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Zaren Elizabeth.
How are you doing pretty darn good? How are Ooh?
I'd be good.
Listen.
Yes, you know it's ridiculous.
I do oh nice?
Based on something you told me about. Okay, you were telling me the other day about George Jones. Yeah, and his last wife, Nancy Sepulvado. Yes, you got me curious, right. I went looking into their relationship because it's a well told tale.
Uh.
And they were married on March fourth, nineteen eighty three, which I think you may have touched upon, but which is right right around now. So we're just looking at an anniversary for them. Sure, congratulations to the couple. But one thing I thought was really interesting because at this point George is trying to be like clean and sober. Do you know where they celebrated where the bride and groom went to toast their nuptials?
I do not.
I didn't think this might have come up. They went to the local burger king following the wedding ceremony.
Did he get one of those paper crowns?
What I want to know George Jones and crown? It's nineteen eighty three, so there's still selling.
They each wore one, you know, they were they.
Go baby past the kitchen from a fries and I'm gonna toast this whopper to you.
Burger king, burger king. That's burger king reception. That's the reception was, that's beautiful.
I just yeah, you know, there you go.
I want to have it their way, really ridiculous. It's amazing. I did not know that. Do you want to know what else is Ridiculous Crime School? This is Ridiculous Crime a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, heists, and cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free and one hundred percent ridiculous. Am right? I know I am. Do you remember a while back when we met up with the fellows from Ridiculous History, Oh yeah, Ben and had an all to play a few games of twenty questions.
Oh yeah.
That was two crossover episodes of Ridiculous Chaos. We had to guess historical figures who pulled a flex or something like that. Because I'm a total jerk, I had everyone guessing about dogs, Bummer and Lazarus and Norton's pups, Cia operative Ben Bolin. He had us guessing about a certain historical crimer, and because he believes in women's lib he picked a lady crimer. Yeah, neither of us had ever heard of her at the time, You and I because
we're poorly educated, totally I can barely reach. So I just fake it. Yeah, fake it till you make it. I never learned my numbers.
Sometimes it is hummed to myself while I'm reading, like, oh god, he's reading. You can tell he's making noises exactly. Yeah.
Then they're like that looks like someone reading. That's what I always think. So I figured, after all this time, I should investigate this fine woman and tell you about her.
Ooh yeah, he did a deep dive.
I did a deep dive. Let's learn about Fredrika Mandelbaumb.
Freddy step On Down.
Aka ma Or marm mandelbarm arm Mandelbaumb. So now I mentioned her on my own a little while back when I was telling you about the criminal Adam Worth. He worked with marm Or ma Mandelbaumb. She's the one who took him from petty crimes to bank robbery, and he's the guy that went on to steal Gainsborough's portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Ah right, so he was a real one and he learned from the realist. Yeah. Mandelbaum was called the Queen of the Fences. Nice and she had
a career that lasted more than thirty years. She was a force to be reckoned with.
Well, she's the queen.
Yeah. So she was about six feet tall. Oh wow, oh yeah.
Big statuesque woman, big.
Hefty gal, round apple cheeks. She had huge, bushy eyebrow.
Oh heck.
Yeah, she took up space and did not give a damn.
I apologetic.
I love it, love it. So, as you know, newspaper folks back in the eighteen hundreds were unkind.
Yo, God were they.
So are modern writerly types.
Yes, still holding true to the traditions.
Margalite Fox wrote a book called The Talented Missus Mandelbaum that came out in twenty twenty four. Great book. In it, she describes ma as looking like quote, the product of a congenial liaison between a dumpling and a mountain. Whoa, And I find that totally unnecessary.
Totally I don't even find it that created no. So missus, Now I got a picture of dumpling in a mountain getting busy marghlite.
I could easily pull pictures of you and go at it, but I am a lady. We don't do the roast, and I'll pretend I'm a gentleman anyway.
Ma.
So Fredrika Henriette August Weissner was born on March twenty eighth, eighteen twenty five, in Castle, a city in what is now.
Central German totally cost German.
So. She was one of seven children born to Samuel Abraham Weissner and his wife Rohell. In eighteen forty eight, she married Wolf Israel.
Mandelbamb Wolf Mandelbomb Wolf.
He was a traveling peddler. He was a little bit older. His name was Wolf, so he was a sexy bad boy of rock and roll. Of course, he rode a horse drawn motorcycle, kind of like how the Amish have horse drawn helicopters. So Wolf Wolf married Fredrika.
I'm still having.
Like I can do all the sound effects for it, and then I'm just gonna pretend like I'm reading.
Wolf. That's a bad spot to be beyond two horses all low.
But yeah, do you think he had like the what are they called the ape hanger?
Oh?
Yeah, get that?
That would be amazing like.
A sledge in a real sled going to the Yeah, and then the like on the ends of the handlebars that in bright colors, like a kid's bike, sparkly. Yeah, white white handlebar rips. Anyway, Okay, so Wolf married for Drika, then he moved to the US in search of a better life with her. Yeah, you know, but he made sure to put her in the family way first.
Okay, so he was an anchor Wolf.
Yes, well, they should have had the anchor baby.
He went first as the anchor I'm saying.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, he kind of flipped it. So two years after he took off in eighteen fifty, she and their daughter joined Wolf in New York City and they settled in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the German immigrant neighborhood known as This is a Weird One.
Little Germany did not see that coming.
Yeah, you can say that in German, but like, I don't do that kind of thing.
Oh you don't say little Germany.
I know it's the little Germany. That's how you say it in Germany. It is teane Deutsch Lemn Okay, but I didn't want to mess it up.
Look at me, having German friends for parents, by friends having German parents.
So this neighborhood was like super high density.
Okay, jam packed with new immigrants.
Oh yeah, they had full dreams, empty pocketbooks. The conditions were terrible, yes, yeah, so the buildings weren't maintained in the least totally falling apart. There's like no lighting.
You're hearing your neighbors coughing on.
Some of the windows didn't open, there's like no cross A lot of times they'd have like more than twenty families shoved into one single small building.
This is like why we have health departments now.
Yes, yes, no indoor plumbing. You go down to the street, pump water into a bucket, carry it back the stairs. And the toilets were smelly outhouses in the back alley. Yeah, so a bunch of people sharing one.
And there's also just horse droppings all over the street. So it's smelly in the front and the back.
Honey, it is poop city.
I don't think people get how much there was.
No, there's so much.
It's like twenty years ago, so much poop people windows.
You were eating big meals.
Oh yeah, big sloppy meals, lot of meat, meals. Yeah, all right, and like I'm getting you meats like liver.
Sausages. Yeah, oh yeah, buddy, I'm glad I don't have the time.
I'm glad it's not close to lunchtime.
So Wolf, if he stayed on the same career path in the States as he had been doing back in Germany.
Okay, pedlar pedlar.
So he went around selling things, a little bits and bobs.
They dropped the blanket, got all the stuff, yeah.
Little card, all with a bell or something. And so it was pretty widely known that pedlars often worked on the wrong side of the law.
Well, they got to get the stuff somewhere, Elizabeth.
Yeah, but there was Wolf selling crap on the up and up. He's just like legit, Yeah, he just got deal crap.
So pretty I'm a ninety nine cent store.
That's exactly. Pretty soon they need money, So for Drika starts peddling. She had to work. They're starving. So she goes door to door in the Lower east Side selling lace.
Oh nice, you can get a good, pretty petty for that.
Pretty soon they had four kids, but not four times the income. Oh ue draw Yeah, So for Drika she realizes like, okay, I am not making enough money selling lace door to door, and I don't have a lot of opportunities for advancement because like, there are only certain jobs that a working class woman could have in those Yeah, laundry and that's like backbreaking work, crowded, feed chemical, A
lot of people are doing it. She could be a maid, but they made almost nothing, and they usually didn't have four kids.
Yeahs younger, so they can beholden to that family, right and fai home and feed.
You could be a prostitute, but she was a married woman. She didn't want to do that. It was just a bridge too far. So she kept pedling. But she looked around and she saw that some of the people were peddling ill gotten goods, and she had no problem with that. So she had this great personality. People loved her and she made connections. So she began her criminal career by
buying and then reselling stuff that had been scavenged or stolen. So, yeah, street thieves known as groaners and files brought her stuff to her push carts. So groaners were thieves who went to revivals and charity sermons and they'd rob the congregation of their watches and purses and like switch out bad hats for like they had a crappy hat and they'd see a nice one swap them. Yes, yes, yes, yes. They stole prayer.
Books, anything that's not nailed down.
It's like the lowest behavior in church of it. Bottom of the barrel files files were basically pickpockets. They worked with someone called a bulker and the bulker would bump into were like stop the mark, the file would slip in steal whatever valuable they could try, right, So, these folks would come to Ma with the stuff that they stall and she'd buy it off from cheap and then
flip it. And during this early period, she apprenticed herself to this really well known fence named General Abe Greenthal. He was known as perhaps the best pickpocket in the United States. Really yeah, so she trained with the best.
That's why he was the general.
Yeah. He was born in what is now Poland in eighteen twenty two. He told everyone, who's German though, he led.
This city Thessian Empire.
Yeah yeah, so he led a syndicate of Jewish pickpockets who worked nationwide. They did the Bulkan file thing, jostling into victims in crowded places. As like train stations, and the gang that he ran with included most of his family a family.
Tradition, gang, family, whatever.
So in an article about his passing, The New York Times wrote the quote, all the Greenthal family have turned out to be criminals, the women being shoplifters and the men pickpockets. You know, there's a place for everybody's errand.
Yeah, I never got two hands, might not use them.
