
The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum
The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss
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Narrated by:
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Saskia Maarleveld
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By:
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Margalit Fox
About this listen
America’s first great organized-crime lord was a lady—a nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum.
“A tour de force . . . With a pickpocket’s finesse, Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York.”—Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood
A PARADE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?
In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime,” she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country.
But Mrs. Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful crook: She was a business visionary—one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business.
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.
©2024 Margalit Fox (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Exuberant . . . fast-paced. The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum’ serves up a platonic ideal of the criminal mastermind.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A vivid portrait of Mandelbaum in this rich recounting of her life and times. . . relishes Mandelbaum’s chutzpah while describing in forensic detail how an early American crime boss grew her business. A portrait of a woman who, before the term had even been invented, smashed through glass ceilings to get what she wanted.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Before Al Capone, there was Fredericka Mandelbaum . . . a scrupulously researched narrative.”—The New York Times
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Overall
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In When Women Ran Fifth Avenue, journalist Julie Satow draws back the curtain on three visionaries who took great risks, forging new paths for the women who followed in their footsteps. This stylish account, rich with personal drama and trade secrets, captures the department store in all its glitz, decadence, and fun, and showcases the women who made that beautifully curated world go round.
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Read like a text book for fashion students.
- By JACKI on 06-24-24
By: Julie Satow
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A Gentleman and a Thief
- The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue
- By: Dean Jobb
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Catch Me If You Can meets The Great Gatsby meets the hit Netflix series Lupin in this captivating true-crime caper. A skilled con artist and perhaps one of the most charming, audacious burglars in history, Arthur Barry slipped in and out of the bedrooms of New York’s wealthiest residents, even as his victims slept only inches away. He befriended luminaries such as the Prince of Wales and Harry Houdini and became a folk hero, touted in the press as “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived” and an “Aristocrat of Crime.”
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A great story told at a very leisurely pace
- By appreciative reader on 09-06-24
By: Dean Jobb
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The Riddle of the Labyrinth
- The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
- By: Margalit Fox
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records.
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Discovery and Translation of Linear B Script
- By Sires on 01-11-14
By: Margalit Fox
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Diamonds and Deadlines
- A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age
- By: Betsy Prioleau
- Narrated by: Beth Hicks
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For twenty years she ran the country’s largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an all-male industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity and tastemaker in the process. Diamonds and Deadlines reveals the unknown, sensational life of the brilliant and brazen “empress of journalism”.
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Wonderful biography of forgotten gilded age publishing icon
- By Amazon Customer on 03-24-24
By: Betsy Prioleau
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Master Slave Husband Wife
- An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
- By: Ilyon Woo
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, Leon Nixon
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.
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Necessary story well told!
- By Marc W Rhoades on 01-19-23
By: Ilyon Woo
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A Murder in Hollywood
- The Untold Story of Tinseltown's Most Shocking Crime
- By: Casey Sherman
- Narrated by: Casey Sherman
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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From the outside, Hollywood starlet Lana Turner seemed to have it all—a thriving film career, a beautiful daughter, and the kind of fame and fortune that most people could only dream of. But when the famous femme fatale began dating mobster Johnny Stompanato, thug for the infamous west coast mob boss Mickey Cohen, her personal life became violent and unpredictable. Lana's teenage daughter, Cheryl, watched her beloved mother's life deteriorate as Stompanato's intense jealousy took over.
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Not what you think…
- By christopher j rago on 02-26-24
By: Casey Sherman
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The Bishop and the Butterfly
- Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
- By: Michael Wolraich
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else—a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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Annoying narration of a good story
- By Bev on 04-01-24
By: Michael Wolraich
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Empresses of Seventh Avenue
- World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion
- By: Nancy MacDonell
- Narrated by: Gail Shalan
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Empresses of Seventh Avenue will tell the story of how these extraordinary women put American fashion on the world stage and created the template for modern style—and how the nearly $500 billion American fashion industry, the largest in the world, could not have accrued its power and wealth without their farsightedness and determination.
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So boring
- By BVJ on 02-10-25
By: Nancy MacDonell
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The Cure for Women
- Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever
- By: Lydia Reeder
- Narrated by: Sara Sheckells
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Full of larger than life characters and cinematically written, The Cure for Women documents the birth of a sexist science still haunting us today as the fight for control of women’s bodies and lives continues.
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Refreshingly an accurate and elegant read
- By TpK on 05-08-25
By: Lydia Reeder
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The Black Angels
- The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis
- By: Maria Smilios
- Narrated by: Gina Daniels
- Length: 12 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed “the pest house” where “no one left alive.”
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Tons of amazing medical American/black history that easily reads like your favorite novel.
- By Infowiz on 01-31-24
By: Maria Smilios
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Oscar Wilde
- A Life
- By: Matthew Sturgis
- Narrated by: John Pirkis
- Length: 34 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The fullest, most textural, most accurate - most human - account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life - based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life.
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Wilde Made Tame
- By Secutor on 11-21-21
By: Matthew Sturgis
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The Crazies
- The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West
- By: Amy Gamerman
- Narrated by: Anna Sale
- Length: 17 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Most locals in Big Timber, Montana learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it. Like his pioneer ancestors who staked their claims in the Treasure State, he believed in his right to make a living off the land—and its newest precious resource, million-dollar wind. Trouble was, