August 2, 2019 • 58 mins
How did a young, struggling German immigrant build one of the country's most successful criminal empires? In this live episode, the guys join with Holly Frey, cohost of the award-winning podcast Stuff You Missed in History Class, to explore the life, times and reign of America's first mob boss, Marm Mandelbaum.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt, my name
is all they call me Ben. This is our super
producer Paul, Mission Control decand who is with us as
always backstage? You are you, You are here and that
makes this stuff they don't want you to know live
at the Theater eight St. Mark's. Oh yeah, and it
(00:47):
is a very special day for me personally. Just really
quickly before we get into this, gentleman got this seventeen
years ago today, a little over that. I met this
girl at the International Thespian Conference and uh we we
hit it off. We were introduced that day, and then
ten years ago today I got to become her husband,
which is kind of cool. And she's here and I
(01:08):
never get to do the show in front of her.
So happy anniversary, Diana, Happy anniversary. Start the night off
on a heartwarming note. And this this is a special day.
This is a special place with so much history. So
we we three, he said, we've got to have a
(01:29):
special guest, and luckily we found the perfect one. We'd
like to introduce you. I think we all know and
love her, the co host of the award winning podcast
Stuff You Missed in History Class, Holly Fry. Holy hello,
you guys are way too sweet, and if you would
like to just hang out at my house and do
this every morning when I wake up, that would be um. So,
(01:52):
as Matt kind of did in an orner way earlier,
we did get to see The Kitchen already, Um, which
is Warner Brothers new film, and as I think Scary explained,
it follows these amazing women on their incredible trajectory through
like taking over the crime industry of Hell's Kitchen. Um. This,
in turn no spoilers because we don't want to give
(02:13):
any of them away, but because it is a story
about women in the crime syndicate, it inspired this podcast,
which is about another story of a similar incredibly badass
woman who worked her way to the top of the
organized crime of New York and other places. As you'll hear,
America's first mob boss was a woman, you guys, specifically
(02:38):
a woman known as Frederica marm Vandelbaum. She was born
Frederica Henriette Augusta Wisner in eighteen eighteen in a Prussian
town called Castle, which is now a city in modern
day Germany. That's right. And we don't know a whole
lot about Marm's backstory other than um, you know, she
her family was Jewish, and in eight teen forty eight
(03:00):
she married a guy named Wolf Israel Mandelbaum and the
Wolf Mandelbaum and uh, she she and he were traveling peddlers,
and they were subjected to some pretty serious persecution and
anti Semitism throughout their lives when they were there. Yeah.
(03:21):
Actually traveling peddler was one of the few jobs that
Jews were allowed to hold at the time. Um. And
in addition to this discrimination, the Mandelbaums were also really
driven to a scary place, which is the brink of starvation.
When the potato blight of the nineteen or the eighteen
forties hit Europe, we talked about it a lot in
context of Ireland, but many countries were deeply impacted. Uh.
(03:43):
And so there was also this political instability that developed
in Germany in the late eighteen forties when they had
their own series of revolutions which failed, and these combined
factors led them to the decision that they had to
flee Germany, and they left in eighteen fifty. So Wolf
left in the steamship the Baltimore and arrived in New
York in July of that same year, and Frederika and
(04:05):
their infant daughter Berta pronunciation Guru right here. Berta soon
followed and they arrived in September via the Eerie. And
Frederika at the time was twenty three years old, which
is bonkers to me. I don't know why, because I'm
thirty five, and I don't feel like I've accomplished nearly
as much as as we're going to describe this woman
having accomplished at that point in her life. But the
(04:27):
Mandel Bombs traveled in steerage um where more than a
hundred immigrants were packed into these incredibly tight quarters in
one of three of the ship's lower decks um and
there was a row of tiny hay lined bunks that
were stacked against the wall um and passengers were provided
with what was called an immigrants kit, which was a
(04:48):
horse blanket, a beat up tin plate, a knife, a
fork in a spoon, and seasickness was rampant. It was
a constant problem and the remedies that folks use things
like lime drops, and yet it's true raw onions were
totally useless. So personal space and hygiene were entirely non existent,
(05:09):
and diseases ran rampant on the ship, and many did
not survive this absurdly perilous journey. Yeah, I feel like
we should consider like the supplies they were given were
not nice. So next time you're on your international flight
and you want to complain about your thin blanket, just
trust that you're getting luxury. By comparison, the happy Titanic
(05:30):
moments you see in steerage totally total fantasy and especially
difficult for Marm because Marm was almost six ft tall.
She was around two fifty pounds. She was an imposing
figure who stuck out in a crowd, and she was
she was easy to find, So imagine being almost six
(05:51):
ft tall and stuck in Asmal said, these tiny hay
line buildings, this serious, seriously dangerous, torturous situation. Uh could
prove fatal to a lot of people. And we will
never know exactly what Marm and her daughter endured during
this journey, but one thing is for certain. It was
not pretty. It was the opposite. It was ugly and
(06:13):
the crowding did not stop at steerage. This is this
is one of the worst parts. So they get out
of the boat and they think, you know, who knows
what They're dreaming of a big, beautiful city, green vistas
and so on. But the problem is, by eighteen fifty
this city, New York was the largest and busiest port
in the United States. So Frederica, her husband Wolf and
(06:36):
Berta were just three roughly two million people who would
immigrate to the US via New York during the eighteen fifties,
chasing this dream of a better life in a better country,
and it was a dream that was tough to catch,
especially early on. The Mantal Bombs started their lives in
New York in the lower east side of Manhattan, in
(06:57):
an area known as Klein deutch Land or Little Germany,
which were I believe we're in right now. We're at
least extremely close to it at this moment um. At
the time, Little Germany was made up of around four
hundred blocks, and Tompkins Square Park, which is right down
the road, was at the very center of it. And
then over the years it expanded pretty significantly. Um and
(07:19):
at one point it was I believe. Well, we'll get
into it a little later. But like a lot of
the German families who moved into the city around that time,
the mantel Bombs began their life in New York living
with with family members or friends who would put them
up while they searched for their own place to start
a new life. Yeah, and eventually the mandement was found
an apartment, their own place on the eighth Street, and
(07:40):
it was a stifling, windowless room and an absurdly rundown
tenement building. There was no heat, there was no indoor plumbing,
The bathroom consisted of a wooden outhouse in the alley,
and they had to carry their own water from like
hand pumps, um, and that was the only way they
could get access to fresh water. And those handpumps were
out in the sidewalk. So probably a lot like your
(08:01):
first apartment. Um, that's what I'm guessing. And the thing
is life for most immigrants. As much as they thought
this was going to be way easier, it was extraordinarily difficult.
The mantel Bounds actually lost their first child. That was
not an uncommon occurrence for families, but even so, with
that tragedy in their history, they still ended up kind
of doing better than most. Um, they had a room
(08:21):
to themselves, for example, which seemed incredibly luxurious, and a
lot of immigrants were actually living transient lives. They were
sleeping wherever they could, where they could put down a bedroll,
where someone would let them, they would just if they
could find a dry place, they would make that their
bed for the night. Um, they carried literally everything they
had with them, So I mean, I couldn't even carry
(08:44):
my Star Wars figures. But you've been to the tour
of Ellis Island where you see the luggage room where
they confiscate your luggage and you get it back. We're
talking like trunks, were talking like these massive packs that
they would carry everything they had, and they would absolutely
lose a lot of these things throughout the course of
this experience where talking about they would And part of
that was that they were really victimized by slum lords
(09:04):
who took advantage of people in this desperate situation, who
would you know, charge them way too much for not
permanent living quarters really tight uh, and often there were
dozens of people crammed in one room. So then if
they did not pay, they lost those possessions because those
slum lords would kick them right out and they did
not get to take their things with them, so at
(09:25):
that point they would just be turned out on the street.
They had no money, they had no possessions, just the
clothes on their backs, and they were trying to start
a new life. So survival very quickly became the name
of the game. And the system was, of course corrupt,
and the norm for immigrants was discrimination and cruelty. We've
kind of hit that point repeatedly, and so understandably, Mandelbaum,
(09:47):
like a lot of immigrants, just decided that she had
to make her own rules and figure out a way
to survive and support her family, and that meant turning
to crime. And as it turns out, she was fun
ominally good, as she had a gift. No smoke on
that one. So mandel Baum began to lay the groundwork
(10:07):
for her life as a career criminal while she was
working as a street peddler. Since she and Wolf could
not afford a wagon, much less a storefront, they set
up shop on the streets of Little Germany. They were
walking in the midst of the crowds, selling whatever they
could find that they thought anybody might remotely want broken watches,
(10:29):
scraps of fabric, not like whole pieces of clothing, like
scraps of fabric, pieces of ropes, stuff like that. And
the kinds of things they were selling were, as you
could tell, not in particularly high demand, so tries they
might working all day well into the night. They could
barely afford to feed their children. Something had to be done.
(10:51):
But it was during these early days pedaling on the
streets of Little Germany that Fredericka Mandelbaum began making these
contact that would prove to be super important in establishing
her ultimately her criminal enterprise. So at the time, there
were children that would just roam the streets. A lot
of times, they were homeless, a lot of times they
(11:12):
were part of families that were transient as well, but
they would sell these odds and ends, much like that
peddlar's life U and their parents, if they had them,
would encourage them to make a little more money, to steal,
to do petty crimes, to become pickpockets and thieves. And
nandel Baum saw this and she had like kind of
a lightbulb moment where she was like, Okay, I'm going
(11:33):
to capitalize on this. So she started literally, like Oliver
Twist Fagan style, enlisting these street urchin children into this
grassroots criminal empire. Um. She also met thieves and other
petty crows, so you know, like weren't children, um. And
she started to look into how to unload the stolen
goods that they had acquired, and this led her to
(11:55):
an Aha moment where she realized, uh, hey, there is
just as much, if not more money to make moving
stolen goods than actually doing the stealing, which is pretty enterprising.
And boy, oh boy, did she do just that. She
found her niche and she was spectacular at it. So
for mandel Baum and her family, things really took a
(12:17):
turn for the better. This happened, ironically during a time
that was very difficult for most people because it was
the Panic of eighteen seven. Yeah, not the most encouraging
way to describe an event in history, right. So at
the time Panic of the Panic of eighteen fifty seven,
we as a country, the United States, had more or
(12:37):
less overplayed our financial hand. We expanded domestic investment and
business at a rate that lagged behind the already failing
international economy. And it was a bubble that let me
do a sound effect. It was a bubble that pops spectacularly.
Oh that the two spectacular. Yeah, we'll edit that part.
(12:58):
So so it's serious, though I don't want to make
light of this. Multitudes of banks closed, hundreds of businesses
failed overnight, and that meant that tens of thousands of
people woke up one morning without a job and they
had to figure out something. This was oddly advantageous for
people who were already living on the other side of
(13:19):
the law. They were familiar with this sort of informal system.
The folks with legitimate jobs had to learn this stuff
very quickly, and they had to go to the streets
doing the same stuff that mandel Bomb started out doing. However,
she was in a much better position. Oh, how the
tables have turned. That's right. So Mandel Bomb had already
(13:41):
established herself as this uh shrewd trader, and she was
a ruthless business person, and she was just in the
perfect position to take full advantage of all the woes
that the country and specifically New York City was going
through at the time. And according to her contemporaries, um
when she was making a transaction, right, she would never
buy anything for more than half of what it was worth,
(14:04):
and she would never sell it for less than twice
of what she paid. That's pretty good if you can
actually get away with that over the course of a career,
right um, And she became known as one of the
best fences in the entire city of New York. She
was just purchasing stolen stuff from all the criminals that
are gathering things for her and then selling it to
legitimate buyers. Now that can be anyone from just uh,
(14:27):
let's say Holly wanted to get a Grido something or other,
she had to have one to a business, a a
company that has a storefront that wants to have goods
to sell their right. And if you think about this
as a proprietor in these down times, in a down
economy like that, the only way to actually keep your
business alive is to offer the lowest possible prices to
(14:51):
customers that you possibly can write. Then you also have
to charge enough to make a profit on whatever good
you're selling to them. And that meant that the stolen
goods from Marm's enterprise made business sense. And it makes
you wonder just how many of Marms fell off the wagon.