The General wasn't just an expert pickpocket. He was also a first class fence. And it was under his guidance that Ma learned how to evaluate luxury merchandise. And she learned all the details to look for, like the feel of the fabrics, the weight and touch of metals and gems, the quality manufacturing and craftsmanship that you know makes these things so valuing. Yeah, and she learned how to move stolen goods turn a tidy profit, and she learned to keep the majority of the profit for herself.
She's getting good smart.
So by the end of the Civil War eighteen sixty five, she had tucked enough money away and had enough to open a legitimate looking dry goods store, just a front. It gave her cover in like assessing luxury textiles and materials things like silk lace, cashmere, and seal skin which is called pin seal when it's made into leather, which bums me all the way out.
Yeah. Yeah, but it was a you know, I was a nice fabric.
It was a luxury material. Seal skin and pin seal.
Yeah, that's a lot of like oil.
Mean Yeah, So mandelbomb suppliers were young thieves. They stole stuff from warehouses, delivery wagons, they go down to.
The docks of a truck.
Yes, basically she bought their stolen goods at this fraction of a wholesale value, so let's say ten percent, right, So they got it for free. So anything they make is going to make them happy. So like, let's suppose the wholesale value is one hundred dollars, so they get ten bucks. Then she would resell the stuff to her customers, and these were people like tailors or just housewives looking for a deal. She'd charge them more, but still way under the full wholesale value.
Yeah, market price is one hundred dollars.
For wholesale, I forget even reach tail value.
Wow.
So if these folks they would have had to pay one hundred wholesale she charges them like sixty Okay, so she's turning a fifty dollars profit out of basically nothing. Yeah, the economy was changing in the US at the time. You know, we've got growing industrialization. Cities are growing with like both immigrants and those coming in from the country looking for jobs.
You know, these factories are growing.
Yeah. So despite growing wealth inequality as well, there's a growing middle class and they weren't living by such razor margins, and they wanted nice things too. Sure, so luxury items like cashmere shawls could pull in incredible prices. It costs so much. According to Marglite Fox quote, a single cashmere shawl from that time would sell for the equivalent of forty five thousand dollars in today's dollars.
I'm sorry, need to pick my jaw back up off the floor. Forty five thousand dollars for a piece of clothing that is like flimsy.
At They're not flimsy shawl. You know, I have like a fur coat. You know, I have a kashmere problem wearing a cashmere sweater.
I know you do. But that's like a light thing, and I know it's like lace's light. It's also expensive I'm not suggesting, but I mean that's not a lot of material.
No.
I love a good Kashmere shaw like a scarf so huge as to engulf one. Yes, I would not, However, in a million years pay forty five thousand dollars.
I don't think I pay forty five hundred dollars for a shawl.
What would middle class Elizabeth do back then?
Where would you place the cap on? How much you pay for a really nice like this is my my favorite show?
Well, it depends on all the quality of the casual.
Say it's nice, and imagine it's really nice.
You're and I need Kashmere. So I have to really think about this. Mom mandel Mam was like in the legal version of quints, okay, like affordable. I would totally be hanging around her store. I know, like, do you have the boyfriend car?
You would have one of those tickets.
I think like if you get I'd look at like three hundred dollars would be like a low a Kashmir shawl. Sure, So if I really like this was a nice like a couple grand, I don't know, I personally wouldn't pay that grand. Maybe reddit afterwards I'd be like, oh.
My god, what have I done?
Yeah, there's no pay a thousand dollars for it, you know, but that'd be a nice, nice, nice one.
Sure, I would assume.
So anyway, that of course, Like if you're looking at forty five thousand.
Dollars equivalent, that's that's like today a nice used Trump.
And Ma's like, you got fifty bucks.
Yeah, like a brand new Chinese ev Yes exactly.
And I say this as I am currently wearing a cashmere sweater.
Yes, I know.
I don't even know how much that would.
I know that too. I wasn't even go as.
In those days it didn't cost me forty five thousand dollars. So Ma, she exploited the gap between rising demand and the availability of stolen merch, and that's how she made an obscene.
Amount of money.
Apparently, let's take a break when we return more stolen goods. Zaren Elizabeth, welcome back. Hey have a Cashmi wrap.
I just bought a sixty thousand dollars pair of socks.
They're really nice, Mom, Mandelbah, she's making it work. So she has moved from peddling is one hundred percent focused on her growing criminal empire. She also benefited from like the broader political and economic climate of New York City at the time, Like corruption was everywhere. Yeah, I mean you had Tammany Hall exactly, and it was just it was a big mess.
And also like ostentatious, like flourishes of wealth are starting to become the fashion of the day. We're not quite to like, you know, the whatever the whatever you want to call the eighteen nineties. There's lots of different nickties, but like you know, the Gilded Age will say, but.
We're on our way. The trends that people watch live up to. And the thing is, it's like it that spark for what, you know, some would call the Gilded Age of you know, if you have any kind of show of wealth, you're welcomed in, no questions asked. Yeah, so, I mean she fits right in with that. So and we're transitioning from an agrarian economy to like this capitalist
urban commerce. She built her fortune by you know, taking things out of legitimate trade channels and you know, putting them on the illicit market.
And and in a way that cops really don't usually mess with. There's no violence. They're like, what can we do?
Yeah, exactly, And then maybe they'll take a little on the side. Yeah, so by she's got eighteen sixty five. She's got the modest dry goods store on Clinton Street the Lower east Side, So let's talk about that a little bit. It served as the public front for this rapidly expanding criminal operation. There was the store front, but then there were also like this warren of rooms behind
the shop that functioned as headquarters for the network. So inside the building at Clinton and Rivington, she had all of these hidden features to hide stuff. So look normal when you walk in downst room, they were altering and like stripping identifying marks off of stuff.
Oh, there's not like a stock room first, and then behind that they.
Right, they're taking gemstones out of settings. They're taking like hallmarks off of jewelry and silverware.
Literally behind the curtain you got jewelers.
Kind away manufacturers, labels from textiles. And then there was like a trapdoor that led to other places concealed passageways. This a tunnel network chimney. Yeah, oh yeah. There was a hidden parlor where she could like secretly observe transaction. There was a dormitory for when they needed to arrest the thieves.
Yeah, I've been working all night, tired.
You take five. The upstairs was her family apartment where the kids were being raised. This is all all there. Her primary business became fencing stolen property, so she really wasn't out there doing anything. Smart criminals who stole items, you know, jewelry, furniture sold to her. She turned it around.
I assume they're coming to the back, yes, and here's what I got.
Exactly back entrance and all that stuff she really like. She preferred stuff like silk and diamonds. They could be purchased cheaply, resold at huge profits, hard to prove where they came from exactly. She was willing to handle almost anything, though. There's this story that goes that after the Great Chicago Fire, thieves brought her a herd of goats that they stole and during the chaos, and she was like yeah, and she's like, y'all take them. How they got the goats from Chicago, New York?
I cannot say, I'm going to assume a train.
I guess who knows. So she sought out experienced criminals rather than like street brawlers or petty scavengers. A lot of the women that she employed specialized in shoplifting from department stores, which we.
Saw them rot as was imagining some upscale maids who are like, you know, going to leave their employer.
She taught these women like how to move through the department stores without attracting any attention. There's this police inspector Thomas Burns. He wrote a book about the criminals at the time, and he recorded all of her known associates in this eighteen eighty six book. There was Mike Kurtz and he was one of the co found of the Dutch Mob during the eighteen seventies. He went to prison for silk theft and then while he was inside he found out that eating soap could make you sick.
He had to go to prison, so he ate soap.
And he got sick and he lost wade. He was a mess. Prison doctors are like, I don't know, we don't know what's wrong with him. Sure, we don't know what to do. I'm just going to diagnose him as dying. And so he got a pardon and then he stopped eating soap and he was fine. So that was upright, having people.
Why you inside, I was pushing silk silk, What do you know?
Now I'm eating soap okay. So then he had Mary Holbrook. She was an Irish born pickpocket and a shop lifter. She bounced around between Boston, Chicago, New York. She is called the most notorious female thief in America. In the late eighteen hundreds Mary Whole book. She was running a brothel when she married this guy thief named Holbrook. And in eighteen sixty nine he and his gang went to
western Illinois to rob some banks. They got caught. Buck and his buddies tried to tunnel their way out of jail, but they got caught again. He did not survive a prison guard's excitability with a shotgun. Yeah, bad luck, Buckshot. Molly gave him a proper funeral and said, quote, we all know that Buck was not on the square, but he was always a good and kind man to me, that is the measure. And over like one hundred people, all these thieves and like prostitutes and ruffians went to
his funeral. Then Molly met and married this guy, Jimmy Hoy. He was a pickpocket and they ran a pickpocket ring together. She found new love. And this is around the time that she worked under Ma. Then there was Sophie Levy aka Sophie Lyons. She was a young pickpocket yeah, and a blackmailer. She was regarded as one of Ma's top
proteges and like her, Skime like her. The whole thing was that she would lure men into hotel rooms, wait until they got undressed, and then steal their clothes and demand money to give it back to them.
Oh, I thought you'd have like a male Confederate county.
It was like, nope, I've got your pants. Yeah, I got your honey pants.
Everybody knows because your name's are in it exactly.
Now give me fifty bucks. There was also black Lina Kleinschmidt, Black Lina kleins Yeah, and so she, like Sophie Lyons, was like a close student of moz and Black Lina was another German born criminal in New York. She's struggling to get by. She got busted in eighteen eighty trying to steal one hundred and eight yards of silk worth two hundred and fifty dollars and that's like eight thousand today. When she finally got out of jail, she skipped bail and she was like caught and they put time on
her ticket. She moved to Hackensack, New Jersey. When she's finally out there, she posed as a wealthy widow of a South American mining tycoon.
