The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
by participation in, New York’s seamy side, wrote in his memoirs: ‘Such operations as bank burglary were held in much higher esteem during the ‘sixties and ‘seventies than at present, and the most distinguished members of the craft were known by sight and pointed out to strangers.’ Allan Pinkerton, the father of Worth’s future adversary, in his 1873 book The Bankers, The Vault and The Burglars, observed that ‘instead of the clumsy, awkward, ill-looking rogue of former days, we now have the intelligent, scientific and calculating burglar, who is expert in the uses of tools, and a gentleman in appearance, who prides himself upon always leaving a “neat job” behind.’
Worth’s friend Eddie Guerin argued that ‘a successful bank sneak requires to be well-dressed and to possess a gentlemanly appearance.’ Sophie Lyons concurred, noting also that a certain amount of professional snobbery pertained in the upper ranks of crime. ‘It was hard for a young man to get a foothold with an organised party of bank robbers, for the more experienced men were reluctant to risk their chances of success by taking on a beginner.’
Without success Worth sought acceptance in such established bank-robbing cliques as that of George Leonidas Leslie, better known as ‘Western George’, which was responsible for a large percentage of the bank heists carried out in New York between the end of the war and 1884. Lyons first encountered Worth when he was ‘itching to get into bank work’, specifically through her husband, Ned Lyons, a noted burglar. But the veteran crooks turned down all advances from the aspiring newcomer.
Worth needed a patron, someone to provide him with an entree to the criminal elite. He found one in the mountainous figure of ‘Marm’ Mandelbaum.
CONTEMPORARY WRITERS reached for superlatives when describing Fredericka, better known as ‘Mother’ or ‘Marm’ Mandelbaum: ‘The greatest crime promoter of modern times’, the ‘most successful fence in the history of New York’ and the individual who ‘first put crime in America on a syndicated basis’ are just a few of the plaudits she garnered in a long career of unbroken dishonesty.
Marm’s nickname was a consequence of her maternal attitude towards criminals of all types, for her heart was commensurate with her girth. She was an aristocrat of crime, but unlike the object of Worth’s later affections – namely the portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire – Marm Mandelbaum was no oil painting. ‘She was a huge woman, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, and had a sharply curved mouth and extraordinarily fat cheeks, above which were small black eyes, heavy black brows and a high sloping forehead, and a mass of tightly rolled black hair which was generally surmounted by a tiny black bonnet with drooping feathers.’
Like Worth, Fredericka had emigrated from Germany to the United States in her youth, arriving ‘without a friend or relative’, but far from defenceless. Sophie Lyons, who adored Marm, noted that ‘her coarse, heavy features, powerful physique, and penetrating eye were sufficient protection and chaperone for anyone,’ adding unkindly (but no doubt accurately) that ‘it is not likely that anyone ever forced unwelcome attentions on this particular immigrant.’
Soon after she got off the boat, the formidable Fredericka had fixed her beady eye on one Wolfe Mandelbaum, a haberdasher who owned a three-storey building at 79 Clinton Street in the Kleine Deutschland section of Manhattan’s East Side. A weak and lazy fellow, Wolfe was ‘afflicted with chronic dyspepsia’. A few weeks of Fredericka’s voluminous but easily digestible cooking persuaded him to marry her, and ‘Mrs Mandelbaum forever afterward was the head of the house of Mandelbaum’. While still nominally a haberdasher’s, the property on Clinton Street was turned by Marm into the headquarters of one of the largest fencing operations New York has ever seen. She started by selling the ‘plunder from house to house’, and in a few years had built up a vast business which ‘handled the loot and financed the operations of a majority of the great gangs of bank and store burglars’. Warehouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn were used to hide the stolen goods, while the unscrupulous lawyers Howe and Hummel were employed on an annual retainer of five thousand dollars to ensure her continued liberty, principally through bribery, whenever ‘the law made an impudent gesture in her direction’. Most of Marm’s business was fencing, but she was not above financing other crooks in their operations and was even said to have run a ‘Fagin School’ in Grand Street, not far from police headquarters, ‘where small boys and girls were taught to be expert pickpockets and sneak thieves’. A few outstanding pupils even went on to ‘post-graduate work in blackmailing and confidence schemes’.
Marm Mandelbaum is first listed in police records in 1862, and over the next two decades she is estimated to have handled between five and ten million dollars’ worth of stolen property. Criminals adored her. As the celebrated thief ‘Banjo’ Pete Emerson once observed, ‘she was scheming and dishonest as the day is long, but she could be like an angel to the worst devil so long as he played square with her’. As the fame, fortune and waistline of Mrs, soon to be the widow, Mandelbaum (Wolfe’s dyspepsia having returned with a vengeance) grew, so too did the extravagance of her lifestyle and her social ambitions. The two floors above her centre of operations ‘were furnished with an elegance unsurpassed anywhere in the city; indeed many of her most costly draperies had once adorned the homes of aristocrats, from which they had been stolen for her by grateful and kind-hearted burglars’. There Marm Mandelbaum held court as an underworld saloniste, and ‘entertained lavishly with dances and dinners which were attended by some of the most celebrated criminals in America, and frequently by police officials and politicians who had come under the Mandelbaum influence.’
‘I shall never forget the atmosphere of “Mother” Mandelbaum’s place,’ Sophie Lyons recalled wistfully, for here congregated not merely burglars and swindlers, but bent judges, corrupt cops and politicians at a discount, all ready to do business. Such criminal notables as Shang Draper and ‘Western George’ came to sit at Marm’s feet, and she repaid their homage by underwriting their crimes, selling their loot and helping those who fell foul of the law. In a profession not noted for its generosity, Marm was an exception, retaining ‘an especial soft spot in her heart for female crooks’ and others who might need a helping hand up the criminal ladder. Marm was an equal opportunities employer and a firm believer that gender was no barrier to criminal success, a most enlightened view for the time and a verity of which she was herself the most substantial proof. She did not, however, brook competition, and when one particularly successful thief called ‘Black’ Lena Kleinschmidt stole a fortune, moved to Hackensack (more fashionable then than now) and began putting on airs and dinner parties, Marm was livid. She was thoroughly delighted when Black Lena