Bits of loot actually ended up in legitimate storefronts in
(15:11):
New York City at the time. Yeah, or how much
of that kind of thing is actually still happening today
right now? I mean think about it. Don't think about it.
Let's not so that was way way back in the
mid nineteenth century. Uh, not now, not, not now at all. Right,
We're good, everything's good. Um. Marm's network perfectly was straddling
(15:32):
the worlds of both this this crime, the world of
crime in the world of commerce, and she was connecting
the numerous criminal sellers to the legitimate and very eager purchasers.
And everyone in the city at that time is looking
for a bargain and everything they're doing, and with Marm's
business model, everybody was winning. Yeah, if you wanted to
sell something to someone, he was not going to ask
(15:54):
a lot of questions. You went to Marm. And if
you wanted to buy something on the cheap, nick lesslee cheap,
questionably cheap, you went to Marms. So soon every street
level criminal had either met or worked with Frederica mar Mandelbaum.
But pretty quickly her network climbed out from just like
(16:14):
the depths of street level criminals. Uh, and she started
establishing relationships with people like lawyers, police officials, prosecutors, anyone
that wanted to have a relationship that had something to
gain from knowing Marms. She was a regular at this
place called the Eighth Street Thieves Exchange, which was one
of New York's most active black markets. I heard it
described as like a Walmart of thievery kind of and
(16:37):
um wards, by the way, at the time where these
numbered voting districts in New York that was divided up
into and that will come up a little bit later.
Um So, she was beloved as well in the Jewish community,
and she often used her synagogue, which was she was
very active in as a networking site. And even the
corrupt politicians of Tammany Hall, the political machine, were huge
(16:57):
fans of marm because they knew that if they played
ball with her that she would help them secure the
Jewish vote in the ward which she was becoming particularly
um influential within. So there were folks like Tammany Hall's
boss Tweed and the particularly corrupt mayor Fernando Woods at
the time who were regular guests at her house at
(17:19):
these like Suarez that she would throw and they absolutely
were doing business with her, no question about it. Yeah.
So while she's rubbing shoulders with all of these big
names in the city, she's also she and all the
money in her enterprise. They're financing some of the city's
most spectacular crimes, like the Manhattan Savings bank robbery, which
(17:40):
could be an episode all its own. It's crazy. But
can you give us a like a little quick and
dirty about this? Definitely so in It was eighteen seventy
eight when this occurred, and this robbery was and still
is to this day in twenty nineteen, the largest bank
robbery of all time in terms of real money that
was stolen in uh and at that time, in seventy eight,
(18:02):
over three million dollars in cash, money and securities were stolen.
Think about that, in eighteen seventy eight dollars. WHOA. So
here's the big question. We've kind of gone over all
this stuff about Fredrika Mandelbaum, but what really makes her different?
How could she operate a criminal enterprise at this scale
(18:23):
for such a long time. You know what I love
about that is that's that's a great question and it
actually does have an answer, which doesn't always happen. We're
talking about history, right, So so marm succeeded in a
in an industry that also had other players. Right, there
were rival fence operations. In addition to fighting against these groups.
(18:45):
She raised four children, right, and she was caring for
wolf her sick husband, and Wolfe suffered from consumption. He
was also, sadly to say, not respected by either the
legal operators like the cops or the illegal people. They
all thought that this guy was a joke. They actually
(19:07):
called him and this was a very bad word at
the time. They referred to him as a nonentity ouch.
I know, it's brutal, right, And and so she was
taking care of her family pretty much on her own.
She was also running a legitimate dry goods store. And
I want to I want to be honest with everyone.
I want to clear this up really quickly, because when
(19:27):
we started working on this, I wasn't sure what dry
goods meant. I thought it was like a bean store, like, yeah,
no question about I honestly had no idea. Either that's
such a bless your heart moment, thank you a resident haberdasher,
or like in a fashion play, tell us what dry
dry goods were things that were non non food necessities,
(19:50):
so it could be clothes, hats, tablewares, etcetera. Gloves maybe
life needs yeah, and so not beans. I want to
really stress just store. I got it, guys, I learned
so marm Also, while she was doing all this, while
she's fighting rivals, raising her family and running actually legitimate business,
(20:15):
she built the city's largest fencing operation, ran it for
more than two decades and still in history and the
history of this town, she is the most successful fence
even in But there's another thing that made her different.
We've been throwing around the name marm Right, it's her nickname,
it's her street name. Where did it come from? Though? Okay,
(20:38):
so this is a fun story. Here's the deal. So
she was a ruthless criminal masterbind but she was also
a very nurturing lady. Um. I mean, I think there's
some evidence of that in the fact that she took
care of a family while running two other businesses, one
legitimate and onnot um. She actually took it upon herself
to mentor young criminals. I mean, that's sweet, um, do
(21:00):
you think about it? She taught them their trade. So
she called this is the sweetest thing. She called her
a group of criminals, her little chicks and they called
her Morm in return, so it was a very nurturing
and loving creation. Yeah yeah, yeah. Beginning around the time
of the Panic of eighteen fifty seven, she started just
(21:22):
taking various ne'er do wells under her wings. She was
seeing lots of people who needed help and she was like,
come to me, I will I will teach you. And
although she helped criminals of all types pursue careers in
crime and learn their trade and get really good at it,
she was really really, particularly softhearted and fond of working
with young women because she felt like it saved them
(21:43):
from a life as a housekeeper um or probably other options,
which is kind of a framing spin, you know what
I mean, because we're helping her, right, I mean, I
also don't want to clean a house, but um you know,
pick pocketing sounds better. But uh so. The chief though
(22:04):
in her affection, even though she was very nurturing with
her little chicks, really what it all came down to
for her were her three surviving children. So Annie, Julius,
and Sarah were the ones that lived after their first
child had passed, and marm was so dedicated to them
that even in the middle of like an incredibly important
deal or a meeting. If one of her kids was six,
(22:24):
she was like, I'm sorry, this deal can't happen now,
I'm out um or even if they just needed her,
she would completely call off whatever she was doing and
run to their side. So things were really looking up
for the Mandel Bombs at this point. They absolutely were
moving on up out of the tenements. And now Marm's
home was full of dry goods, but they were fancy
dry goods. They were things like furniture art. Art is
(22:45):
the fanciest of dry goods if you ask me, silverware,
draperies uh stolen from some of the best homes and
businesses and mansions in New York City. By eighteen sixty four,
she bought a three story building um at seventy nine
Clinton Street on the corner of Rivington and Clinton, and
the family had their dry goods store still at the time,
(23:08):
run by Wolf and the kids. It was an adorable
family affair, but the real action was happening in the
back rooms where Marm headed up this incredibly lucrative fencing operation.
This isn't fencing. Like fencing, it's like moving stolen goods.
I don't think any I was just clarifying she might
have sold fences. You don't know how. There was somebody
(23:29):
here this whole time, going how do you make money
fencing them and take their wallet? Just think we're all
on the same page, Like I see fences everywhere around town.
You know what's true. And she was always one step
ahead of the authorities in the event that there was
a raid or something. She even had this thing. It
was like a chimney with a fake back that hit
a dumb waiter. So if the cops were coming, they
(23:52):
were knocking on the door, she could like load this
dumb waiter up in the fake chimney with all the
stolen goods she had, and lower it down underground and
and be like, what, I'm operating the dry goods exclusively.
I'm a legitimate business person. Leave me the hell. Are
you a chimney inspector, sir, dot be on your way
your credentials. No, it's true. Um, so she was pretty crafty.
(24:18):
There's there's a fantastic book by an author named Jade
north Conway, and in this book he delineates three three
principal reasons that marm Mandelbaum was a cut above all
of the other fencing operations, and and the I think
they're pretty legitimate, to be honest. Well, the first one is,
(24:38):
remember she and her family they're immigrants from Germany, right,
they speak German, but she learned to speak English extremely
well and pretty quickly, and she could function as an
interpreter between any other immigrants who also spoke German and English.
Now this is huge because in eighteen seventy and there's
an estimated thirty percent of all of New York City's
(24:58):
inhabitants were either German immigrants or their first generation children.
So there are a lot of people that spoke both
English and German or just English or just German. Right,
So a lot of her clientele would need the service,
and it probably also helped put them at ease when
she's having a transaction with them if she can be
functioned as a translator. And and this is just my speculation,
(25:22):
but I think it was probably advantageous that she could
understand English. So well, if let's say she's having some
kind of trade deal with someone who speaks English who
maybe doesn't know who she is and thinks that, oh well,
she probably only speaks German, she can understand everything to
that person or that person in there, uh there, others
are saying absolutely gay in the upper hand or even
(25:44):
like overhere deals and you know all that kind of stuff,
and like totally figure out how to kind of capitalize
on that language thing for sure, and feign ignorance to right, like, oh,
I don't know what you're talking about. Literally yeah, oh,
the power to be the only person in the room
who literally knows, let's go everything that's going on. Um. Second,
she had this other skill set, which is sort of
(26:04):
like a different kind of bilinguality. Right, she knew, uh,
the crime industry, but she also was running a legitimate
dry goods store, so she knew the products that were
available and when things came in off the streets. She
knew what fabric was worth, what jewelry was worth, and
she knew the markets for those products. So she had
(26:25):
a very intimate understanding of both their prices and the
level of demand based on the people that have been
coming to her on the side with potential deals or needs.
And this allowed her to make lightning quick calculations about
the value of stolen goods when they were offered to her.
And third, and perhaps this is the most important part
of her operation. Everyone from the judges to the to
(26:49):
the street thieves knew that she would never ask any questions.
You just show up with eighty seven. Hats fine, you
know what I mean. Let's talk turkey. She dealt in
plunder of all kinds, silk, lace, diamonds, carriages, horses, gold, silver,
of course, bonds and more. And she could, like you
were saying, Holly, she could just look at something a
(27:11):
thief it brought her, and then lightning quickly, she would
know automatically how much she would pay for it, and
she would already know where she would sell it, which
was brilliant. In fact, she was so she was so
efficient at this. When the Chicago Fire of eighteen seventy
one occurred, looting was rampant in Chicago, was pandemonium, was chaotic,
(27:31):
and a lot of the stuff that got looted from
a different city ended up with her. It went through
her hands at some point. And although her although her
pursuit of this stuff was sophisticated and very well thought out,
the actual process was really simple. It's sort of like
you said earlier, Matt. She let's let's say, for instance,
(27:52):
let's go with eight seven stolen fedoras. Sure, so somebody
comes up eight seven stolen fedoras. Let's say that's like
a hundred dollars worth of hats. It's like a math problem.
We'll just we don't know how much of those actually
made bows. So she would say, okay, this is a
hundred dollars. If I were actually paying for this legitimately,
(28:14):
I will give you twenty dollars. That's one fifth of it.
And the thief would say, okay, yeah, that's fine, I'll
just go get some more hats tomorrow, and then she
would resell those goods for sixty dollars. And the police
had action as well in this process. So the victims
of theft might approach the police and say, hey, somebody
stole all my weird hats or whatever, and they would say, well,
(28:36):
if you make it worth our while, we'll do our
best to find them. And sometimes they would do too,
is just go back to marm and like buy another hat,
like an equivalent hat, and then say hey, here's your hat.
And it was like, yeah, it was absolute subterfuge because
they were getting paid under the table. So from their opinion,
every from their perspective, rather, everybody is winning except you know,
(28:58):
the victims, he said, the person whose hats those were originally. Um.
What's interesting about marm is that even though she became
very successful and could have easily moved uptown too much
fancier digs, she chose to stay in Little Germany. However,
her empire expanded all over the place. UM. It moved
throughout New York, uh, into all the boroughs beyond the boroughs.
(29:20):
Eventually she became an established force in Trenton and Newark. UH.