That's brilliant, creative. I thought she's gonna go with her.
I love it.
The widow of a boat captain who saying she went, she went off the American mining magnet.
She copied Ma's lavish and like convivial style. She threw these really fancy dinner parties.
She's kind of a bone v yes, yes.
And it was at these parties that she'd rob her guests. And then she was to go from Hackensack up to New York, sell the stuff, and then come back with the money to throw another huge party and keep the lifestyle going. And she got busted for that when she wound up wearing this emerald ring that she'd stolen and the victim recognized it at the next party.
You can't do that.
You can't do that.
Also, you got to have some kind of like Patsy who you can blame for stuff goes bad. You gotta be like, oh no, there is one guy. I don't know why he's around. He's got to be also family, so he knows you're not really throwing him under the bus. You're just like you need to go cool up for it.
She's she got lazy.
There was this thing and covetous.
Native shoplift her a Litland known as kid glove Rosie.
Was he a was she like a legitimate like little person?
No?
No, no, she was just short.
She was just a tiny one.
And kid Glove Rosie worked with Black Lena a lot, and she got busted. Yeah, kid Glove Rosie got busted on that silk heist with her like her.
Hands are the size of a kid's school.
I guess I don't know, or she would you know, she would handle thing with kids, kid gloves. She was a gentle touch in her shoplifting.
Like.
There was also this elderly Irish pickpocket named Old Mother Hubbard, and her specialty was being able to get into any woman's handbag and take the coin purse out like she could just she was incredible with that.
Was she literally an elderly woman, an old.
Irish lady Mom managed this really diverse group. I mean, you think about it, it's primarily German born Jewish immigrants, but then like like a healthy dose of Irish and these are the people who were fully marginalized.
All the time and living right now near each other.
Yeah, and so they're like exactly. So she's got this huge group and she organized them so well. And to protect herself from prosecution, she wouldn't take stolen goods directly at the shop. She had them stored in various rented properties all around the city. So, despite all her criminal activities, she developed this reputation for loyalty and reliability among all the people who worked with her and for her money.
Yeah.
Well, and according to New York's chief of police at the time, George Walling, she was widely regarded as scrupulously fair within the criminal world, and her success came in large part because she had this support. Like saying, quick with the bail money. She rarely betrayed anyone who worked with her. She would do the bail, she'd get lawyers for people. Newspapers sometimes described her with this like aura of respect, that she was respectable and even like philanthropic.
She sounds straight up gangster, I mean the original gangster.
Yes, So her influence went way beyond just like simple fencing. So, like I said, there's you know, you've got Tammany Hall going on. Well, she cozies up to all those politicians.
They're dirty and corrupting. Criminal.
Cozy is up to the police department.
She knows all these officers and detectives. They she'd have these elaborate dinners at her home and she would entertain them and then you know, she would pay them off.
To look the other way. She would have sometimes like for her network. She would also throw them big, you know parties, picnics.
Oh yeah, I'm sure donate to the policeman's retirement.
Even her criminal gangs, She's like, let's have a company picnic. Let's do it. Some people had like regular salaries with her, rather than just being paid by.
The peace ahead of her curry.
And that's how she got all these maternal nicknames mar mother, ma, mother, bomb th like so they called her so. Stories circulated that she even established a training school for young criminals. Zaren closure eyes. Yes, I want you to picture it. It's October of eighteen seventy six. You are a thirteen year old boy sent to enroll at a local school, a school for criminals. You walk up to the building at Clinton and Grand in New York's Lower East Side.
It's a chaotic scene on the street. Vendors jostles for customers on the sidewalks and in the gutters, as horses slowly pull carts laden with goods up the street. Shops with Hebrew lettering painted on the windows flanked a building signs above you. Up and down the street advertised rooms for rent, or cobbler services or baked goods. People laugh, they argue, They call to one another in Yiddish. You
are a red headed Irish kid. Here's a little out of his element here, but you feel alive, You feel ready. Three blocks down at Clinton and Rivington is Mom Mandelbaum's dry goods store. You are well aware that it's a front. You've walked by and peeked in. You've heard stories. You are a very intelligent, very precocious kid. You have street smarts, and you're going to go far in this world. And to help you on your way, you're trying to get into Ma's school for criminal kids. You ring the bell
and a woman in her twenties opens the door. She asks who sent you? You tell her old mother Hubbard knows you sent you here to get a start. She looks you up and down and then nods and lets you in. She passes you off to an older teen boy. He tells you he's going to give you a tour and then you'll get started. You follow him up a flight of creaking stairs to a wide landing. He tells you that beginners start with pickpocketing and small thefts. He
asks if you have any experience with that. Sure, you say, I know all about it. He eyes you suspiciously. You stare at him and reach into your pocket, keeping his eye contact, you pull out a pearl handled knife. The boy's face goes pale. That's my knife, he stammers, patting at his pocket. You hand it back to him. Indeed it is, you say, Then you smirk. The boy puts the knife into his inside jacket pocket, stares at you, and continues his tour. You walk down the hall and
stop in front of a room. A woman instructs a young girl to bump into a boy as she walks by him. She does as she's told again. The teacher demands the children take their places and pretend once more to pass each other on the street. We'll be teaching you the techniques of distraction and stealth, but I'm not sure you need much teaching in that department, he says. He tells you that the next step is more complex crimes.
You follow him down the hall to another room. Inside, a group of young boys sits on the floor and they watch in awe as an old man with a long gray beard slowly turns the dial on a safe. He looks up at you and smiles and goes back to the work. Your guide tells you that you'll learn stuff like burglary, blackmail, and safe cracking unless you already know how to crack a safe, he says no. You
tell him not yet, that's why you're here. The two of you reach another stairwell and climb to the next floor. The boy tells you that if you show real talent, you'll be able to join Mandelbaum's organization immediately. He says, Moss started the school six years ago. He was in the first class. You stop at another open door. It
looks like a traditional classroom. Inside, students sit in rows of desks, their heads down, brows furrowed, and concentration as they practice forging a signature posted on a large paper taped to a chalkboard. At the front of the room, a boy with ink smeared on his cheek, glances up at you, and then gets back to work. Your guide tells you you're going to go see the dining area, and you start down the hall, but stop abruptly. An enormous woman blocks your path. She is imposing, she is serene.
She asks you your name, and you tell her you're honest, no alias. She stares at you, looks you up and down. Where are you from? She asks, Hell's kitchen? You tell her no, Where are your people from? She says me, Dad's from County Cork. If that's what you're after, you tell her. She's silent. You can hear a clock ticking in a room down the hall. Is your father, Seamus Sullivan? She asks why? You respond, I think you know why I'm asking you go. Does he know you're here? She
asks you? Tell her no. She stares some more. The clock keeps ticking. Get out, she tells you in the harshest tone. Get out now. You turn and race down the stairs two at a time. You make it to the front door, and fling yourself out onto the street. The sunshine blinds you momentarily. You run down Clinton, bobbing and leaving between people crossing Broadway until you reach South Street, right by Peer thirty six. You slam into a police officer, a detective. He looks down at you. You look up
at him. She's on to us that you say, your father looks to the sky and then turns and spits on the ground. He sighs. Well, we gave it a shot, he says. Meanwhile, back at the school, Mom Mandelbaum is quickly closing up shop, kicking her pupils out into the street, as if this school never existed in the first place.
Yes, I want to go to crime school for kids, so zaren, I'd love that Seamus Sullivan was a copy.
So there's reason to believe it didn't actually exist in the first place. So for years, decades, more than a century, it was understood that ma ran a school for young criminals at Clinton and Grand in the Lower east Side. School Well, no, and then she shut it down. And then it was also widely understood that she shut it down when she discovered that the son of a cop had enrolled. Oh and so I didn't make that part
of it. Yeah, but then that Marglite Fox wrote in her book that her research determined it was an urban legend. That's a buzzkill and like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.
I'm right there with you, Fox. And also it seems like that'd be something that she would do.
And then then like a cop sends his kid in to like infiltrate. Yeah, I love it. Let's pause for ads, and I'm going to pick your pockets and when we come back more Ma, Ma mandlebam.
How you enjoying my pocket? Lint? I saw you dry it and lint I got lint empty my pockets in anticipation of this, I'm.
Not very good, Ma. Ruler of a criminal empire, Queen the Empress. As her power increased, she expanded into financing large scale criminal ventures. I was wondering, Yeah, stuff like bank robberies, really elaborate burglaries. One of her most notable crimes that was connected to her whole network happened in eighteen sixty nine when thieves broke into New York City's Ocean National Bank and stole around eight hundred thousand dollars.
Adam Worth was in on that one talked about that and so the robbery like it took months of prep. Remember a shell company rented office space beneath the bank. They cut through that ceiling using specially designed tools. At the time, it was considered the largest bank burglary in American history. And so for about like three decades, her organization operated with just freedom. They just did whatever. Yeah, that incredible. So law enforcement officials they knew at the
time that like this goes all across the country. She wasn't just in New York.
Yeah, have Chicago connections. Yeah, straight out.
If a major silk robbery happened in any other city and like the criminals were associated with her organization, she would be the first like write a first refusal for that silk, Like that was how it went. And she also but she had this like public image of this respectable member of the community. She gave tons of money, she donated to her synagogue. She was friendly with her neighbors. She came across Like if you weren't aware, just is this really like rich, respectable woman?
Was she did she have like a pretend husband or an even wolf. Yeah, but he was older, so I don't know if he's still alive.
He's still there and he didn't have to keep pedlins.
So like.
