MAMA TRIED
Fredericka Mandelbaum came to America in 1850 with little more than the clothes she was wearing. She moved into a Manhattan slum, worked hard, invested shrewdly, and, earning the nickname “Mother,” built a million-dollar business. Mother Mandelbaum’s rags-to-riches story would be truly inspirational except for the fact that she made her millions buying and selling stolen goods.
Mother Mandelbaum was, in underworld parlance, a fence—“the smartest fence in America,” according to the Brooklyn Eagle. The New York Times went further, in 1884 labeling Mandelbaum “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York.”
Mandelbaum was