She courted wealthy, legitimate clients as well as Jersey criminals. Um.
And then what's what's interesting and not really surprising is
that her husband both died in eighteen seventy five. But
because she had kind of been running everything, she was
(29:40):
able to, you know, pretty quickly move on. She didn't
have to pause and grieve and wonder how she was
going to make ends meet. She was like, Okay, well,
let's keep the business running. And by the eighteen eighties
she owned several tenement buildings and uh she also owned warehouses.
And she used those warehouses to store all of this merchandise,
all of the stolen goods that she was handling. But
(30:03):
what's really cool cool being a relative term is that. Um,
this is not all she built, and I love this
part of the story. So mandel Bomb allegedly uh founded
an actual school to train up young criminals around eighteen seventy.
She's true. She she bought a building on the corner
of Clinton and Grant and transformed into kind of like
(30:23):
an X Men School for the gifted or whatever, a
Hogwarts type situation. But instead of teaching you know, young
mutants or wizards or whatever to harness their super superpowers,
mandel Bomb's Grand Street School started off with the finer
points of pick pickpocketry, pocket, here we go, I'm like
in that, or things like misdirection, um and yeah, young
men and women alike, which is a big deal. Um.
(30:45):
Were who showed promise with the basics were then graduated
on to more advanced skills, stuff like safe cracking or
grand larceny or blackmail or con artist. Try like you do.
And um, the professors at this Grand Street School, we're
the best criminals in the city because they were already
part of Mandel Bomb's network of crooks. So students who
(31:07):
excelled at this school were brought into mandel Bomb's inner circle. Yeah,
definitely a kind of promotion, right something, I still want
to get my PhD and pickpocketology. Excellent use of my time,
your PhD. P. So you know, allegedly this uh, this
(31:27):
school was right next to the police headquarters. Again, that's allegedly.
I love it. I love her so much. That plays
into the story because the thing about bribery and corruption
is that there is a threshold. People will look the
other way for some stuff. But if we get to egregious,
if we get to blatant, then there's a police chief
who needs to get reelected, so needs a scapegoat. And
(31:50):
although details on this details on the school or a
little bit sketchy at this point, we know that it
did eventually close when Mandelbaum found out at one of
the students was the child of a police official. Uh,
this kid was enrolled. And picture mandel Bomb, you know,
just wiping her for it a little bit and thinking
(32:10):
the heat's getting close, you know. So, so she didn't
want to risk the school being exposed. And part of
it was probably because she had this loyalty to her
little chicks too. So it operated for about six years
and it generated, as you said, no, some of the
most gifted criminals in New York which makes them, by default,
(32:33):
some of the most gifted criminals in the country at
the time. Okay, so we've we've established here that Fredrika
mar Mandel Bomb was a very important adult in the
lives of a whole bunch of kids in New York
City and young adults. And to some, you know, she
was the employer, the person that you take your goods
tod and you're gonna get a little bit, you're gonna
get paid a little bit. To others, she's the headmaster
(32:55):
at the school where you're going every day. And to
a lot of them, she was also ma, like we've
kind of discussed earlier, and we actually have a quote
here from mar Mandelbaum. Oh yeah, she's pretty blunt and
explaining why they gave her this nickname, she says, I
am Ma because I give them what a mother cannot
(33:15):
sometimes give money and horses and diamonds, and I don't know,
I don't know how you guys screw up, but I
had I had a childhood lacking and at least diamonds
and horses. You never even had like horseback riding lessons
or like wrote a pony. But she's giving them their
own horse diamond encrusted. The money actually was coated with diamonds.
(33:36):
It was just like Christmas at my house. So we've
we've talked about some of those professors. They were at
the school. They were some of the best criminals in
all New York City. A lot of her proteges ended
up becoming the next generation of best criminals. So we've
got a few of those here that will will go over.
The first one is Sophie Lions and again at a
(33:57):
very young age, she started out working with mar Mandel
Beelm bringing things to her and we actually have a
quote from Sophie that illustrates the way she felt about Marm.
She said, quote, I was not quite six years old
when I stole my first pocketbook. That's crazy. I mean,
you gotta start um early. Uh. I was very happy
because I was petted and rewarded. My wretched stepmother patted
(34:20):
my curly head, gave me a bag of candy and
said I was a good girl. Right. Okay, So after
years and years of stealing and conning, Sophie Lyons really
did become one of the most notorious thieves in all
of New York City, and she also became extremely notorious
as a confidence woman, and she was considered by Marm
(34:43):
to be one of her closest allies. Right. But, as
you might have guessed from the Wretched stepmother line, Lions
eventually turned on Mandelbaum and totally threw her under the bus.
She actually reade a tell all book called Why Crime
Doesn't Pay Now. Yeah, um Now. An other one of
the protegees who was also very close with Sophie Lyons
(35:04):
was a woman named do we decide it was Lena?
I think it's Lena, Lana Lana klein Schmidt and um again,
she's another very prominent criminal that came up under Marm's tutelage.
And she actually moved to Hackensack, New Jersey, and she
was posing as the wealthy widow of this South South
(35:24):
American mining tycoon. And she started doing the same things
that Marm was doing, where she's holding these big parties
for important officials, only this time it's over in Jersey.
And uh. She actually got in trouble because she was
wearing a ring. That's how she got caught. She was
wearing a ring that was stolen that was recognized by
one of the important folks at her house. It was
(35:45):
business model that Marm was establishing. This is like she
was franchise. Yeah. I like the idea that Lena was
like the original faker of being the prince from Africa
that might need like and was getting confidence of people
that way. And these are us. These are just a
few of the associates. There were others that are very
well known in crime history today, people like Little Annie
(36:07):
Riley Ellen Clegg or Margaret Brown who went by the
street name Old Mother Hubbard. Yes. Then we also had
a guy named Herman Stout Stout Stout Stout, and he
was the only one Marm trusted. Uh. Stoud was mount
of bombs, a most trusted associate and was always by
her side. He literally is the one who did all
(36:28):
the heavy lifting and when they did deals, he would
tote all of the goods to one of her many
warehouses across town. And she loved him over all of
her associates for sure. Yeah. She referred to him at
different times as her son, especially when they were talking
to the police. Spoiler alert, she doesn't really get away eventually,
(36:54):
despite all of her precautionary measures. Uh, there's a plot
twist in New York. Knew of shoals are elected and
they're actually not corrupt. It's weird. It's like a Shamalan twist,
you know. Damn Yeah. And so they said, all right,
we're gonna bring this this whole operation down, and um,
the District Attorney's office was in the midst of a
(37:14):
cold war with the corrupt police force with boss politics.
The new mayor, a guy named Edward Cooper, wanted to
reform the city was very vocal about it, and it
turned out that many people in this fair metropolis agreed.
They were like, I would be nice if my stuff
is stolen to at least get it back, you know exactly.
(37:34):
But the problem is a domino effect ensued with that,
at least for marm and in her criminal enterprise, because
without the support of these politicians, she couldn't effectively bribe
the officials that she needed to, and without those bribes
greasing all the wheels to make stuff happen and to
give her some cover, she couldn't operate out in the
open anymore. Yeah. And what's more, the situation worse since
(37:56):
because she could also no longer protect her criminal old network,
the city's worth of little chicks. They were once grateful
for patronage, and now they began flipping, snitching, testifying against
her in court. The tide, in short, was turning the
d A. A guy named Peter Olney hires the Pinkerton
Detective Agency to take Marm's operation down once and for all.
(38:21):
So members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which again has
its own whole, very rich story UM and still exists
today in a certain form, Um was a private entity,
which in some ways kind of prevented it from being
quite so open to the corruption that many public services
were having issues with UM, and they did manage to
(38:42):
bring her reign in New York to an end. So
their plan was super simple. This is the thing, like
the criminal master find always gets taken down by just
the stupidest, easiest thing. They got a bolt of silk,
they tagged it so they knew that one was the
stolen one, and then they just waited for Marm to
buy it, which she of course did so that she
was caught red handed and she went to trial. She
(39:04):
was released on bail. This was largely thanks to the
work of how and Humble law firm. She kept them
on a five thousand dollar a year retainer. Yeah, they
were like the They were like the salt goodman of
their day. Right, this very breaking bad? It was a
better call? How and hummele I would actually watch that show. Um.
(39:24):
And then, in a this rare and sort of delightfully
pearl clutching statement, very out of character that she made
to the public, Mom vehemently professed her innocence. Oh yes,
oh this is great. I keep a dry goods store
and have for it twenty years past. I buy and
(39:45):
sell dry goods as other dry goods people do. Good.
I have never knowingly bought stolen goods, and neither did
my son Julius. I have never stolen anything in my life,
which probably true. I feel that these charges are brought
against me in spite I have never bribed the police
(40:08):
nor had their protection. I never needed their protection because
I and my son are innocent of these charges. So
help me, God, it's going to be an amazing juxtaposition
to another statement she makes a little later in the episode. Yeah.
In short, marm won Best Dramatic Performance in a non
acting role. But it's really important that we haven't really
(40:29):
mentioned this specifically, But like her whole like stroke of
genius was that she never really handled the stolen goods.
She just had people do it for her. So she
probably maybe even like was drinking her own kool aid
and believed that she actually wasn't a criminal, that she
was just a proprietor was like, you know, facilitating things.
You know, I'm helping the community, helping the community exactly.
She actually was kind of, Yeah, no one wants to
(40:51):
be a housekeeper, right right, certainly not me. Um. I
did have that job once, but that's another story. So
rather than surrender in the midst of all of this,
she decided that she would run, and she escaped north
to Canada, and she established herself with over one million
dollars worth of stolen diamonds and cold hardcash. Slight backtrack.
It's an amazing story how she actually accomplished this. She
(41:14):
Um was under house arressed essentially, or she you know,
posted that bail that we talked about, and she had
a housekeeper that she had impersonated her by dressing in
her classic outfit that she wore, which kind of was
like a Queen Victoria kind of situation with like a
feathered hat and like a veil. So she was able
to make trips to her lawyer's office while the Pickerton's
were surveilling her, and she went into the lawyer and
(41:36):
then the housekeeper came out, and so they tracked the
housekeeper and then Morm made that Canadian get away. Yeah,
I made a run for the border. Um. So there
in Canada, they stayed purposely at second rate in conspicuous places.
They went to a little hotel near the Grand Trunk
Railway station in Hamilton, Canada, and they just wanted to
(41:58):
stay on the deal. They just tried to keep a
low profile. But then on December nine, four, Hamilton's police
and detectives arrested Marm and her two associates, Julius her
Son and Herman as they were sitting down for breakfast.
So they were having omelets and handcuffs um. And naturally
Marm attempted to bribe the police because that's that's her
(42:20):
jam who worked before. Why would we not do it again?
But Canadian police they don't play. They were not having this,
the incorruptible Canadians, It's true. And so Marm was arrested
yet again in Canada for a possession of four thousand
dollars worth of stolen diamonds. But yeah, I don't know, like,
what would that translate to in today's money, four thousand
dollars in diamonds it was like a million bucks. I
(42:41):
don't know. I'm not imagining. I'm not a human. Yeah,
I mean yeah, I guess it would be about a
fistful of diamonds. I think we should agree that loose
diamonds are just inherently a sketchy thing. It's also absurdly baller.
If you're just dealing in loose diamonds, you just have
them lying around. There's a Jeffrey Epstein thing there. They're
gonna let's yet. So yeah, she's arrested again. But luckily
(43:06):
the owner of the diamonds couldn't, like eyeball, identify that
the diamonds were mine. I don't know how how would
you like know that they were these were my diamonds.
I like diamonds. I don't believe that's fair. Maybe there
was an etching on the bottom, or maybe there were
specific weight or specific cut perhaps for this guy could
(43:27):
not do that thing. So the Canadian cops had to
let her go as well, and the New York d
A didn't have jurisdicxon so he wasn't able to send
anyone to the Canadian court to fetch her, and Marm
and her associates once again ran free. Yeah yeah, and
she actually ended up with her diamonds, right, she totally did.
