In tonight's classic episode, fellow conspiracy realist Your Boys hit the Road, joined with one of our close close friends, the host of many shows including Stuffy Missed in History Class, Holly Fry.
Yeah, in the beautiful Saint Mark's Theater in the I believe the East Village the Westville is one of the villages in New York City talking about some true crime stuff.
Yeah, and it's about Hell's kitchen, right, It's like the history of the area there in New York and this particular person that was kind of scary but mostly a super effective fence and a.
Bit of a historical deep cut.
Yes.
Yeah.
And also, although I don't believe we get to it in this live show. What we love about Hell's kitchen, or at least what I love is that it implies the idea of other infernal rooms in a house. Where's Hell's bathroom? You know what I mean? Does Hell have a foyer?
Hell's boudoirs?
But it's also like, what does it get in a kitchen? It gets hot? So this is the hot part of Hell.
Yeah, what's Hell's washroom?
Like?
Oh boy?
Uh?
So we get into everything except for that. In tonight's exploration.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is not They call me Ben.
This is our super producer, Paul Mission Control Decan, 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 eighty Saint Mark's.
Oh oh yeah, and it is a very special day for me personally. Just really quickly before we get into this gentleman seventeen years ago today, a little over that I met this girl at the International Thespian Conference and 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 never get to do the show in front of her. So happy anniversary, Diana.
Yay, Happy anniversary.
Start the night off on a heartwarming note.
I love it, And this is a special day. This is a special place with so much history. So we three said we've got to have a 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.
Holly Holy Oh, 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.
So.
As Matt kind of did in a nin er Niner way earlier, we did get to see The Kitchen already, which is Warner Brother's 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 nineteen
seventy eight Hell's Kitchen. This, in turn no spoilers because we don't want to give 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, It's true.
It's true, true, specifically, a woman known as Frederica marm Bandelbaum. She was born Frederica Henriette Augusta Weisner 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 you know, her family was Jewish, and in eighteen forty eight she married a guy named Wulf Israel Mandelbaum nice and Wulf Mandelbaum, and 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, Actually traveling peddler was one of the few jobs that Jews were allowed to hold at the time. 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 nineteenth or the eighteen forties hit Europe, we talk about it a lot in context of Ireland, but many countries were deeply impacted, 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 both left on the steamship the Baltimore and arrived in New York in July of that same year, and Fredrika and their infant daughter Berta.
Yeah nice yeah nail plus.
Pronunciation guru right here.
Berta soon followed and they arrived in September via the Erie, and Fredrika 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 we're going to describe this woman
having accomplished at that point in her life. But the Mandelbombs traveled in steerage where more than one hundred immigrants were packed into these incredibly tight quarters in one of three of the ship's lower decks, and there was a row of tiny, hay lined bunks that were stacked against the wall, and passengers were provided with what was called an immigrants kit, which was a 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 us things like lime drops and yeah it's true, raw onions.
Were totally useless.
So personal space and hygiene were entirely non existent, 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 moments you see in steerage untrue, right, total fantasy, and especially difficult for Marm because Marm was almost six feet tall, she was around two hundred and fifty pounds. She was an imposing figure who's stuck out in a crowd, and she was easy to find. So imagine being almost six feet tall and stuck in Asmol said these tiny hay line buildings, This serious, seriously dangerous, tortuous situation 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 the crowding did not stop at steerage. 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 Berta were just three roughly two million people who would immigrate to the US via New York. We're in 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 Mantel Bombs started their lives in New York in the lower east side of Manhattan, in an area known as Klein deutsch Land or Little Germany, which where I believe we're in right now. We're at least extremely close to it at this moment. 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, and at one point it was I believe I 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 Mandelbombs began their life in New York living 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 Mandlums found an apartment, their own place on Eighth Street, and it was a stifling, windowless room and a surdly run down tenement building. There was no heat, there was no indoor plumbing, The bathroom consisted of a wooden out house in the alley, and they had to carry their own water from like hand pumps, and that was the only way they could get access to fresh water. And those hand pumps were out in the sidewalk.
So probably a lot like your first apartment, 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 Mandelbaumbs 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. They had a room 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. They carried literally everything they had with them, so I mean, I couldn't even carry my Star Wars figures.
