Fredericka 'Ma' 'Mandelbaum: Jewish Supercriminal

[Karl Radl]

Fredericka 'Ma' 'Mandelbaum: Jewish Supercriminal

Not many people today have heard of Fredericka Mandelbaum; one time queen of the New York underworld. If you had been born into mid-nineteenth century America however you would have known precisely who she was. After all she was an 'aristocrat of crime' (1) and 'the most successful fence in the history of New York.' (2)

Born in the German city of Kassel on 27th February 1827 as Friederike Henriette Auguste Wiesener to a jewish merchant and his wife. (3) She moved to New York from Germany in 1850 (4) and married one Wolf Israel Mandelbaum, who was a haberdasher by profession. (5)

Having moved into her husband's shop in the Kleine Deutschland district on Manhatten's East Side and an unsuccessful stint as a costermonger (selling fruit and vegetables from a cart). (6) She turned her hand to crime and established relations with a jewish supercriminal named Moses Ehrich; who was a major receiver of stolen property (i.e. a fence) in New York. (7) It was Ehrich who bailed Mandelbaum out of gaol when she was caught in the act of receiving stolen property from several female pickpockets, including one who described herself as Mandelbaum's apprentice. (8)

It may well have been Ehrich who taught Mandelbaum the art of the criminal fence and convinced her to operate her husband's haberdashery shop (he was a very weak-willed and lazy man) (9) as a front behind which she could operate.

This turned out to be a stroke of genius as thieves could visit Mandelbaum easily and on legitimate pretexts only to be lead up to the rooms upstairs to where she conducted her criminal empire. (10) She also had the rather useful gift of being very resourceful and having a wide enough network of contacts that she could literally fence anything for a thief from pilfered diamonds to stolen horses and carriages. (11)

In time she was the most important fence in New York city and all the major criminal gangs in the city used her services to profit from the proceeds of thefts, robberies and blackmail. (12) In this way she acted as the money behind the increasingly audacious robberies that were taking place and she did indeed directly put up money for specialist criminal jobs of this variety as long as she knew the criminals and there was sufficient capital to be gained. (13)

Other criminals solicted her compnay, the two floors above Wolf Mandelbaum's haberdashery shop were sumptuously decorated (to the point that when the police raided the building in 1884 they were flabbergasted at the scale of her wealth) (14) with furnishings purloined from the homes of wealthy New Yorkers by her friends and admirers in the underworld. (15)

Direct evidence of Mandelbaum's importance in the New York underworld can be found in the fact that she maintained her rooms as a kind of Salon for the best of the criminal fraternity. (16) A Salon which, I might add, was also regularly attended by corrupt police officials and judges (17) whose services in assisting criminals getting off the hook without any significant consequences were available for a suitably large monetary consideration.

Mandelbaum even had the audacity to create and run a 'Fagin' school across from police headquarters, which taught street children the art of burglary and pick-pocketing with especially talented youngsters being given special classes in blackmail. (18)

It is little wonder that after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 (which was incidentally probably started by a fellow jew named Louis Cohn) (19) those among the criminal fraternity who engaged in the wholesale looting of the smoldering city fenced their ill-gotten gains through Mandelbaum. (20)

Estimates suggest that between 1862 and 1882 Mandelbaum fenced between 5-10 million dollars worth of stolen property for the criminal fraternity. (21) This translates to approximately 150-200 million dollars worth of property today. (22)

Thus it is little surprise that Mandelbaum maintained a firm of unscrupulous lawyers, Howe and Hummel, on a permanent retainer of 5,000 dollars per annum to defend her and her friends/minions/lackeys from harassment by the forces of law and orders (23)

Mandelbaum was only brought down when a reforming wave of new uncorruptable police and legal officials came on the scene and the District Attorney Peter B. Olney arranged a sting with the Pinkerton agency to catch Mandelbaum with stolen bolts of silk that had been deliberately marked. (24)

Mandelbaum's efforts to bribe her way out of trouble failed after she had been released on a 21,000 dollar bail-bond (25) and on the advice of her lawyers; she fled to Toronto in Canada with a bag containing a huge wad of cash. Estimates vary but the agreement is that she took somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 dollars with her. (26)

Mandelbaum died happily in Toronto a decade later a wealthy woman (only returning once surrepticiously to visit the United States to attend the funeral of her daughter) (27) and the United States was impudent in the face of the lack of an extradiction treaty with Canada. (28)

Having summarized her life and crimes it behooves me to point out that Mandelbaum looked like a stereotypical jewess. She was described as follows by one of her long-time associates:

'She was a huge woman, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, and she 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.' (29)

Indeed she was a devout synagogue-attending jewess (30) who networked with numerous jewish fellow criminals there (31), while gave large amounts of money as charitable donations to said religious community, Congregation Rodelph Sholem, as mark of her jewish piety. (32)

Thus when another associate of Mandelbaum's referred to her as being 'scheming and dishonest as the day is long.' (33) It is reasonable (because of her synagogue-based criminal networking) to extrapolate this to generally mean that it was from among the jews that a significant number of the senior figures in New York's underworld came.

This gives the lie to the typical mendacity of those writers who complain about 'anti-Semitic' descriptions of Mandelbaum, (34) but yet do not comprehend that when said writers alluded to Mandelbaum's jewishness they were in fact pointing out the (disproportionate) number of senior New York underworld figures who 'just happened' to be jewish.

Coincidences mount up don't they?

References

(1) Ben Macintyre, 2012, [1998], 'The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty', Harper Press: London, p. 25
(2) Ibid.
(3) http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-01903.html; http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship...ry.php?rec=160
(4) http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...693582/?no-ist
(5) Ibid; Macintyre, Op. Cit., pp. 25-26
(6) http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...693582/?no-ist
(7) http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-01903.html
(8) Ibid.
(9) Macintyre, Op. Cit., p. 26
(10) Ibid.
(11) Ibid, p. 28
(12) Ibid, p. 26
(13) Ibid, p. 194
(14) Ibid, p. 26
(15) Ibid.
(16) Ibid, p. 27
(17) Ibid.
(18) Ibid, p. 26
(19) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...-1871-and.html
(20) Macintyre, Op. Cit., p. 194
(21) Ibid, p. 26
(23) http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/mar...stermind/6634/
(24) Ibid; Macintyre, Op. Cit., p. 26
(25) Ibid, p. 194
(26) Ibid.
(27) Ibid; http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship...y.php?rec=160; http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-01903.html
(28) Ibid.
(29) http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship...y.php?rec=160; http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/mar...stermind/6634/
(30) Macintyre, Op. Cit., p. 25
(31) http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...693582/?no-ist
(32) http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship...ry.php?rec=160
(33) Macintyre, Op. Cit., p. 26
(34) http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...693582/?no-ist

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...um-jewish.html