She retrieved her diamonds, which is absurdly baller second time around.
(43:53):
I love the idea of the jail checkout where they
just hand her up. He can't figure out who they
belonged to, so they must be yours. Oh, she did
have to pay six It's like the processing for sure.
So she used those diamonds and she bought herself a tiny,
the small, very meager, two story house along Hamilton's main street.
And by she opened you guessed it again, another dry
(44:17):
goods store. She's really good at the dry goods and uh,
and it became a family operation, right and totally again.
Her three children joined her, Annie and Julius permanently, and
then her married daughter Sarah stayed in Hamilton's behind for
a time before returning back to New York with her family.
And so now we're at this this strange sort of crossroads, right,
(44:41):
we have to ask ourselves, was Marm finally after all
these years on the street and narrow were her Queen
pinned days behind her. We're very proud of that phrase.
Pretty good. It depends on what you think, and we
want to hear your opinion on this and what you
think about this letter that she sent to her friends
in New York after she had started her dry goods
(45:03):
store in Canada. I like how Ben sets this up,
like there will be question marks in your head, but
when you hear this, there won't. Uh Marm wrote quote,
I beg to announce to you that I have opened
my new emporium in every respect the equal of my
late New York establishment. I shall be pleased to continue
our former pleasant business relations, promising not alone to pay
(45:26):
the best prices for the article which you may have
for sale, but also in carefully protecting all my customers,
no matter at what expense. With my present facilities, I
am able to dispose of all commodities forwarded to me
with dispatch and security, trusting to hear from you soon,
(45:47):
and assuring you that a renewal of past favors will
be greatly appreciated. I am yours faithfully, F Mandelbau. Can
we unpack some of this kind of dated language real quick?
I'm sorry. I don't even know that it's dating well
thinly veiled letter of all times exactly. But with my
present facilities, I am able to dispose of all commodities
(46:08):
forwarded to me with dispatch and security. So I'm gonna
move your soul and stuff. I'm gonna continue doing what
I use you guys. It's still totally cool. I'm just
doing it somewhere else. If it was written in it
would have just said I'm back at it. See you
come get me. Yeah, yeah, it's it's true. Like dispatch
and security, I'll not only move all your stuff, but
I'll move it faster than anyone else, and you will
(46:30):
not get busted as you would if you went to
other less reputable fencing establishment. There you go. So a
gentleman from New Yorker reporter headed on up to Canada.
Just you know, peek in the store, see what's going
on in there. Uh again, it's completely legit, he said, sarcastically.
And uh. This guy reacted in in a way that
(46:51):
can only be described as faint surprise when he found
that all of the new Canadian stores merchandise came from
New York City. That weird. Uh, everything was being sold
at incredibly almost unbelievably low prices, and there were absolutely
zero identifying labels on any of the merchandise. It checks
(47:14):
out basically. So it appeared that Morm was, you know,
you'd think she set up in this new place. Whatever
she's doing, bribing whoever, she's got a bribe, but whatever
she's doing to continue this business, it seems like she
was ready to start a new basically a new chapter
for her. She's gonna live life out as all the
stories would want us to believe, happily ever after. But unfortunately, UM,
(47:34):
it wasn't gonna work out that way for her. Um,
this is a little bit sad here. Her daughter Annie
were talking about how she was up there in Canada
with her while she went back to New York, as
we mentioned, and while she was there, she got pretty
sick and she ended up developing pneumonia. And then on November,
her daughter Annie died, and there was no way that
Morm was going to not go back and be there,
(47:58):
you know, for her daughter's burial. Um, and whatever the
cost might be, whether it was to her livelihood, to
her own personal freedom, she was gonna do whatever it took.
Because we talked about earlier in the show. Her children
were her first and foremost priority. She was going to
be there for them, come hell or high water. And
so Mom's Mom Morm's former home was now owned by
(48:19):
a Mrs marx Uh and Morm and her son Julius
actually slipped into the house um and they were and
Morm was overcome by grief, and she fainted at the time.
And she obviously had re established some of those old
connections and those old friendships because she had a group
of friends who actually were there for her and escorted
her out of the house and they hit her in
(48:41):
a different home across the street while she recovered Um.
But while it was clear that giving Annie a Christian
burial would help kind of like make things a little
more low key and under the radar, Morm insisted that
it had to be a traditional Jewish service in accordance
with her faith, because like that, she was very, very religious,
(49:02):
and there was no other way that it was going
to work for her. So Marm's son Julius, tried to
do a little disguise work. He shaved his hair and
beard so that he would evade the police. But Marm
we mentioned she was a very tall woman and very large.
She was imposing, so you couldn't really costume that situation
and make her not look like herself. Uh. And she
was grieving very deeply, so she probably wasn't really into
(49:24):
the costume idea to begin with. Um. And what's really
interesting is that her street family, like her criminal family,
came to her daughter's funeral as well. So it was
like burglars and bank thieves and pickpockets and basically every
kind of person she had ever touched in her life
and in her school, etcetera. And they all came out publicly.
I mean, everybody at this point is taking a big risk,
(49:46):
but they wanted to pay their respects to her daughter.
And afterwards marm went back to Hamilton, Canada. She was
not apprehended by police, uh and the Pinkerton's also left
her alone. And it's unclear still if the cops to
pity on a grieving mother. What we do know for
sure is that uh, she did return uh, and that
there was a police officer even stationed at the funeral
(50:09):
and so they knew she was there, and reporters were
even there to interview her that day, so it was
not a secret at all. But they all just let
her leave in peace after the service was over. And
can I make to me this just rings true of
that sentiment that is a occurred and it's it's occurred
in the past several times and you kind of feel
(50:30):
it in waves. And I say this as in at lantern,
but that idea that we're all New Yorkers, right, like
like they know that all of these criminals are gathered
in this one place, but they also know that she
and these other people are important in some way as
a whole, as a community, as a whole, right, so
they just kind of let it slide. And I think
(50:51):
it speaks to the city. And there's also like almost
like a rules of engagement kind of situation where it's
like this is not fair game. It's like you don't
arrest somebody when they're going to church, you know, like
that that's sort of like an unspoken rule even between
law enforcement and criminal it would seem extraordinarily cruel to
arrest someone at their daughter's funeral. Yeah. I have a
(51:11):
theory as well that I think is pretty plausible. Uh,
odds are statistically that police officer at some point worked
with or for marm you know what I mean. So
he may have been grieving just as much. But from
that point on, marm becomes a successful, active pillar of
the community in Hamilton's Canada. Her shop is legit, by
(51:34):
which I mean no one officially reported a crime. That's
that was good enough for her. She regularly attended the
local synagogue and she began to use that as a
networking hub. She you know, seems dead set to become
a Canadian resident. However, that does not mean that New
York City has forgotten about her. As a matter of fact,
(51:55):
quite the opposite. She becomes sort of a celebrity icon
of her day. She's like Elvis Presley. She's like Bigfoot.
Everybody is seen this lady in New York and they
are convinced that it's her. But regardless of how many
times they see her, they describe her and so on,
and they're like this close to maybe trying to get
(52:15):
a picture of her or something. They never they never
catch her. It's almost like the fame of who she
had become had arrested the city and people wanted to
have their own Mom Mandel bound story. And eventually she
passed away and at the time her her obituaries, which
were published made international news, and they were not vilifying her. Really,
(52:40):
there was even at the even from the law enforcement community,
there was a sense of begrudging respect. They referred to
her as old mother Mom, the Queen of Fences, and
in February, when she passed away, contemporary accounts described her
death as due to something called Bright's disease. Nowadays we
(53:02):
recognize that as nephritis or kidney disease. Uh, and her
body was actually returned to New York. However, there was
a mystery afoot. Well, yeah, if you're you're someone with
the influence and intelligence of mar Mandelbaum, and you wanted
to get back to New York, maybe you could arrange
to have it look like you died and then maybe
(53:23):
send your body, your body in a coffin to New York. Right,
But maybe it's just stones. Maybe it's actually stolen goods
that are in that coffin. That'd be pretty cool. Who knows.
And her legend, of course feeds all of these you know,
thoughts that people were having. They were wondering, was it
possible that she's still alive and living in Ontario, and
(53:44):
was she as some course sources claimed, calling herself an
entirely new thing, reinventing herself as Madame Fuchs and then
kind of plotting a covert return to the lowery sign. Yeah,
but perhapsingly the better question is do legends ever truly
pass away? And to quote the you know, the wonderful
a Nelion, it's better to burn out than to fade away,
you know, And that's exactly what what Mandel Bomb did.
(54:07):
It's a good question because we know that while mar
may no longer be with us today, her legacy does remain.
She was the most successful fence. She was the first
mob boss of this country in history. At its heart
is a palam sest. You know, whatever occurs or is
written today will never fully erase the past. It's so true.
(54:28):
So the next time you're walking around in this area,
if you just happen to make it over here and
you walk past seventy nine Clinton Street, just take a second,
just stand there for a second, knowing the history, because
there's a pawn shop right there in that location. Now
a pawn shop. It's kind of crazy, right, There's a sign,
a big, bold yellow sign with bright red letters that
says we buy gold, silver, diamonds and any other that
(54:55):
it does say we do repairs, though of course they do.
You can also actually find her burial site um at
the Union Field Cemetery at Congregation Rhodef Shalom, which is
in Queen's today. And so maybe we end on some
other questions. Was Frederica marm Mandelbaum a criminal? I mean, yes, yes,
(55:16):
that that was pretty easy to answer. But was she
a bad person? That depends on who you're asking. And
it's also although it's tempting to oversimplify people and to
put them in the box of good or bad, you know,
diabolical or saint, like it's unfair to them and like
any other person, Marm was much more complex than a
(55:38):
pat answer, you know, and thank you so much for
joining us, Holly pleasure. I have to ask, I know
everybody's wondering if you're not familiar yet. For for a
fellow history buffs in the audience, where can they learn
more about stuff you missed in history class? We are
everywhere on social media as missed in History. You can
also go to missed in History dot com and find
(55:59):
all of our episodes of all time going back many
years uh and any of the episodes since Tracy and
I have been on the show, which has been since. Uh,
we'll have show notes attached to them, So come and visit.
We would love to meet you. If you want to
check out more stuff they don't want you to know,
you can do that by going to your podcast platform
of choice and look up stuff that I want you
(56:20):
to know. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter
and all that stuff is conspiracy stuff. Show conspiracy stuff
or conspiracy Yeah, one or the other. Just just just
keep up. Before we wrap up entirely though, I had
a fat question. One thing I noticed when we were
researching this is there's not a lot of like evidence
in the writings and the the history of mar Mandelbaum
about her being some kind of ruthless, murderous person. There's
(56:43):
really a little violence in her story. Well, here's the thing.
When you're operating a criminal enterprise like that, how how
are you going to prove a lot of the things
that happen in the basements of you know, theaters before
they get excavated? Right? Good question, Like, really, how do
you prove that stuff unless you get caught red handed
or somebody uh leaks that information to the authorities or
(57:05):
something like that, or a bribe arrives late. Well exactly,
how do we really know what was happening her enterprise,
but her AMMO definitely does seem to have been kind
of more of a killing with kindness, like I will
win everyone over because she was a diplomat. I think
even the people and the situation with her daughter's funeral
is even evidence that even the people who were uh
(57:26):
positioned against her in terms of the battle of legalities
still kind of loved her. Yeah, you have to. I mean,
you have to respect someone even if if you're diametrically opposed.
Because I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and maybe a speculation,
but like you said, Hollie, everything about her proves that
she didn't get her hands dirty, and she would probably
(57:46):
say that murder is bad for business when you think
about it. Right again, thank you guys so much for
having me. Thanks the Warder Brothers. Please check out the
Chin if you'd like to hear more stories about similarly
badass women. Right it's coming up Friday, August nine, and
(58:07):
I'm getting thumbs up to everybody who's in the audience,
and thanks so much, Thanks so much for coming. We
hope you enjoy the theater. The uh. The Gangster Museum
is upstairs by the way, if you ever in town
and want to check that out. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. Stuff They Don't Want You to Know is
(58:41):
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt, my name
is all they call me Ben. This is our super
producer Paul, Mission Control decand who is with us as
always backstage? You are you, You are here and that
makes this stuff they don't want you to know live
at the Theater eight St. Mark's. Oh yeah, and it
(00:47):
is a very special day for me personally. Just really
quickly before we get into this, gentleman got this seventeen
years ago today, a little over that. I met this
girl at the International Thespian Conference and uh we we
hit it off. We were introduced that day, and then
ten years ago today I got to become her husband,
which is kind of cool. And she's here and I
(01:08):
never get to do the show in front of her.
So happy anniversary, Diana, Happy anniversary. Start the night off
on a heartwarming note. And this this is a special day.
This is a special place with so much history. So
we we three, he said, we've got to have a
(01:29):
special guest, and luckily we found the perfect one. We'd
like to introduce you. I think we all know and
love her, the co host of the award winning podcast
Stuff You Missed in History Class, Holly Fry. Holy hello,
you guys are way too sweet, and if you would
like to just hang out at my house and do
this every morning when I wake up, that would be um. So,
(01:52):
as Matt kind of did in an orner way earlier,
we did get to see The Kitchen already, Um, which
is Warner Brothers new film, and as I think Scary explained,
it follows these amazing women on their incredible trajectory through
like taking over the crime industry of Hell's Kitchen. Um. This,
in turn no spoilers because we don't want to give
(02:13):
any of them away, but because it is a story
about women in the crime syndicate, it inspired this podcast,
which is about another story of a similar incredibly badass
woman who worked her way to the top of the
organized crime of New York and other places. As you'll hear,
America's first mob boss was a woman, you guys, specifically
(02:38):
a woman known as Frederica marm Vandelbaum. She was born
Frederica Henriette Augusta Wisner in eighteen eighteen in a Prussian
town called Castle, which is now a city in modern
day Germany. That's right. And we don't know a whole
lot about Marm's backstory other than um, you know, she
her family was Jewish, and in eight teen forty eight
(03:00):
she married a guy named Wolf Israel Mandelbaum and the
Wolf Mandelbaum and uh, she she and he were traveling peddlers,
and they were subjected to some pretty serious persecution and
anti Semitism throughout their lives when they were there. Yeah.
(03:21):
Actually traveling peddler was one of the few jobs that
Jews were allowed to hold at the time. Um. And
in addition to this discrimination, the Mandelbaums were also really
driven to a scary place, which is the brink of starvation.
When the potato blight of the nineteen or the eighteen
forties hit Europe, we talked about it a lot in
context of Ireland, but many countries were deeply impacted. Uh.
(03:43):
And so there was also this political instability that developed
in Germany in the late eighteen forties when they had
their own series of revolutions which failed, and these combined
factors led them to the decision that they had to
flee Germany, and they left in eighteen fifty. So Wolf
left in the steamship the Baltimore and arrived in New
York in July of that same year, and Frederika and
(04:05):
their infant daughter Berta pronunciation Guru right here. Berta soon
followed and they arrived in September via the Eerie. And
Frederika at the time was twenty three years old, which
is bonkers to me. I don't know why, because I'm
thirty five, and I don't feel like I've accomplished nearly
as much as as we're going to describe this woman
having accomplished at that point in her life. But the
(04:27):
Mandel Bombs traveled in steerage um where more than a
hundred immigrants were packed into these incredibly tight quarters in
one of three of the ship's lower decks um and
there was a row of tiny hay lined bunks that
were stacked against the wall um and passengers were provided
with what was called an immigrants kit, which was a
(04:48):
horse blanket, a beat up tin plate, a knife, a
fork in a spoon, and seasickness was rampant. It was
a constant problem and the remedies that folks use things
like lime drops, and yet it's true raw onions were
totally useless. So personal space and hygiene were entirely non existent,
(05:09):
and diseases ran rampant on the ship, and many did
not survive this absurdly perilous journey. Yeah, I feel like
we should consider like the supplies they were given were
not nice. So next time you're on your international flight
and you want to complain about your thin blanket, just
trust that you're getting luxury. By comparison, the happy Titanic
(05:30):
moments you see in steerage totally total fantasy and especially
difficult for Marm because Marm was almost six ft tall.
She was around two fifty pounds. She was an imposing
figure who stuck out in a crowd, and she was
she was easy to find, So imagine being almost six
(05:51):
ft tall and stuck in Asmal said, these tiny hay
line buildings, this serious, seriously dangerous, torturous situation. Uh could
prove fatal to a lot of people. And we will
never know exactly what Marm and her daughter endured during
this journey, but one thing is for certain. It was
not pretty. It was the opposite. It was ugly and
(06:13):
the crowding did not stop at steerage. This is this
is one of the worst parts. So they get out
of the boat and they think, you know, who knows
what They're dreaming of a big, beautiful city, green vistas
and so on. But the problem is, by eighteen fifty
this city, New York was the largest and busiest port
in the United States. So Frederica, her husband Wolf and
(06:36):
Berta were just three roughly two million people who would
immigrate to the US via New York during the eighteen fifties,
chasing this dream of a better life in a better country,
and it was a dream that was tough to catch,
especially early on. The Mantal Bombs started their lives in
New York in the lower east side of Manhattan, in
(06:57):
an area known as Klein deutch Land or Little Germany,
which were I believe we're in right now. We're at
least extremely close to it at this moment um. At
the time, Little Germany was made up of around four
hundred blocks, and Tompkins Square Park, which is right down
the road, was at the very center of it. And
then over the years it expanded pretty significantly. Um and
(07:19):
at one point it was I believe. Well, we'll get
into it a little later. But like a lot of
the German families who moved into the city around that time,
the mantel Bombs began their life in New York living
with with family members or friends who would put them
up while they searched for their own place to start
a new life. Yeah, and eventually the mandement was found
an apartment, their own place on the eighth Street, and
(07:40):
it was a stifling, windowless room and an absurdly rundown
tenement building. There was no heat, there was no indoor plumbing,
The bathroom consisted of a wooden outhouse in the alley,
and they had to carry their own water from like
hand pumps, um, and that was the only way they
could get access to fresh water. And those handpumps were
out in the sidewalk. So probably a lot like your
(08:01):
first apartment. Um, that's what I'm guessing. And the thing
is life for most immigrants. As much as they thought
this was going to be way easier, it was extraordinarily difficult.
The mantel Bounds actually lost their first child. That was
not an uncommon occurrence for families, but even so, with
that tragedy in their history, they still ended up kind
of doing better than most. Um, they had a room
(08:21):
to themselves, for example, which seemed incredibly luxurious, and a
lot of immigrants were actually living transient lives. They were
sleeping wherever they could, where they could put down a bedroll,
where someone would let them, they would just if they
could find a dry place, they would make that their
bed for the night. Um, they carried literally everything they
had with them, So I mean, I couldn't even carry
(08:44):
my Star Wars figures. But you've been to the tour
of Ellis Island where you see the luggage room where
they confiscate your luggage and you get it back. We're
talking like trunks, were talking like these massive packs that
they would carry everything they had, and they would absolutely
lose a lot of these things throughout the course of
this experience where talking about they would And part of
that was that they were really victimized by slum lords
(09:04):
who took advantage of people in this desperate situation, who
would you know, charge them way too much for not
permanent living quarters really tight uh, and often there were
dozens of people crammed in one room. So then if
they did not pay, they lost those possessions because those
slum lords would kick them right out and they did
not get to take their things with them, so at
(09:25):
that point they would just be turned out on the street.
They had no money, they had no possessions, just the
clothes on their backs, and they were trying to start
a new life. So survival very quickly became the name
of the game. And the system was, of course corrupt,
and the norm for immigrants was discrimination and cruelty. We've
kind of hit that point repeatedly, and so understandably, Mandelbaum,
(09:47):
like a lot of immigrants, just decided that she had
to make her own rules and figure out a way
to survive and support her family, and that meant turning
to crime. And as it turns out, she was fun
ominally good, as she had a gift. No smoke on
that one. So mandel Baum began to lay the groundwork
(10:07):
for her life as a career criminal while she was
working as a street peddler. Since she and Wolf could
not afford a wagon, much less a storefront, they set
up shop on the streets of Little Germany. They were
walking in the midst of the crowds, selling whatever they
could find that they thought anybody might remotely want broken watches,
(10:29):
scraps of fabric, not like whole pieces of clothing, like
scraps of fabric, pieces of ropes, stuff like that. And
the kinds of things they were selling were, as you
could tell, not in particularly high demand, so tries they
might working all day well into the night. They could
barely afford to feed their children. Something had to be done.
(10:51):
But it was during these early days pedaling on the
streets of Little Germany that Fredericka Mandelbaum began making these
contact that would prove to be super important in establishing
her ultimately her criminal enterprise. So at the time, there
were children that would just roam the streets. A lot
of times, they were homeless, a lot of times they
(11:12):
were part of families that were transient as well, but
they would sell these odds and ends, much like that
peddlar's life U and their parents, if they had them,
would encourage them to make a little more money, to steal,
to do petty crimes, to become pickpockets and thieves. And
nandel Baum saw this and she had like kind of
a lightbulb moment where she was like, Okay, I'm going
(11:33):
to capitalize on this. So she started literally, like Oliver
Twist Fagan style, enlisting these street urchin children into this
grassroots criminal empire. Um. She also met thieves and other
petty crows, so you know, like weren't children, um. And
she started to look into how to unload the stolen
goods that they had acquired, and this led her to
(11:55):
an Aha moment where she realized, uh, hey, there is
just as much, if not more money to make moving
stolen goods than actually doing the stealing, which is pretty enterprising.
And boy, oh boy, did she do just that. She
found her niche and she was spectacular at it. So
for mandel Baum and her family, things really took a
(12:17):
turn for the better. This happened, ironically during a time
that was very difficult for most people because it was
the Panic of eighteen seven. Yeah, not the most encouraging
way to describe an event in history, right. So at
the time Panic of the Panic of eighteen fifty seven,
we as a country, the United States, had more or
(12:37):
less overplayed our financial hand. We expanded domestic investment and
business at a rate that lagged behind the already failing
international economy. And it was a bubble that let me
do a sound effect. It was a bubble that pops spectacularly.
Oh that the two spectacular. Yeah, we'll edit that part.
(12:58):
So so it's serious, though I don't want to make
light of this. Multitudes of banks closed, hundreds of businesses
failed overnight, and that meant that tens of thousands of
people woke up one morning without a job and they
had to figure out something. This was oddly advantageous for
people who were already living on the other side of
(13:19):
the law. They were familiar with this sort of informal system.
The folks with legitimate jobs had to learn this stuff
very quickly, and they had to go to the streets
doing the same stuff that mandel Bomb started out doing. However,
she was in a much better position. Oh, how the
tables have turned. That's right. So Mandel Bomb had already
(13:41):
established herself as this uh shrewd trader, and she was
a ruthless business person, and she was just in the
perfect position to take full advantage of all the woes
that the country and specifically New York City was going
through at the time. And according to her contemporaries, um
when she was making a transaction, right, she would never
buy anything for more than half of what it was worth,
(14:04):
and she would never sell it for less than twice
of what she paid. That's pretty good if you can
actually get away with that over the course of a career,
right um, And she became known as one of the
best fences in the entire city of New York. She
was just purchasing stolen stuff from all the criminals that
are gathering things for her and then selling it to
legitimate buyers. Now that can be anyone from just uh,
(14:27):
let's say Holly wanted to get a Grido something or other,
she had to have one to a business, a a
company that has a storefront that wants to have goods
to sell their right. And if you think about this
as a proprietor in these down times, in a down
economy like that, the only way to actually keep your
business alive is to offer the lowest possible prices to
(14:51):
customers that you possibly can write. Then you also have
to charge enough to make a profit on whatever good
you're selling to them. And that meant that the stolen
goods from Marm's enterprise made business sense. And it makes
you wonder just how many of Marms fell off the wagon.