Oh yeah, and behind this facade, you know, she's organizing thefts and burglaries and luxury merchandise all across the United States. She had this lavish lifestyle. She wore really elaborate silk dresses and a sealskin cape, and she wore a ton of jewelry. There were some that say that she wore like basically a million dollars like in modern dollars worth of jewelry around just every day, like very Elizabeth Taylor.
Wow, And you're nobody's gonna rob her.
So it's exactly who would even dare. As her business expanded, she bought warehouses in order to store all the stolen goods.
And I'm sure that like you know, I know that she's primarily in non violent crimes, but I bet you knows some hitters.
Oh yeah, she has. She has to do, yeah, because all of the like her coterie of bad men, they're on the fringes and they're connected to other like violent groups.
My brother does that do work exactly.
So in the mid eighteen eighties, an estimated ten million dollars worth of luxury merchandise had been handled through her Lower East Side shop get it. It was one of the central hubs of organized crime in the city, and so her long run of success, though, finally came to an end. In eighteen eighty four, this newly appointed District Attorney of New York City, Peter Olney, he decided to go after her.
Her specifically trendy, not just criminals like her, but her specifically.
But because local police, like everyone, kind of knew they'd been compromised, right, so only hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency those joy Kills to conduct a sting operation. And there was this one Pinkerton agent, Gustav Frank. He infiltrated the network. He posed as a criminal named Stein, and he exploited her tendency to help thieves out, particularly those of German Jewish background like she was. And that's how he got into like the inner circle. He wormed his
way in. So on the morning of July twenty second, eighteen eighty four, Frank and three other Pinkerton's raided the shop and they uncovered a ton of stolen property up and there's all that's in there, like jewelry, watches, silverware, loose diamonds, all sorts of stuff, microwaves, color TVs, GPS systems, air purifs, bevel toaster ovens, you know or not I don't know.
It was just like a smoking gun collection.
Completely completely. They found all the hidden rooms, antique furniture trunks filled with cashmere shawls, lace curtains, bolts of silk. They had melted down stolen jewelry into just gold bars, and so they found those. They went into her bedroom and they found the melting pots and the scales used to do all this stuff when they arrested her. So the detectives arrest her and they try and holler away, and one's like, you know what, just admit, defeat and cooperate.
She like stops and turns and looks at him and then just socks him in the kiss or just decks it.
So I know.
Exactly her son, Julius, who had been involved in the operations. He got arrested alongside Julius. It's a great name. One of her daughters was married to in some reports married to a detective and others to a politician. It depends on which newspaper you read. Why not both write, But like she was supposed to be attached to all the family business as well, and so like this is just
the press loves this. Of course, It's all over the place, and so she already had prominent defense attorneys like on retainer William F. Howe and Abraham Hummel, and they were well known for like representing the Underworld figures in the city.
So they're mob lawyers.
Yes. They tried to undermine the credibility of Frank the Pinkerton detective.
Like the roy Cohnes of the nineteenth century.
Yes, and so they're like, you know, that Pinkerton detective, I think he actually was a criminal, Like he's not a Pinkerton, you know, so they're just making him out he was. He was, you know, taking his own share of stuff.
Yeah.
Bail was set at ten grand, which was just an incredible amount then, and that was like for five different charges that she was facing.
Like receiving stolen goods, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, So bail gets paid, She goes home and the Pinkertons are keeping an eye on her under total surveillance. December fourth, eighteen eighty four, though she's scheduled to appear in court, she vanishes. She used a body double to slip the Pinkertons, got on a train, fled to Canada, and took a million dollars worth of stolen goods with her.
I don't know about you, but I've always wanted to have cause to use a body double right to sneak to Canada.
I mean, that's like girls dream. So remember that thief Molly Holbrook, who, Yeah, she was working in all like up and down the Northeast as a pickpocket. She got busted a bunch of times in Boston. Boston, Yeah, but either she would jump bail or she'd get off thanks to her fancy lawyers, how and humble, which MA would organize her. But in eighteen eighty four she got arrested and got five years at the prison on Blackwell's Island. And she begged MA, like, please send the lawyers, send lawyers,
guns and money. MA was like enough, I can't with you. So Mollie decided to turn state's evidence on Ma. Oh no, And that's one of the reasons why MA ran off to Canada. That's one of the reasons the DA was like, oh, I can go after this. MA knew that they had an insider to testify against her, so she goes off to Ontario. By the following day, newspapers had traced her to Canada like they figured it out. But because no extradition treaty existed between the US and Canada at that time.
She could stay there without being returned for trial, so she didn't really want to leave New York, just like ri Em saying, leaving New York never easy. I saw the light fading out. That's a great song, by the way, sare thank you, thank you for bringing that up. In Toronto, she was in Hamilton, Ontario, just outside, just outside of Toronto, so she was forced to stay there, and she saw this exile as kind of like a living death, like
New York was everything for her. But there she is Hamilton, Ontario. She opened a business known as Ladies and Children's Underwear Emporium and Andizars Unpants sure right, so even there, like it was rumored that she was fencing and bribing officials. She worked behind the store counter though, and she went to services at the local synagogue. She kept a really close relationship with her children. One of her sons opened
a tobacconist shop right down the street. A daughter of hers frequently traveled from New York carrying letters and packages, and people like also kind of thought that maybe she was bringing up stolen merchandise because she always, like Moss still had really low price in her shop, and the daughter always came in with a lot of luggage, but they could never prove anything. In eighteen eighty five, tragedy struck her youngest daughter, Annie died in New York. She
was only eighteen. It was pneumonia. So mom was like, I have to see her one last time. She was bereft. This was her baby. So she snuck back to.
New York for the.
Yeah, she put on a disguise and I'm really hoping for great wig play. Then she got into her old house by using one of the passages her crooks would use to get in undetected. She managed to view the body, pay her respects before leaving again for Canada, and she made it back without getting arrested. Yes, I was hoping she was able to do it. So Fredrika Marmandelbaum died in Canada in eighteen ninety four. Her body was transported back to New York for burial in the same cemetery
where her daughter was laid to rest. And even in death, she was this figure of fascination. So like the newspapers had all this wild speculation about the funeral and the burial.
Some thought that she faked her death and the coffin was just like full of rocks that she was out living it up somewhere, and others, like other newspaper reports talked about how like there was this huge crowd and everyone got pickpocketed, and so at the time of her death, she had a fortune that was estimated at around a million dollars, which is like thirty seven point eight million dollars today. So zaren, what's your ridiculous takeaway?
I am so impressed with marm Mandelbomb. I mean, like for a lot of reasons. I like her panacha, like her style, like the way she does it. But also I mean it's the classic thing of like, oh, you gotta be like twice as good. She's like, I got to be three times as good to be able to be on the same par because you know, I'm an immigrant, I'm a woman in the nineteenth century America and Canada. I mean like I'm a Jewish woman. I'm six feet tall,
and I stand out. And then like everything she's like so like and the fact that she got to live and lived so well and took care so many people. She seems to be like the type of criminal that I always wanted to be around back when I did crime, which is hard to find. You know, like people have gotten lazy about how they do crime now. They don't understand it's a community thing. Like if you really want
to be successful, you've got to have a network. You gotta have respect, You got to have people who owe you in a way that is actually meaningful, you know, not just like you know, otherwise you're gonna get the're gonna turn state's evidence.
Well, you know, we're talking about old school mafia, and you see it as like that's when the police wouldn't protect a community. They had to stuff up and protect.
You want the old ladies to be able to go out of it.
It's gonna cost you a little something, but like that's the taxes you pay basically.
And it's also I mean that is kind of how society works anyway. I mean, like you're paying stuff already all the time for these same things. You're just doing it to a person who's like a little bit more familiar with violence crime, you know. But it's like it's not that much different, right, right, and it's more effective, you know. It's like I'm being real anyway, what's yours?
Elizabeth my ridiculus takeaway is that you know, she didn't From what I understand, she wasn't hurting anybody, you know. And I mean it's like, there are just costs of doing business when you're dealing with luxury goods. I suppose so, And I think that she helped more than she heard. You know what insurance is for exactly everything for each other. It just keeps she circulating money into the community. But I'll tell you what I need to talk back.
That's my takeaway. Oh my god, I.
Let Oh my goodness, I just got done listening to the ten cent Beer Night. I have not laughed this hard any of your episodes. There was another one. I can't remember what it was, but this one was hilarious. Somebody needs to make a movie or a short film about it.
Would be hilarious things. Guys. That's a really good idea. Like a documentary.
Yeah, I think there actually are there. Yeah, I think there are. I think there's even a documentary. I think there's an animated version of that story that's like on YouTube or whatever. I think you can find people. I mean, we've been asked to tell that story to other people, Like just in general, it's it is a very much a not a known commodity. But I mean it's like some people are like this one.
You're told it the funniest way.
We did, you did did?
That's it for today. You can find us online at ridiculous Crime dot com. We're also at Ridiculous Crime on Blue Sky and Instagram or on YouTube a Ridiculous Crime pod. You can email us at ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com, and you can please please please leave a talk back on the free iHeart app reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Zabeth Dutton and Zaren Burnett, produced and edited by Pau Houston, head of the Rude Duke Gang, starring
Emily's Rutger as Judith. Research is by notorious pickpocket Marissa Brown and professor of safe cracking Jabbari Davis. The theme song is by Guy who keeps his Wallet in his back pocket Thomas Lee and Guy who Can't find his Wallet Travis Dutton. Post wardrobe is provided by Botany five hundred guests, hair and makeup by Sparkleshot Mister Andre. Executive producers are Pinkerton, Pickpocket poachers Ben Bolin and Noel Brown.
P Dicks Crime Say It one More Time.
Geequus Crime.
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio four more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.