But you've been to the tour of Ellis Island where you see, yeah, the luggage room where they confiscate your luggage and you get it back.
We're talking like trunks.
We're 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 we're talking about.
They would.
And part of that was that they were really victimized by slum lords who took advantage of people in this desperate situation. Who would you charge them way too much for not permanent living quarters really tight 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 that point they would just be turned out on
the street. They had no money, they had no possessions, just to 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, 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 phenomenally good.
At Oh my goodness, she had a gift.
No smoke on that one. So Mandelbaum began to lay the groundwork 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, scraps of fabric, not like whole pieces of clothing, like scraps of fabric, pieces of rope, stuff like that. And the kinds of things they were selling were, as you could tell, not in particularly high demand. So try as they might, working all day well into the night, they could barely afford to feed their children. Something had to be done.
But it was during these early days pedaling on the streets of Little Germany that Frederica Mandelbaum began making these contacts 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 were part of families that were transient.
As well, but they would sell.
These odds and ends much like that peddler's life, 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 Mandelbaum saw this and she had like kind of a light bulb moment where she was like, Okay, I'm going to capitalize on this. She started, literally, like Oliver twist Fagan style, enlisting these
street urchin children into this grassroots criminal empire. She also met thieves and other petty crooks who you know, like weren't children, and she started to look into how to unload the stolen goods that they had acquired, and.
This led her to an Aha moment where she realized, 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 boyle boy, did she do just that. She found her niche and she was spectacular at it. So for the Mandelbaum and her family, things really took a turn for the better. This happened, ironically, during a time that was very difficult for most people because it was the Panic of eighteen fifty 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 less overplayed our financial hand. We expanded domestic investment and business at a 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 popped spectacularly.
Oh spectacular, Yeah, we'll edit that part.
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 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 Mandelbaum started out doing. However, she was in a much better position.
Oh, how the tables have turned.
That's right. So Mandelbaum had already established herself as this 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, in specifically New York City, was going through at the time. And according to her contemporaries, when she was making a transaction, right, she would never buy anything for more than half of what it was worth, 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, 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 let's say Holly wanted to get a Grido something or other, she had to have one to a business, a company that has a storefront that wants to have goods to sell there.
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 customers that you possibly can.
Right.
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 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. Now not now at all. Right, We're good, everything's good. Marm's network perfectly was straddling the worlds of both 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. 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 who was not gonna ask a lot of questions, you went to Marm. And if you wanted to buy something on the cheap, ridiculously cheap, questionably cheap, you went to Marm. So soon every street level criminal had either met or worked with Frederica mar Mandelbaumen.
But pretty quickly her network climbed out from just like the depths of street level criminals, 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 Marm. 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 wards, by the way, at the time were these numbered voting districts in New York that was divided up into and that'll come a little bit later. 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 fans of Marm because they knew that if they played ball with her, that she would help them secure the Jewish vote in the thirteenth Ward, which she
was becoming particularly 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 these like souares 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.
Could be an episode all its own. It's crazy. Can you give us 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 at that time. In eighteen seventy eight, 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 for such a long time.
Now, 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 when we're talking about history. Right, So, marm succeeded in a in an industry that also had other players. Right, there were rival fence operations in a day to fighting against these groups. She raised four children, right, and she was caring for Wolf, her sick husband, and
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 called him and this was a very bad word at the time. They referred to him as a non entity.
Ouch.
I know, it's brutal, right, 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 be honest with everyone. I want to clear this up really quickly, because when we started working on this, I wasn't sure what dry goods meant. I thought it was like a bean store.
Yeah, no question about it.
I honestly had no idea.
Either that's such a bless your heart moment, Thank you Holly.
Holly as our resident haberdasher, or like, yeah, some play tell.
Us what dry The dry goods were things that were non non food necessities, so it could be clothes, hats, tablewars, et cetera.
Gloves.
Maybe life needs sure. Yeah, and so not beans. I want to really stress kids, not dry beans.
Just go to the grocery store. Yeah, 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 of actually legitimate business, she built the city's largest fencing operation, ran it for more than two decades and still in history, in the history of this town, she is the most successful fence, even in twenty nineteen. But there's another thing that made her different. We've been throwing around the name
marm Right, it's her nickname, it's a street name. Where did it come from?
Though?