Bits of loot actually ended up in legitimate storefronts in
(15:11):
New York City at the time. Yeah, or how much
of that kind of thing is actually still happening today
right now? I mean think about it. Don't think about it.
Let's not so that was way way back in the
mid nineteenth century. Uh, not now, not, not now at all. Right,
We're good, everything's good. Um. Marm's network perfectly was straddling
(15:32):
the worlds of both this this crime, the world of
crime in the world of commerce, and she was connecting
the numerous criminal sellers to the legitimate and very eager purchasers.
And everyone in the city at that time is looking
for a bargain and everything they're doing, and with Marm's
business model, everybody was winning. Yeah, if you wanted to
sell something to someone, he was not going to ask
(15:54):
a lot of questions. You went to Marm. And if
you wanted to buy something on the cheap, nick lesslee cheap,
questionably cheap, you went to Marms. So soon every street
level criminal had either met or worked with Frederica mar Mandelbaum.
But pretty quickly her network climbed out from just like
(16:14):
the depths of street level criminals. Uh, and she started
establishing relationships with people like lawyers, police officials, prosecutors, anyone
that wanted to have a relationship that had something to
gain from knowing Marms. She was a regular at this
place called the Eighth Street Thieves Exchange, which was one
of New York's most active black markets. I heard it
described as like a Walmart of thievery kind of and
(16:37):
um wards, by the way, at the time where these
numbered voting districts in New York that was divided up
into and that will come up a little bit later.
Um So, she was beloved as well in the Jewish community,
and she often used her synagogue, which was she was
very active in as a networking site. And even the
corrupt politicians of Tammany Hall, the political machine, were huge
(16:57):
fans of marm because they knew that if they played
ball with her that she would help them secure the
Jewish vote in the ward which she was becoming particularly
um influential within. So there were folks like Tammany Hall's
boss Tweed and the particularly corrupt mayor Fernando Woods at
the time who were regular guests at her house at
(17:19):
these like Suarez that she would throw and they absolutely
were doing business with her, no question about it. Yeah.
So while she's rubbing shoulders with all of these big
names in the city, she's also she and all the
money in her enterprise. They're financing some of the city's
most spectacular crimes, like the Manhattan Savings bank robbery, which
(17:40):
could be an episode all its own. It's crazy. But
can you give us a like a little quick and
dirty about this? Definitely so in It was eighteen seventy
eight when this occurred, and this robbery was and still
is to this day in twenty nineteen, the largest bank
robbery of all time in terms of real money that
was stolen in uh and at that time, in seventy eight,
(18:02):
over three million dollars in cash, money and securities were stolen.
Think about that, in eighteen seventy eight dollars. WHOA. So
here's the big question. We've kind of gone over all
this stuff about Fredrika Mandelbaum, but what really makes her different?
How could she operate a criminal enterprise at this scale
(18:23):
for such a long time. You know what I love
about that is that's that's a great question and it
actually does have an answer, which doesn't always happen. We're
talking about history, right, So so marm succeeded in a
in an industry that also had other players. Right, there
were rival fence operations. In addition to fighting against these groups.
(18:45):
She raised four children, right, and she was caring for
wolf her sick husband, and Wolfe suffered from consumption. He
was also, sadly to say, not respected by either the
legal operators like the cops or the illegal people. They
all thought that this guy was a joke. They actually
(19:07):
called him and this was a very bad word at
the time. They referred to him as a nonentity ouch.
I know, it's brutal, right, And and so she was
taking care of her family pretty much on her own.
She was also running a legitimate dry goods store. And
I want to I want to be honest with everyone.
I want to clear this up really quickly, because when
(19:27):
we started working on this, I wasn't sure what dry
goods meant. I thought it was like a bean store, like, yeah,
no question about I honestly had no idea. Either that's
such a bless your heart moment, thank you a resident haberdasher,
or like in a fashion play, tell us what dry
dry goods were things that were non non food necessities,
(19:50):
so it could be clothes, hats, tablewares, etcetera. Gloves maybe
life needs yeah, and so not beans. I want to
really stress just store. I got it, guys, I learned
so marm Also, while she was doing all this, while
she's fighting rivals, raising her family and running actually legitimate business,
(20:15):
she built the city's largest fencing operation, ran it for
more than two decades and still in history and the
history of this town, she is the most successful fence
even in But there's another thing that made her different.
We've been throwing around the name marm Right, it's her nickname,
it's her street name. Where did it come from? Though? Okay,
(20:38):
so this is a fun story. Here's the deal. So
she was a ruthless criminal masterbind but she was also
a very nurturing lady. Um. I mean, I think there's
some evidence of that in the fact that she took
care of a family while running two other businesses, one
legitimate and onnot um. She actually took it upon herself
to mentor young criminals. I mean, that's sweet, um, do
(21:00):
you think about it? She taught them their trade. So
she called this is the sweetest thing. She called her
a group of criminals, her little chicks and they called
her Morm in return, so it was a very nurturing
and loving creation. Yeah yeah, yeah. Beginning around the time
of the Panic of eighteen fifty seven, she started just
(21:22):
taking various ne'er do wells under her wings. She was
seeing lots of people who needed help and she was like,
come to me, I will I will teach you. And
although she helped criminals of all types pursue careers in
crime and learn their trade and get really good at it,
she was really really, particularly softhearted and fond of working
with young women because she felt like it saved them
(21:43):
from a life as a housekeeper um or probably other options,
which is kind of a framing spin, you know what
I mean, because we're helping her, right, I mean, I
also don't want to clean a house, but um you know,
pick pocketing sounds better. But uh so. The chief though
(22:04):
in her affection, even though she was very nurturing with
her little chicks, really what it all came down to
for her were her three surviving children. So Annie, Julius,
and Sarah were the ones that lived after their first
child had passed, and marm was so dedicated to them
that even in the middle of like an incredibly important
deal or a meeting. If one of her kids was six,
(22:24):
she was like, I'm sorry, this deal can't happen now,
I'm out um or even if they just needed her,
she would completely call off whatever she was doing and
run to their side. So things were really looking up
for the Mandel Bombs at this point. They absolutely were
moving on up out of the tenements. And now Marm's
home was full of dry goods, but they were fancy
dry goods. They were things like furniture art. Art is
(22:45):
the fanciest of dry goods if you ask me, silverware,
draperies uh stolen from some of the best homes and
businesses and mansions in New York City. By eighteen sixty four,
she bought a three story building um at seventy nine
Clinton Street on the corner of Rivington and Clinton, and
the family had their dry goods store still at the time,
(23:08):
run by Wolf and the kids. It was an adorable
family affair, but the real action was happening in the
back rooms where Marm headed up this incredibly lucrative fencing operation.
This isn't fencing. Like fencing, it's like moving stolen goods.
I don't think any I was just clarifying she might
have sold fences. You don't know how. There was somebody
(23:29):
here this whole time, going how do you make money
fencing them and take their wallet? Just think we're all
on the same page, Like I see fences everywhere around town.
You know what's true. And she was always one step
ahead of the authorities in the event that there was
a raid or something. She even had this thing. It
was like a chimney with a fake back that hit
a dumb waiter. So if the cops were coming, they
(23:52):
were knocking on the door, she could like load this
dumb waiter up in the fake chimney with all the
stolen goods she had, and lower it down underground and
and be like, what, I'm operating the dry goods exclusively.
I'm a legitimate business person. Leave me the hell. Are
you a chimney inspector, sir, dot be on your way
your credentials. No, it's true. Um, so she was pretty crafty.
(24:18):
There's there's a fantastic book by an author named Jade
north Conway, and in this book he delineates three three
principal reasons that marm Mandelbaum was a cut above all
of the other fencing operations, and and the I think
they're pretty legitimate, to be honest. Well, the first one is,
(24:38):
remember she and her family they're immigrants from Germany, right,
they speak German, but she learned to speak English extremely
well and pretty quickly, and she could function as an
interpreter between any other immigrants who also spoke German and English.
Now this is huge because in eighteen seventy and there's
an estimated thirty percent of all of New York City's
(24:58):
inhabitants were either German immigrants or their first generation children.
So there are a lot of people that spoke both
English and German or just English or just German. Right,
So a lot of her clientele would need the service,
and it probably also helped put them at ease when
she's having a transaction with them if she can be
functioned as a translator. And and this is just my speculation,
(25:22):
but I think it was probably advantageous that she could
understand English. So well, if let's say she's having some
kind of trade deal with someone who speaks English who
maybe doesn't know who she is and thinks that, oh well,
she probably only speaks German, she can understand everything to
that person or that person in there, uh there, others
are saying absolutely gay in the upper hand or even
(25:44):
like overhere deals and you know all that kind of stuff,
and like totally figure out how to kind of capitalize
on that language thing for sure, and feign ignorance to right, like, oh,
I don't know what you're talking about. Literally yeah, oh,
the power to be the only person in the room
who literally knows, let's go everything that's going on. Um. Second,
she had this other skill set, which is sort of
(26:04):
like a different kind of bilinguality. Right, she knew, uh,
the crime industry, but she also was running a legitimate
dry goods store, so she knew the products that were
available and when things came in off the streets. She
knew what fabric was worth, what jewelry was worth, and
she knew the markets for those products. So she had
(26:25):
a very intimate understanding of both their prices and the
level of demand based on the people that have been
coming to her on the side with potential deals or needs.
And this allowed her to make lightning quick calculations about
the value of stolen goods when they were offered to her.
And third, and perhaps this is the most important part
of her operation. Everyone from the judges to the to
(26:49):
the street thieves knew that she would never ask any questions.
You just show up with eighty seven. Hats fine, you
know what I mean. Let's talk turkey. She dealt in
plunder of all kinds, silk, lace, diamonds, carriages, horses, gold, silver,
of course, bonds and more. And she could, like you
were saying, Holly, she could just look at something a
(27:11):
thief it brought her, and then lightning quickly, she would
know automatically how much she would pay for it, and
she would already know where she would sell it, which
was brilliant. In fact, she was so she was so
efficient at this. When the Chicago Fire of eighteen seventy
one occurred, looting was rampant in Chicago, was pandemonium, was chaotic,
(27:31):
and a lot of the stuff that got looted from
a different city ended up with her. It went through
her hands at some point. And although her although her
pursuit of this stuff was sophisticated and very well thought out,
the actual process was really simple. It's sort of like
you said earlier, Matt. She let's let's say, for instance,
(27:52):
let's go with eight seven stolen fedoras. Sure, so somebody
comes up eight seven stolen fedoras. Let's say that's like
a hundred dollars worth of hats. It's like a math problem.
We'll just we don't know how much of those actually
made bows. So she would say, okay, this is a
hundred dollars. If I were actually paying for this legitimately,
(28:14):
I will give you twenty dollars. That's one fifth of it.
And the thief would say, okay, yeah, that's fine, I'll
just go get some more hats tomorrow, and then she
would resell those goods for sixty dollars. And the police
had action as well in this process. So the victims
of theft might approach the police and say, hey, somebody
stole all my weird hats or whatever, and they would say, well,
(28:36):
if you make it worth our while, we'll do our
best to find them. And sometimes they would do too,
is just go back to marm and like buy another hat,
like an equivalent hat, and then say hey, here's your hat.
And it was like, yeah, it was absolute subterfuge because
they were getting paid under the table. So from their opinion,
every from their perspective, rather, everybody is winning except you know,
(28:58):
the victims, he said, the person whose hats those were originally. Um.
What's interesting about marm is that even though she became
very successful and could have easily moved uptown too much
fancier digs, she chose to stay in Little Germany. However,
her empire expanded all over the place. UM. It moved
throughout New York, uh, into all the boroughs beyond the boroughs.
(29:20):
Eventually she became an established force in Trenton and Newark. UH.
She courted wealthy, legitimate clients as well as Jersey criminals. Um.
