Mrs Fredericka Mandelbaum came to the US from Germany with her husband Wolf but it wasn’t all that easy to make money in New York in 1850. So she decided she needed to become an entrepreneur and started selling the goods her ring of thieves would bring to her.  There were many thieves in her circles and they took a LOT of stuff including jewelry and money and cars and whatever wasn’t tied down. and Fredericka became rich. 

The Talented Mrs MandelbaumvV
The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss by Margalit Fox, 2024
Read by Saskia Maarleveld 6h 17m
Rating – 7.5 / History – True Crime

I just wasn’t all that impressed by this one. I finished it but it was just the average story of the averages mob boss who happened to be a woman – and, while I”m at it, Jewish.

“One hundred years ago, New York City was in the midst of what newspapers decried as “a Jewish crime wave.” The causes were complex, but most observers at the time laid the blame on Prohibition, which created a lucrative black market for alcohol overnight.

“’Shifty-eyed boys of the slums,’ a reporter noted in 1922, ‘suddenly began to wear $200 suits of clothes, to flash five-carat diamonds, to drive high-powered cars, to shoot craps for $100 a throw,’ Led by Arnold Rothstein (nickname: ‘the Brain’) and fueled by the phenomenal profits of the bootleg booze trade, Jews by the mid-1920s dominated the illicit industries of gambling, narcotics, labor racketeering and loan-sharking in the city.