Okay, so this is a fun story. Here's the deal. So she was a ruthless criminal, masterbuind but she was also a nurturing lady. 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 one not. She actually took it upon herself to mentor young criminals. I mean, that's sweet. And when you think about it, she taught them their trade. So she
called this is the sweetest thing. She called her group of criminals, her little chicks and they called her Marm in return. So it was a very nurturing and loving area kind of situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beginning around the time of the Panic of eighteen fifty seven, she started just 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 soft hearted and fond of working with young women because she felt like it saved them from a life as a housekeeper or probably other options.
Which is kind of a framing spin, you know what I mean. These kids were helping her.
Right, I mean, I also don't want to clean a house, but you know, pickpocketing sounds better. But so chief though 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 sick, she was like, I'm sorry, this deal can't happen now, I'm out. 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 the fanciest of dry goods if you ask me, silverware, draperies 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 at seventy nine Clinton Street on the corner of Rivington and Clinton, and the family had their dry goods store still at the time, 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 anybody was kidding.
So Skyle, I was just clarifying she might have sold fences.
You don't know, I know how.
There was somebody here this whole time, going how do you make money fencing like this? I'm just looking their wallet 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 authority 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 hid a dumbwaiter. So if the cops were coming, they were knocking on the door, she could like load this dumbwaiter up in the fake chimney with all the stolen goods she had, and lower it down underground and be like what I'm operating, This is dry goods exclusively. I am a legitimate business person. Leave me the hell Are you.
A chimney inspector, sir, ye, be on your way exactly, show show me your credentials.
No, it's true.
So she was pretty crafty.
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 mar Mandelbaum was a cut above all of the other fencing operations, and in the I think they're pretty legitimate, to be honest.
Well, the first one is, remember she and her family there are 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 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 this 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 this is just my speculation, 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 and their others.
Are saying absolutely, gain the upper hand or even like overhear 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 too, right, exactly 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 what's everything that's going on. Second, she had this other skill set, which is sort of like a different kind of bilinguality. Right, she knew 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 street, she knew what fabric was worth, what jewelry was worth, and she
knew the markets for those products. So she had 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 heart of her operation. Everyone from the judges to 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 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 efficient at this. When the Chicago Fire of eighteen seventy one occurred, looting
was rampant in Chicago. It's pandemonium was chaotic, 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 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 say, for instance, let's go with eighty seven stolen fedors. Sure, So somebody comes up eighty seven stolen
fa doors. Let's say that's like one hundred dollars worth of hats. It's like a math problem. We'll just we don't know how much of those actually go wear.
No marmandelbauce values of hat.
So she would say, okay, this is one hundred dollars. If I were actually paying for this legitimately, 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, if you make it worth a while, we'll do our best to find them.
Well, and sometimes they would do it too, is just go back to marm and like buy another hat, like an equivalent hat, and then say hey, here's your hat. Yeah, And it was like yeah, it was absolutely subterfuged because they were getting paid under the table.
So from their opinion every from their perspective, rather, everybody is winning except you know, the victims.
Right, except the person whose hats those were originally. What's interesting about marm is that even though she became very successful and could have easily moved uptown to much fancier digs, she chose to stay in Little Germany. However, her empire expanded all over the place. It moved throughout New York into all the burroughs beyond the Burrows. Eventually she became an established force in Trenton and Newark. She courted wealthy,
legitimate clients as well as Jersey criminals. And then what's what's interesting and not really surprising is that her husband Bothe died in eighteen seventy five. But because she had kind of been running everything, she was 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 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 what's really cool, cool being a relative term, is that this is not all she built.
And I love this part of the story.
So Mandelbaum allegedly founded an actual school to train up young criminals around eighteen seventy.
She's true.
She bought a building on the corner of Clinton and Grant and transformed it into kind of like an X Men school for the gifted or whatever, or a Hogwarts type situation, but instead of teaching you know, young mutants or wizards or whatever to harness their superpowers, Mandelbaum's Grand Street School started off with the finer points of pickpocketry.
Yeah, pocket tree, here we go.
I'm liking that, or things like misdirection and yeah, young men and women like which is a big deal. 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 artistry like you do. And the professors at this Grand Street School were the best criminals in the city because they were already part of Mandelbaum's
network of crooks. So students who excelled at this school were brought into Mandelbaum's inner circle.