And then what's what's interesting and not really surprising is
that her husband both died in eighteen seventy five. But
because she had kind of been running everything, she was
(29:40):
able to, you know, pretty quickly move on. She didn't
have to pause and grieve and wonder how she was
going to make ends meet. She was like, Okay, well,
let's keep the business running. And by the eighteen eighties
she owned several tenement buildings and uh she also owned warehouses.
And she used those warehouses to store all of this merchandise,
all of the stolen goods that she was handling. But
(30:03):
what's really cool cool being a relative term is that. Um,
this is not all she built, and I love this
part of the story. So mandel Bomb allegedly uh founded
an actual school to train up young criminals around eighteen seventy.
She's true. She she bought a building on the corner
of Clinton and Grant and transformed into kind of like
(30:23):
an X Men School for the gifted or whatever, a
Hogwarts type situation. But instead of teaching you know, young
mutants or wizards or whatever to harness their super superpowers,
mandel Bomb's Grand Street School started off with the finer
points of pick pickpocketry, pocket, here we go, I'm like
in that, or things like misdirection, um and yeah, young
men and women alike, which is a big deal. Um.
(30:45):
Were who showed promise with the basics were then graduated
on to more advanced skills, stuff like safe cracking or
grand larceny or blackmail or con artist. Try like you do.
And um, the professors at this Grand Street School, we're
the best criminals in the city because they were already
part of Mandel Bomb's network of crooks. So students who
(31:07):
excelled at this school were brought into mandel Bomb's inner circle. Yeah,
definitely a kind of promotion, right something, I still want
to get my PhD and pickpocketology. Excellent use of my time,
your PhD. P. So you know, allegedly this uh, this
(31:27):
school was right next to the police headquarters. Again, that's allegedly.
I love it. I love her so much. That plays
into the story because the thing about bribery and corruption
is that there is a threshold. People will look the
other way for some stuff. But if we get to egregious,
if we get to blatant, then there's a police chief
who needs to get reelected, so needs a scapegoat. And
(31:50):
although details on this details on the school or a
little bit sketchy at this point, we know that it
did eventually close when Mandelbaum found out at one of
the students was the child of a police official. Uh,
this kid was enrolled. And picture mandel Bomb, you know,
just wiping her for it a little bit and thinking
(32:10):
the heat's getting close, you know. So, so she didn't
want to risk the school being exposed. And part of
it was probably because she had this loyalty to her
little chicks too. So it operated for about six years
and it generated, as you said, no, some of the
most gifted criminals in New York which makes them, by default,
(32:33):
some of the most gifted criminals in the country at
the time. Okay, so we've we've established here that Fredrika
mar Mandel Bomb was a very important adult in the
lives of a whole bunch of kids in New York
City and young adults. And to some, you know, she
was the employer, the person that you take your goods
tod and you're gonna get a little bit, you're gonna
get paid a little bit. To others, she's the headmaster
(32:55):
at the school where you're going every day. And to
a lot of them, she was also ma, like we've
kind of discussed earlier, and we actually have a quote
here from mar Mandelbaum. Oh yeah, she's pretty blunt and
explaining why they gave her this nickname, she says, I
am Ma because I give them what a mother cannot
(33:15):
sometimes give money and horses and diamonds, and I don't know,
I don't know how you guys screw up, but I
had I had a childhood lacking and at least diamonds
and horses. You never even had like horseback riding lessons
or like wrote a pony. But she's giving them their
own horse diamond encrusted. The money actually was coated with diamonds.
(33:36):
It was just like Christmas at my house. So we've
we've talked about some of those professors. They were at
the school. They were some of the best criminals in
all New York City. A lot of her proteges ended
up becoming the next generation of best criminals. So we've
got a few of those here that will will go over.
The first one is Sophie Lions and again at a
(33:57):
very young age, she started out working with mar Mandel
Beelm bringing things to her and we actually have a
quote from Sophie that illustrates the way she felt about Marm.
She said, quote, I was not quite six years old
when I stole my first pocketbook. That's crazy. I mean,
you gotta start um early. Uh. I was very happy
because I was petted and rewarded. My wretched stepmother patted
(34:20):
my curly head, gave me a bag of candy and
said I was a good girl. Right. Okay, So after
years and years of stealing and conning, Sophie Lyons really
did become one of the most notorious thieves in all
of New York City, and she also became extremely notorious
as a confidence woman, and she was considered by Marm
(34:43):
to be one of her closest allies. Right. But, as
you might have guessed from the Wretched stepmother line, Lions
eventually turned on Mandelbaum and totally threw her under the bus.
She actually reade a tell all book called Why Crime
Doesn't Pay Now. Yeah, um Now. An other one of
the protegees who was also very close with Sophie Lyons
(35:04):
was a woman named do we decide it was Lena?
I think it's Lena, Lana Lana klein Schmidt and um again,
she's another very prominent criminal that came up under Marm's tutelage.
And she actually moved to Hackensack, New Jersey, and she
was posing as the wealthy widow of this South South
(35:24):
American mining tycoon. And she started doing the same things
that Marm was doing, where she's holding these big parties
for important officials, only this time it's over in Jersey.
And uh. She actually got in trouble because she was
wearing a ring. That's how she got caught. She was
wearing a ring that was stolen that was recognized by
one of the important folks at her house. It was
(35:45):
business model that Marm was establishing. This is like she
was franchise. Yeah. I like the idea that Lena was
like the original faker of being the prince from Africa
that might need like and was getting confidence of people
that way. And these are us. These are just a
few of the associates. There were others that are very
well known in crime history today, people like Little Annie
(36:07):
Riley Ellen Clegg or Margaret Brown who went by the
street name Old Mother Hubbard. Yes. Then we also had
a guy named Herman Stout Stout Stout Stout, and he
was the only one Marm trusted. Uh. Stoud was mount
of bombs, a most trusted associate and was always by
her side. He literally is the one who did all
(36:28):
the heavy lifting and when they did deals, he would
tote all of the goods to one of her many
warehouses across town. And she loved him over all of
her associates for sure. Yeah. She referred to him at
different times as her son, especially when they were talking
to the police. Spoiler alert, she doesn't really get away eventually,
(36:54):
despite all of her precautionary measures. Uh, there's a plot
twist in New York. Knew of shoals are elected and
they're actually not corrupt. It's weird. It's like a Shamalan twist,
you know. Damn Yeah. And so they said, all right,
we're gonna bring this this whole operation down, and um,
the District Attorney's office was in the midst of a
(37:14):
cold war with the corrupt police force with boss politics.
The new mayor, a guy named Edward Cooper, wanted to
reform the city was very vocal about it, and it
turned out that many people in this fair metropolis agreed.
They were like, I would be nice if my stuff
is stolen to at least get it back, you know exactly.
(37:34):
But the problem is a domino effect ensued with that,
at least for marm and in her criminal enterprise, because
without the support of these politicians, she couldn't effectively bribe
the officials that she needed to, and without those bribes
greasing all the wheels to make stuff happen and to
give her some cover, she couldn't operate out in the
open anymore. Yeah. And what's more, the situation worse since
(37:56):
because she could also no longer protect her criminal old network,
the city's worth of little chicks. They were once grateful
for patronage, and now they began flipping, snitching, testifying against
her in court. The tide, in short, was turning the
d A. A guy named Peter Olney hires the Pinkerton
Detective Agency to take Marm's operation down once and for all.
(38:21):
So members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which again has
its own whole, very rich story UM and still exists
today in a certain form, Um was a private entity,
which in some ways kind of prevented it from being
quite so open to the corruption that many public services
were having issues with UM, and they did manage to
(38:42):
bring her reign in New York to an end. So
their plan was super simple. This is the thing, like
the criminal master find always gets taken down by just
the stupidest, easiest thing. They got a bolt of silk,
they tagged it so they knew that one was the
stolen one, and then they just waited for Marm to
buy it, which she of course did so that she
was caught red handed and she went to trial. She
(39:04):
was released on bail. This was largely thanks to the
work of how and Humble law firm. She kept them
on a five thousand dollar a year retainer. Yeah, they
were like the They were like the salt goodman of
their day. Right, this very breaking bad? It was a
better call? How and hummele I would actually watch that show. Um.
(39:24):
And then, in a this rare and sort of delightfully
pearl clutching statement, very out of character that she made
to the public, Mom vehemently professed her innocence. Oh yes,
oh this is great. I keep a dry goods store
and have for it twenty years past. I buy and
(39:45):
sell dry goods as other dry goods people do. Good.
I have never knowingly bought stolen goods, and neither did
my son Julius. I have never stolen anything in my life,
which probably true. I feel that these charges are brought
against me in spite I have never bribed the police
(40:08):
nor had their protection. I never needed their protection because
I and my son are innocent of these charges. So
help me, God, it's going to be an amazing juxtaposition
to another statement she makes a little later in the episode. Yeah.
In short, marm won Best Dramatic Performance in a non
acting role. But it's really important that we haven't really
(40:29):
mentioned this specifically, But like her whole like stroke of
genius was that she never really handled the stolen goods.
She just had people do it for her. So she
probably maybe even like was drinking her own kool aid
and believed that she actually wasn't a criminal, that she
was just a proprietor was like, you know, facilitating things.
You know, I'm helping the community, helping the community exactly.
She actually was kind of, Yeah, no one wants to
(40:51):
be a housekeeper, right right, certainly not me. Um. I
did have that job once, but that's another story. So
rather than surrender in the midst of all of this,
she decided that she would run, and she escaped north
to Canada, and she established herself with over one million
dollars worth of stolen diamonds and cold hardcash. Slight backtrack.
It's an amazing story how she actually accomplished this. She
(41:14):
Um was under house arressed essentially, or she you know,
posted that bail that we talked about, and she had
a housekeeper that she had impersonated her by dressing in
her classic outfit that she wore, which kind of was
like a Queen Victoria kind of situation with like a
feathered hat and like a veil. So she was able
to make trips to her lawyer's office while the Pickerton's
were surveilling her, and she went into the lawyer and
(41:36):
then the housekeeper came out, and so they tracked the
housekeeper and then Morm made that Canadian get away. Yeah,
I made a run for the border. Um. So there
in Canada, they stayed purposely at second rate in conspicuous places.
They went to a little hotel near the Grand Trunk
Railway station in Hamilton, Canada, and they just wanted to
(41:58):
stay on the deal. They just tried to keep a
low profile. But then on December nine, four, Hamilton's police
and detectives arrested Marm and her two associates, Julius her
Son and Herman as they were sitting down for breakfast.
So they were having omelets and handcuffs um. And naturally
Marm attempted to bribe the police because that's that's her
(42:20):
jam who worked before. Why would we not do it again?
But Canadian police they don't play. They were not having this,
the incorruptible Canadians, It's true. And so Marm was arrested
yet again in Canada for a possession of four thousand
dollars worth of stolen diamonds. But yeah, I don't know, like,
what would that translate to in today's money, four thousand
dollars in diamonds it was like a million bucks. I
(42:41):
don't know. I'm not imagining. I'm not a human. Yeah,
I mean yeah, I guess it would be about a
fistful of diamonds. I think we should agree that loose
diamonds are just inherently a sketchy thing. It's also absurdly baller.
If you're just dealing in loose diamonds, you just have
them lying around. There's a Jeffrey Epstein thing there. They're
gonna let's yet. So yeah, she's arrested again. But luckily
(43:06):
the owner of the diamonds couldn't, like eyeball, identify that
the diamonds were mine. I don't know how how would
you like know that they were these were my diamonds.
I like diamonds. I don't believe that's fair. Maybe there
was an etching on the bottom, or maybe there were
specific weight or specific cut perhaps for this guy could
(43:27):
not do that thing. So the Canadian cops had to
let her go as well, and the New York d
A didn't have jurisdicxon so he wasn't able to send
anyone to the Canadian court to fetch her, and Marm
and her associates once again ran free. Yeah yeah, and
she actually ended up with her diamonds, right, she totally did.
She retrieved her diamonds, which is absurdly baller second time around.
