In Her Pocket

Sometimes crime can be curious, as these two stories demonstrate today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
Museums can teach us a lot about the darker side
of human life, from coffins and skeletons to weapons and destruction.
Museums are brimming with the ominous. But sometimes we get
so lost in far off history that we don't realize
there are nefarious tales behind the museums themselves. If we
look a little closer, we might find stories marked with
scandal and controversy. And if we look closer than that,

(01:00):
we might uncover long forgotten curses. In twenty eleven, United
States customs agents sorted through incoming packages. As they examined
various items, they paused at one that was particularly heavy.
The label said that it was from the United Arab
Emirates and that it contained handmade clay tiles from Turkey.
Needless to say, something felt a little off. Maybe it

(01:21):
was the weight of the package, or maybe it was
the recipient. The package you see was addressed to Hobby Lobby.
Hobby Lobby runs a chain of craft supply stores, and
while the agents thought that it might have made sense
for the company to order tiles, they wouldn't have expected
those tiles to be handmade from Turkey. The agents were suspicious.
They shook the package like a child would rattle and

(01:43):
unopen Christmas present, and noticed the contents felt bulkier than
a set of tiles would. Suspicious, they sliced through the
packaging tape and looked inside. What they saw astounded them.
Over the next few days, Customs seized more packages like
this one. All of them were either address to Hobby
Lobby or the company's president, Stephen Green. None of the

(02:04):
packages had the right documentation, and all of them contained
things unlike any the agents had seen before. It appeared
as though Green might have been smuggling. This put him
under extreme scrutiny. Smuggling is no small matter, and federal
investigators had to get involved. When they saw everything the
Customs agents had found, they were equally shocked. Something shady

(02:25):
was indeed going on. At the same time, Green was worried.
This ordeal began right as he started planning his latest venture,
a museum all about the Bible and its history, called
creatively the Museum of the Bible. He needed to be
able to focus on that, but the investigation was large
scale and he didn't expect it to end anytime soon,
and he was right about that. About six years later,

(02:48):
the government found out that the goods weren't from Turkey
at all. They were from Iraq, the country nicknamed the
birthplace of the Bible. Finally, the government filed the complaint
against Stephen aptly titled the Union United States of America
versus approximately four hundred and fifty ancient canea formed tablets
and approximately three thousand ancient clay boulet. The name said

(03:09):
it all. Green had illegally smuggled ancient artifacts out of Iraq.
He then tried to pass off those tablets, along with
other items, as standard tiles, but most likely he planned
to put them on display in his museum. It turned
out that many of the artifacts had been missing for
decades after being looted from museums and archaeological sites, and

(03:29):
perhaps the most significant of them all was a clay
tablet that was about three thousand, five hundred years old.
Known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, it's inscribed with part
of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is considered the oldest
literary work in human history. Archaeologists uncovered the Epic of
Gilgamesh in eighteen fifty three when they excavated the library
of an ancient Mesopotamian king. Ironically, the king had protected

(03:53):
those tablets with a curse on anyone who tried to
steal them. Now the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet is back with
its rightful owners. It's not clear how Green thought that
he could get away with this, but he did own
up to his mistakes, although the bad news kept coming.
In twenty eighteen, experts analyzed five Dead Sea scrolls on
display at his museum and discovered that they were actually fake.

(04:16):
Needless to say, I think the lesson from this story
is pretty clear. Don't take history for granted, and don't
take history. Everyone called her mother ma or marm, but

(04:41):
Frederica Mandelbaum was always a mother second and a business
woman first. Long before she came to Manhattan, she knew
how to make a buck. She was born in eighteen
twenty seven in Germany, living a working class lifestyle until
she married her husband Wolf at the age of twenty one.
The two of them traveled around the country treside peddling
goods before emigrating to New York City in eighteen fifty.

(05:05):
Life in New York was hard for immigrants. In Little Germany,
Marm and Wolf were squeezed into stinking tenements where they
had no light, air, or running water. Just like back home,
Marm and Wolf were street pedlars, selling anything they could.
The Mandelbomb's neighbors, however, were not interested in buying rags
and broken clocks that were salvaged from the trash bins,

(05:25):
so the Mandelbombs and their four children were barely scraping by.
But Marm was a clever woman. When most people saw
the financial panic of eighteen fifty seven as a disaster,
she saw an opportunity. With businesses and banks failing and
thousands losing their jobs, children were sent out onto the
street to make money however they could. Many turned to pickpocketing, burglary,

(05:48):
or other petty crimes to survive. When they needed to
sell their ill gotten gains, they knew they could count
on Marm. Marm and wolf opened a dry goods store,
claiming to be simple importers. Their real business, though, was
in the back room, selling pocket watches, jewelry, fine cloth, silver,
even furniture that had wandered off from wealthy households. Business

(06:10):
was good. Soon they rented an entire warehouse just to
store stolen items. By all accounts, Marm's strong personality was
her greatest asset in building an illegal empire. She befriended
crooked cops and judges, setting up a system of bribes
and favors to keep her thieves out of jail. She
financed gangs of blackmailers and organized bank heists, and then

(06:33):
in eighteen seventy, she decided to pass her collected knowledge
along and opened her own school for crooks. At mar
Mandelbaum's Grand Street School, young men and women could learn
how to pick a pocket or case a house. Subjects
included misdirection, safe cracking, blackmail, and burglary, and she especially
liked to train young women from the working class who

(06:54):
had few other opportunities to make money. Her best students
went on to work for her, running keep hart of
her operation. As Marm Mandelbaum's empire grew, she became a
fixture of New York society. Her life of crime was
an open secret. Both of these things made it that
much harder to stop her though. Not only did Marm
have an ear of judges and politicians, but she also

(07:16):
kept a fun handy for bailing out her loyal followers.
She kept cab drivers on retainer for quick getaways, and
worked with jewelers to alter stolen pieces. Tammany Hall, the
political machine that controlled New York, recognized her influence and
agreed to protect her so long as she delivered Jewish
and working class voters, which was ironic considering she couldn't

(07:36):
even vote herself. Marm had carefully crafted a loyal network
that would never give her up. Too many influential people
depended on her. Marm also took care never to commit
any crimes directly. She never picked a pocket or cracked
a safe. If she was found in possession of any
stolen goods, she could claim innocence she didn't steal them
after all, So for decades, Marm's empire was allowed to

(07:59):
operate in the shadows, safe from the law. By the
eighteen eighties, Marm's criminal empire was regularly trading over five
million dollars in stolen goods. City officials, corrupt or not,
couldn't look away any longer, so in eighteen eighty four
they hired the pin Carton Detective Agency to take her down.
Silk was ultimately her achilles heel. She knowingly bought stolen

(08:21):
silk from a pin Carton agent posing as a thief.
What she did not know was that this silk was marked.
When police found the marked silk in a raid on
her warehouse, it was all over for Marm. She'd been
caught intentionally trafficking in stolen goods and was arrested. Despite
constant monitoring by the police and the Pinkertons, Marm still
had some tricks up her sleeve. Late one night, after

(08:44):
Marm had been released on bail, she slipped out of
her apartment in New York. She fled to Canada carrying
nearly a million dollars in cash and diamonds, and she
lived out the rest of her days a free woman.
When Marm Mandelbaum died in eighteen ninety four, her body
was returned to New York to be buried. Attended her funeral, and,
according to reports, over a dozen mourners had their pockets,

(09:06):
picked just the way that marm would have wanted. I
hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how

(09:29):
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.