In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. "Marm" Mandelbaum had made the ascent from tenement poverty to vast wealth by becoming the country's most notorious "fence"--a receiver of stolen goods--and a criminal mastermind. Called "the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime," she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid portrait of Gilded Age New York--a city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and "legitimate" commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies America's cherished rags-to-riches narrative while simultaneously upending it entirely.
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