(43:53):
I love the idea of the jail checkout where they
just hand her up. He can't figure out who they
belonged to, so they must be yours. Oh, she did
have to pay six It's like the processing for sure.
So she used those diamonds and she bought herself a tiny,
the small, very meager, two story house along Hamilton's main street.
And by she opened you guessed it again, another dry
(44:17):
goods store. She's really good at the dry goods and uh,
and it became a family operation, right and totally again.
Her three children joined her, Annie and Julius permanently, and
then her married daughter Sarah stayed in Hamilton's behind for
a time before returning back to New York with her family.
And so now we're at this this strange sort of crossroads, right,
(44:41):
we have to ask ourselves, was Marm finally after all
these years on the street and narrow were her Queen
pinned days behind her. We're very proud of that phrase.
Pretty good. It depends on what you think, and we
want to hear your opinion on this and what you
think about this letter that she sent to her friends
in New York after she had started her dry goods
(45:03):
store in Canada. I like how Ben sets this up,
like there will be question marks in your head, but
when you hear this, there won't. Uh Marm wrote quote,
I beg to announce to you that I have opened
my new emporium in every respect the equal of my
late New York establishment. I shall be pleased to continue
our former pleasant business relations, promising not alone to pay
(45:26):
the best prices for the article which you may have
for sale, but also in carefully protecting all my customers,
no matter at what expense. With my present facilities, I
am able to dispose of all commodities forwarded to me
with dispatch and security, trusting to hear from you soon,
(45:47):
and assuring you that a renewal of past favors will
be greatly appreciated. I am yours faithfully, F Mandelbau. Can
we unpack some of this kind of dated language real quick?
I'm sorry. I don't even know that it's dating well
thinly veiled letter of all times exactly. But with my
present facilities, I am able to dispose of all commodities
(46:08):
forwarded to me with dispatch and security. So I'm gonna
move your soul and stuff. I'm gonna continue doing what
I use you guys. It's still totally cool. I'm just
doing it somewhere else. If it was written in it
would have just said I'm back at it. See you
come get me. Yeah, yeah, it's it's true. Like dispatch
and security, I'll not only move all your stuff, but
I'll move it faster than anyone else, and you will
(46:30):
not get busted as you would if you went to
other less reputable fencing establishment. There you go. So a
gentleman from New Yorker reporter headed on up to Canada.
Just you know, peek in the store, see what's going
on in there. Uh again, it's completely legit, he said, sarcastically.
And uh. This guy reacted in in a way that
(46:51):
can only be described as faint surprise when he found
that all of the new Canadian stores merchandise came from
New York City. That weird. Uh, everything was being sold
at incredibly almost unbelievably low prices, and there were absolutely
zero identifying labels on any of the merchandise. It checks
(47:14):
out basically. So it appeared that Morm was, you know,
you'd think she set up in this new place. Whatever
she's doing, bribing whoever, she's got a bribe, but whatever
she's doing to continue this business, it seems like she
was ready to start a new basically a new chapter
for her. She's gonna live life out as all the
stories would want us to believe, happily ever after. But unfortunately, UM,
(47:34):
it wasn't gonna work out that way for her. Um,
this is a little bit sad here. Her daughter Annie
were talking about how she was up there in Canada
with her while she went back to New York, as
we mentioned, and while she was there, she got pretty
sick and she ended up developing pneumonia. And then on November,
her daughter Annie died, and there was no way that
Morm was going to not go back and be there,
(47:58):
you know, for her daughter's burial. Um, and whatever the
cost might be, whether it was to her livelihood, to
her own personal freedom, she was gonna do whatever it took.
Because we talked about earlier in the show. Her children
were her first and foremost priority. She was going to
be there for them, come hell or high water. And
so Mom's Mom Morm's former home was now owned by
(48:19):
a Mrs marx Uh and Morm and her son Julius
actually slipped into the house um and they were and
Morm was overcome by grief, and she fainted at the time.
And she obviously had re established some of those old
connections and those old friendships because she had a group
of friends who actually were there for her and escorted
her out of the house and they hit her in
(48:41):
a different home across the street while she recovered Um.
But while it was clear that giving Annie a Christian
burial would help kind of like make things a little
more low key and under the radar, Morm insisted that
it had to be a traditional Jewish service in accordance
with her faith, because like that, she was very, very religious,
(49:02):
and there was no other way that it was going
to work for her. So Marm's son Julius, tried to
do a little disguise work. He shaved his hair and
beard so that he would evade the police. But Marm
we mentioned she was a very tall woman and very large.
She was imposing, so you couldn't really costume that situation
and make her not look like herself. Uh. And she
was grieving very deeply, so she probably wasn't really into
(49:24):
the costume idea to begin with. Um. And what's really
interesting is that her street family, like her criminal family,
came to her daughter's funeral as well. So it was
like burglars and bank thieves and pickpockets and basically every
kind of person she had ever touched in her life
and in her school, etcetera. And they all came out publicly.
I mean, everybody at this point is taking a big risk,
(49:46):
but they wanted to pay their respects to her daughter.
And afterwards marm went back to Hamilton, Canada. She was
not apprehended by police, uh and the Pinkerton's also left
her alone. And it's unclear still if the cops to
pity on a grieving mother. What we do know for
sure is that uh, she did return uh, and that
there was a police officer even stationed at the funeral
(50:09):
and so they knew she was there, and reporters were
even there to interview her that day, so it was
not a secret at all. But they all just let
her leave in peace after the service was over. And
can I make to me this just rings true of
that sentiment that is a occurred and it's it's occurred
in the past several times and you kind of feel
(50:30):
it in waves. And I say this as in at lantern,
but that idea that we're all New Yorkers, right, like
like they know that all of these criminals are gathered
in this one place, but they also know that she
and these other people are important in some way as
a whole, as a community, as a whole, right, so
they just kind of let it slide. And I think
(50:51):
it speaks to the city. And there's also like almost
like a rules of engagement kind of situation where it's
like this is not fair game. It's like you don't
arrest somebody when they're going to church, you know, like
that that's sort of like an unspoken rule even between
law enforcement and criminal it would seem extraordinarily cruel to
arrest someone at their daughter's funeral. Yeah. I have a
(51:11):
theory as well that I think is pretty plausible. Uh,
odds are statistically that police officer at some point worked
with or for marm you know what I mean. So
he may have been grieving just as much. But from
that point on, marm becomes a successful, active pillar of
the community in Hamilton's Canada. Her shop is legit, by
(51:34):
which I mean no one officially reported a crime. That's
that was good enough for her. She regularly attended the
local synagogue and she began to use that as a
networking hub. She you know, seems dead set to become
a Canadian resident. However, that does not mean that New
York City has forgotten about her. As a matter of fact,
(51:55):
quite the opposite. She becomes sort of a celebrity icon
of her day. She's like Elvis Presley. She's like Bigfoot.
Everybody is seen this lady in New York and they
are convinced that it's her. But regardless of how many
times they see her, they describe her and so on,
and they're like this close to maybe trying to get
(52:15):
a picture of her or something. They never they never
catch her. It's almost like the fame of who she
had become had arrested the city and people wanted to
have their own Mom Mandel bound story. And eventually she
passed away and at the time her her obituaries, which
were published made international news, and they were not vilifying her. Really,
(52:40):
there was even at the even from the law enforcement community,
there was a sense of begrudging respect. They referred to
her as old mother Mom, the Queen of Fences, and
in February, when she passed away, contemporary accounts described her
death as due to something called Bright's disease. Nowadays we
(53:02):
recognize that as nephritis or kidney disease. Uh, and her
body was actually returned to New York. However, there was
a mystery afoot. Well, yeah, if you're you're someone with
the influence and intelligence of mar Mandelbaum, and you wanted
to get back to New York, maybe you could arrange
to have it look like you died and then maybe
(53:23):
send your body, your body in a coffin to New York. Right,
But maybe it's just stones. Maybe it's actually stolen goods
that are in that coffin. That'd be pretty cool. Who knows.
And her legend, of course feeds all of these you know,
thoughts that people were having. They were wondering, was it
possible that she's still alive and living in Ontario, and
(53:44):
was she as some course sources claimed, calling herself an
entirely new thing, reinventing herself as Madame Fuchs and then
kind of plotting a covert return to the lowery sign. Yeah,
but perhapsingly the better question is do legends ever truly
pass away? And to quote the you know, the wonderful
a Nelion, it's better to burn out than to fade away,
you know, And that's exactly what what Mandel Bomb did.
(54:07):
It's a good question because we know that while mar
may no longer be with us today, her legacy does remain.
She was the most successful fence. She was the first
mob boss of this country in history. At its heart
is a palam sest. You know, whatever occurs or is
written today will never fully erase the past. It's so true.
(54:28):
So the next time you're walking around in this area,
if you just happen to make it over here and
you walk past seventy nine Clinton Street, just take a second,
just stand there for a second, knowing the history, because
there's a pawn shop right there in that location. Now
a pawn shop. It's kind of crazy, right, There's a sign,
a big, bold yellow sign with bright red letters that
says we buy gold, silver, diamonds and any other that
(54:55):
it does say we do repairs, though of course they do.
You can also actually find her burial site um at
the Union Field Cemetery at Congregation Rhodef Shalom, which is
in Queen's today. And so maybe we end on some
other questions. Was Frederica marm Mandelbaum a criminal? I mean, yes, yes,
(55:16):
that that was pretty easy to answer. But was she
a bad person? That depends on who you're asking. And
it's also although it's tempting to oversimplify people and to
put them in the box of good or bad, you know,
diabolical or saint, like it's unfair to them and like
any other person, Marm was much more complex than a
(55:38):
pat answer, you know, and thank you so much for
joining us, Holly pleasure. I have to ask, I know
everybody's wondering if you're not familiar yet. For for a
fellow history buffs in the audience, where can they learn
more about stuff you missed in history class? We are
everywhere on social media as missed in History. You can
also go to missed in History dot com and find
(55:59):
all of our episodes of all time going back many
years uh and any of the episodes since Tracy and
I have been on the show, which has been since. Uh,
we'll have show notes attached to them, So come and visit.
We would love to meet you. If you want to
check out more stuff they don't want you to know,
you can do that by going to your podcast platform
of choice and look up stuff that I want you
(56:20):
to know. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter
and all that stuff is conspiracy stuff. Show conspiracy stuff
or conspiracy Yeah, one or the other. Just just just
keep up. Before we wrap up entirely though, I had
a fat question. One thing I noticed when we were
researching this is there's not a lot of like evidence
in the writings and the the history of mar Mandelbaum
about her being some kind of ruthless, murderous person. There's
(56:43):
really a little violence in her story. Well, here's the thing.
When you're operating a criminal enterprise like that, how how
are you going to prove a lot of the things
that happen in the basements of you know, theaters before
they get excavated? Right? Good question, Like, really, how do
you prove that stuff unless you get caught red handed
or somebody uh leaks that information to the authorities or
(57:05):
something like that, or a bribe arrives late. Well exactly,
how do we really know what was happening her enterprise,
but her AMMO definitely does seem to have been kind
of more of a killing with kindness, like I will
win everyone over because she was a diplomat. I think
even the people and the situation with her daughter's funeral
is even evidence that even the people who were uh
(57:26):
positioned against her in terms of the battle of legalities
still kind of loved her. Yeah, you have to. I mean,
you have to respect someone even if if you're diametrically opposed.
Because I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and maybe a speculation,
but like you said, Hollie, everything about her proves that
she didn't get her hands dirty, and she would probably
(57:46):
say that murder is bad for business when you think
about it. Right again, thank you guys so much for
having me. Thanks the Warder Brothers. Please check out the
Chin if you'd like to hear more stories about similarly
badass women. Right it's coming up Friday, August nine, and
(58:07):
I'm getting thumbs up to everybody who's in the audience,
and thanks so much, Thanks so much for coming. We
hope you enjoy the theater. The uh. The Gangster Museum
is upstairs by the way, if you ever in town
and want to check that out. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. Stuff They Don't Want You to Know is
(58:41):
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
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