Yeah, definitely a kind of promotion, right, sure, something new.
I still want to get my PhD in pickpocketology, I know, right, I believe excellent use of my time your phdp.
I guess, are you sure?
So?
You know, allegedly this this school was right next to the police headquarters. Again, that's allegedly so brazen.
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 although details on this details on this school are a little bit sketchy at this point, we know that it did eventually close when Mandelbaum found out that one of the students was the child of a
police official. This kid was enrolled, and picture Mandelbaumb, you know, just wiping her forehead a little bit and thinking the heat's getting close, you know. 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, some of the most gifted criminals in New York which makes them, by default, some of the most gifted criminals in the country at the time.
Okay, so we've established here that Fredrikamer Mandelbaum 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 to and you're gonna get a little bit, you're gonna get paid a little bit.
To others, she's the headmaster at this 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 marm Mandelbomb.
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 sometimes give money and horses and diamonds. And I don't know, I don't know how you guys grew.
Up, right, 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 or no, but.
She's giving them their own horses.
Yeah, diamond rusted diamond. Yes, it's crazy.
The money actually was coated with diamonds. It was just like Christmas at my house growing up.
So we've talked about some of those professors. They were at the schoo. 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 we'll go over. The first one is Sophie Lyons, and again at a very young age, she started out working with mar Mandelbaum 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 pocket book.
That's crazy.
I mean, you gotta start them early. I was very happy because I was petted and rewarded. My wretched stepmother patted my curly head, gave me a bag of candy and said I was a good girl.
Oo foreshadowing 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 to be one of her allies.
Right, But as you might have guessed from the wretched stepmother line, Lyons eventually turned on Mandelbaum and totally threw her under the bus. She actually wrote a tell all book called Why Crime Doesn't Pay Now.
Yeah. Now. Another one of the proteges who was also very close with Sophie Lyons was a woman named do we decide it was Lena?
I think it's Lena, Lena.
Lena Kleinschmidt. And 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 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 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.
So it was a.
Business model that marm was establishing. This is like what 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. It's nice and.
These are just these are just a few of the associates. There were others that are very well known in crime history today, people like Little Annie Riley Ellen Clegg or Margaret Brown who went by the street name Old Mother Hubbard Dopes.
Yes.
Then we also had a guy named Hermann Stout Stout Stout Stout Stout, and he was the only one Marm trusted. Stoud was Moundebaum's a most trusted associate and was always by her side. He literally is the one who did all 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, despite all of her precautionary measures. There's a plot twist in New York. New officials are elected and they're actually not corrupt. It's weird. It's like a Shyamala on twist, you know. Yeah, and so they said, all right, we're going to bring this
whole operation down. And the District Attorney's office was in the midst of a cold war with a 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.
Well, yeah, exactly. But the problem is a domino effect ensued with that, at least for marm in her criminal enterprise, because without the support of these politicians, she couldn't effectively the 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 worsens because she could also no longer protect her criminal network, the city's worth of little chicks. They were once grateful for her patronage, and now they began flipping, snitching, testifying against her in court. The tide, in short, was turning the da A guy named Peter Olney hires the Pinkerton Detective Agency to take Marm's operation down once and for all.
So in eighteen eighty four, members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which again has its own whole, very rich story and still exists today in a certain form, 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. And they did manage to bring her rain in New York to an end. So their
plan was super simple. This is the thing, like the criminal masterfind 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 then she was caught red handed and she went to trial. She 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 soul goodman of their dad. Right, Yeah, very breaking bad.
It was a better call How and Hummel. I would actually watch that show. And then, in this rare and sort of delightfully pearl clutching statement very out of character that she made to the public, Marm vehemently professed her innocence.
Oh oh, yes, oh this is great. Yeah.
I keep a dry good store and have for twenty years past. I buy and sell dry goods as other dry goods people do. Try goods, you say, I have never knowingly bought stolen goods, and neither did my son Julius. I have never stolen anything in.
My life, which is probably true.
I feel that these charges are brought against me in spite I have never bribed the police 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 gonna be an amazing juxtaposition to another statement she makes a little later in the episode.
Yeah short, Marm won Best Dramatic Performance in a non acting role, but.
It's really important to We haven't really 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.
