questions. Every criminal on the street knew or had heard of her. Slowly, she expanded her personal association with her shady street clientele to the upper echelons of New York society. She nurtured these relationships as readily as she nurtured her relations with criminals, and these relationships proved beneficial for her during her nearly twenty-five year reign as the “Queen among Thieves.”
“Mandelbaum negotiated with lawyers, bondsmen, police and prosecutors . . . Her Clinton Street dry-goods or haberdashery shop became a veritable clearing house for crimes and larceny, an underworld haven attracting the nation’s most famous criminals. George Walling sarcastically dubbed Mandelbaum’s establishment the ‘Bureau for the Prevention of Conviction.’”
—Timothy J. Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale, 2007
In 1860, the Mandelbaums moved to 141 6th Street in the Seventeenth Ward within Kleindeutchsland. Their eldest son, Julius, was born at that address in October 1860. By 1865, they lived in a clapboard house in the Thirteenth Ward, on the corner of Clinton and Rivington Streets. It was a highly industrialized six-block area that was home to more than 3,600 people as well as iron foundries, brick and sewing machine factories, and coal, lumber, stone, and lime yards. The houses and tenements were built close together, crowded next to the factories, shops, churches, synagogues, and schools. There were small retail and wholesale businesses run out of storefronts, small shops, and even out of some homes, along with more than a dozen hotels, inns, and taverns. It was a busy, growing community. The Mandelbaums were coming up in the world. Their new home was better than any of their previous ones and included a store and basement for storage. The family stayed there for the next twenty-five years in the heart of the expanding German immigrant wards. Besides Julius, Fredericka Mandelbaum had given birth to a daughter, Sarah, in 1862, another son, Gustav, in 1864, and another daughter, Anna, in 1867.
Despite her criminal activities, Mandelbaum remained a devoted and attentive mother. The sudden death of her first child, Bessie, made her overprotective and fawning. She never left her children out of her sight for long and she was known to call off a business deal if something of importance affecting her children, like an illness or school recitals, occurred. She doted on her four children and was close to all of them. She was very close to her oldest son, Julius, who eventually became an important part of her fencing business. Although he had a job outside the home by the time he was fourteen years old as an assistant with a local brewer, he continued to run errands for his mother at the store. Julius grew to become a devoted son who was always ready and able to do his mother’s bidding. And like most parents, Mandelbaum wanted more for her children than she ever had and her life of crime was one of them. She did not allow her other children to become part of her criminal business enterprise, especially her two daughters.
At the Clinton and Rivington Street address Mandelbaum tended to her four children and grew her business. She looked after her husband who had become stricken with an undetermined affliction, most likely consumption, ran her legitimate dry goods store, and conducted her fencing operation, which entailed the buying and selling stolen merchandise out of the back of her store out of view of prying eyes. As she amassed her fortune, she filled her home with expensive furniture, paintings, draperies, silverware—the best of everything—stolen from some of the best homes, mansions, and businesses in New York City. Despite her growing wealth and notoriety she chose to stay in Kleindeutschland, where she was able to use the bustling crowded streets of the lower East Side to expand her fencing operations. As time went on she expanded her reach outside of New York City to places like Trenton and Newark, New Jersey, where she established relations with both wealthy, legitimate clientele as well as making contact with various New Jersey–based criminals. Her real estate holdings grew as well. By the 1880s, she reportedly owned several tenements in the city and warehouses where she stored the massive amounts of stolen merchandise. But the center of her operations remained the Clinton and Rivington Street address.
“By 1864, she owned 79 Clinton St., a three-story building at the corner of Rivington Street. The family’s haberdashery, managed by her husband Wolfe and their three children, had a back room for her real business: reselling pinched products to nominally legitimate businessmen across the city . . . A motley variety of ruffians, pickpockets, thieves and arsonists rounded out East Side Crime . . . Clinton Street’s corpulent “Mother” Fredericka Mandelbaum operated a network of fences moving massive quantities of stolen goods around New York and the nation.”
—David Pietrusza, Rothstein, 2004
One can only imagine how the cunning Mandelbaum bartered with some enterprising criminal over a bit of stolen merchandise, ultimately buying it at a quarter of its worth and then selling it to a legitimate customer for twice or three times as much. But even then her prices would have been well below the going rate in the legitimate marketplace. She built her elaborate and successful business as a receiver of stolen property from the ground up, dealing with thieves and selling to legitimate customers, to bribing cops on the beat to look the other way when she engaged in some illicit transaction. Regardless of who she dealt with, everyone knew Mandelbaum was the person to go to if you had something to sell or something you wanted to buy at below cost. And she always had cash on hand to make a deal. There were three skills that made Fredericka Mandelbaum the success she became. First, she had learned to speak English almost as well as she did German, which made her a valuable interpreter. Secondly, her knowledge of silk and fabric and other precious goods gave her expertise in dry goods, which was an advantage over other “fences.” And lastly and perhaps most importantly, her clients, both sellers and buyers, knew that this huge, dark-eyed, corpulent woman didn’t question whether the merchandise she traded in was legitimately or illegitimately acquired. It was these three skills, along with her growing political connections as well as her beneficial association with the police, judges, and lawyers, which allowed her to grow and prosper for more than twenty-five years.
Mandelbaum was drawn to the criminal class for two reasons: First, as an outcast herself, both physically (her height and weight making her stand out) and ethnically, she had an affinity toward society’s outcasts. And secondly, she was a savvy enough businesswoman to realize that by aligning herself with the criminal class, she would be able to grow her business. Criminals could provide her with an array of merchandise that she would otherwise not be able to get her hands on. Her synergetic relationship with the authorities grew out of her understanding that “one hand washes the other,” and in her case, one hand washed the other with bribes, which allowed her to engage in her criminal activities untouched by the long arm of the law. Along with her personal affinity for society’s outcasts and her ongoing relationship with the authorities, there was another driving force in Mandelbaum and that force was her desire for acceptance. As a Jew, a woman, and a criminal, and given her physical attributes, she already faced being ostracized and derided by polite society. The need to be accepted in the face of these impediments drove her to curry favor with New York City’s high society. She soon discovered that those of the upper class had as much larceny in their hearts, however masked by their outward appearance and social standing, as her criminal cohorts. They were willing, although begrudgingly, to look the other way when it came to her criminal endeavors, in light of her accumulated wealth, power, and influence. Soon it was not Mandelbaum who needed to curry favor, but the other way around.
Mandelbaum was truly an American success story, ignoring of course, the fact that her enormous success was in the business of crime. She rose from the humble beginnings in the early 1850s as a lowly immigrant street peddler to become the greatest, most successful and notorious fence in the annals of New York City history. She ran her elaborate network of organized crime from a simple haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side for more than twenty-five years where she enlisted the services of an extensive group of criminals of every ilk, bribed police officials, politicians, and judges and stayed one step ahead of prosecution for much of her life. By the 1880s, it was reported she had amassed a fortune estimated at more than $1 million. According to the New York Times, her operation was “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York City . . . and is believed to have furnished the capital without which extensive enterprises even of theft cannot be carried on.”
Along the way, Mandelbaum made both friends and enemies: Friends who helped her hone her skills in the fencing business and enemies who sought to end her reign. But it was the friends and her extended family of criminals that elevated her to her lofty position within the underworld. The enemies came later.