I'm helping the community exactly.
She actually was kind of, Yeah, no one wants to be a housekeeper.
Right right, certainly not me. 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. She established herself with over one million dollars worth of stolen diamonds and cold hard.
Cash slight backtrack.
It's an amazing story how she actually accomplished this. She was under house arrest essentially, or she you know, posted that bail that we talked about, and she had a housekeeper that she had impersonate 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 Pickertons were surveilling her, and she went into the lawyer and then
the housekeeper came out, and so they tracked the housekeeper and then Marm made that Canadian get away, yeah.
Run for the border. So there in Canada they stayed purposely at second rate, inconspicuous places. They went to a little hotel near the Grand Trunk Railway station in Hamilton, Canada, and they just wanted to stay on the dal. They just tried to keep a low profile. But then on December ninth of eighteen eighty four, Hamilton 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, and naturally Marm attempted to bribe the police because that's that's her 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 what, 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 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.
Let's not get.
Leave.
So yeah, she's arrested again.
But luckily 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, look at me, like, I just have I assume here diamonds I don't believe.
Okay, that's fair.
Maybe there was an etching on the bottom, or maybe there were a specific weight or specific cut.
Perhaps, but this guy could not do that thing, so the Canadian cops had to let her go as well, and the New York DA didn't have jurisdicson 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 ballered the second time around.
I love the idea of the jail checkout where they just hand her up here.
Can't figure out who they belong to, so they must be yours.
Oh, she did have to pay six hundred and forty bucks.
It's like the processing.
Yeah, everybody gets a griving for sure.
So she used those diamonds and she bought herself a tiny, small, very meager, two story house along Hamilton's main Street, and by eighteen eighty six she'd opened you guessed it again, another dry goods store.
Oh heavens, I know she's really good at the dry goods and uh.
And it became a family operation, right it totally again.
Her three children joined her, Annie and Julius permanently, and then her married daughter, Sarah, stayed in Hamilton 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, we have to ask ourselves was marm fine after all these years on the street and narrow were her queen pen days behind her? We're very proud of that phrase.
Yeah, Endpen's pretty good.
It depends on what you think. We want to hear your opinion on this, on what you think about this letter that she sent to her friends in New York after she had started her dry goods 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. 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 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 and assuring you that a renewal of past favors will be greatly appreciated. I am yours faithfully, f Mandelbaum.
Can we unpack some of this kind of dated language real quick?
So I'm sorry with that. I don't even know that it's dating.
Well, okay, listen, thinly veiled letter of all times exactly.
But with my present facilities, I am able to dispose of all commodities forwarded to me with Dispatch and Security. So I'm going to move your stolen stuff. Yeah, I'm going to continue doing what I use you.
Guys, is still totally cool. I'm just doing it somewhere else.
If it was written in twenty nineteen, it would have just said I'm back at it. See you come get me duolo.
Yeah, yeah, it is 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 not get busted as you would if you went to other less reputable fencing establishment.
Exactly.
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? Now again, it's completely legit, he said sarcastically. And this guy reacted in a way that can only be described as faint surprise when he found that all of the New Canadian
stores merchandise came from New York City. That's weird. Everything was being sold at incredibly almost unbelievably low prices and there were absolutely zero identifying labels on any of the merchandise. Oh it checks out, basically. So it appeared that marm was you know, you'd think she's set up in this new place. Whatever she's doing, bribing whoever, she's got a bribe, whatever she's doing to continue this business. It seems like she was ready to start anew basically a new chapter
for her. She's going to live life out as all the stories would want us to believe, happily ever after. But unfortunately it wasn't gonna.
Work out that way for her.
This is a little bit sad here. Her daughter Annie were talking about how she was up there in Canada with her. Well, she went back to new work, as we mentioned, and while she was there she got pretty sick and she ended up developing pneumonia and then on November tenth, eighteen eighty five, her daughter Andie.
Died, and there was no way that Marm was going to not go back and be there, you know, for her daughter's burial, and whatever the cost might be, whether it was to her livelihood, to her own personal freedom, she was going to 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 Marm's former home was now owned by a Missus Marks, and Marm and her son Julius actually slipped into the house and and Marm 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 hid her in a different home across the street
while she recovered. 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, Marm insisted that it had to be a traditional Jewish service in accordance with her faith, because like you said, she was very, very religious, 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 mar 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. And she was grieving very deeply, so she probably wasn't really into the costume idea to begin with.
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, et cetera, and they all came out publicly. I mean, everybody at this point is taking a big risk, but they wanted to pay their respects to her daughter. And afterwards Marm went
back to Hamilton, Canada. She was not apprehended by police, and the Pinkertons also left her alone. And it's unclear still if the cops took pity on a grieving mother. What we do know for sure is that she did return and that there was a police officer even stationed at the funeral, 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 a point to me, this just rings true of that sentiment that has occurred, and it's occurred in the past several times, and you kind of feel it in waves. And I say this as an at Lanton, but that idea that we're all New Yorkers right of 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 it speaks to the city in itself.
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's sort of like an unspoken rule even between law enforcement and.
Criminals, it would seem extraordinarily cruel to arrest someone at their daughter's funeral.
Yeah.
Yeah, I have a theory as well that I think is pretty plausible. 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, Canada. Her shop is legit, by which I mean no one officially reported a crime that was good enough for her. She regularly attended the local synagogue and she began to use that as a
networking hub. She 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, quite the opposite. She becomes sort of a celebrity icon of her day. She's like Elvis Presley, She's like Bigfoot. Everybody has 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 a picture of her
or something, 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 Marm mandelbound story. And eventually she passed away, and at the time her obituaries, which were published, made international news, and they were not vilifying her. Really, 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 Marm, the Queen
of Fences. And in February of eighteen ninety four, when she passed away, contemporary accounts described her death as due to something called Bright's disease. Nowadays we recognize that as nephritis or kidney disease, and her body was actually returned to New York. However, there was a mystery afoot.
Well, yeah, if you're someone with the influence and intelligence of mar Mandelbauman, you wanted to get back to New York, maybe you could arrange to have it look like you died and then maybe 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 thoughts that people were having. They were wondering, was it possible that she's still alive and living in Ontario? And was she, as some sources claimed, calling herself an entirely new thing, reinventing herself as Madame Fuchs and then kind of plotting a covert return to the Lower East Side.
Yeah, but perhaps me the better question is do legends ever truly pass away? And to quote the you know, the wonderful Neil Young, it's better to burn out than to fato. You know, there you go, And that's exactly what Mandelbaum did.
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, and history at its heart is a palump sets. You know, whatever occurs or is written today will never fully erase the past.
It's so true. 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 pawnshop right there in that location. Now, a pawnshop kind of crazy, right, there's a sign of big, bold yellow sign with bright red letters that says we buy gold, silver, diamonds and any other.
That part.
But it does say we do repairs.
Though of course they do.
You can also actually find her burial site at the Union Field Cemetery at Congregation Rhodath Shalom, which is in Queen's today.
And so maybe we end on some other questions. Was Fredrika mar Mandelbaum a criminal? I mean, yes, yes, that one's 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 pat answer, you know, And thank you so much for joining.
Us, Holly, my great pleasure.
I have to ask. I know everybody's wondering if you're not familiar yet, four 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 Inhistory dot com and find all of our episodes of all time going back many years, and any of the episodes since Tracy and I have been on the show, which has been since twenty thirteen. We'll have show notes attached to them. So come and visit. We would love to meet you.
And 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 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 keep it tying. Before we wrap up entirely, though, I have a great question.
One thing I noticed when we were researching this is there's not a lot of evidence in the writings and the history of Marim Mandelbaum about her being some kind of ruthless, murderous person. Now 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, I mean, good question.
Yeah, Like, really, how do you prove that stuff unless you get caught red handed or somebody leaks down information to the authorities or.
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, right, because she was a diplomatic.
I think even the people and the situation with her daughter's funeral is even evidence that even the people who were 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 it's speculation, but like you said, Holly, everything about her proves that she didn't get her hands dirty and she would probably say that murder is bad for business when you think about it, right.
Yeah, again, thank you guys so much for having me.
Thank you.
Thanks to Warner Brothers. Please check out the kitchen if you'd like to hear more stories about similarly badass women. Right.
It comes on Friday, August night, and I'm giving 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 Gangster Museum is upstairs, by the way, if you ever in town and want to check that out.
Yes, you see us soon, Thank you, thank you.
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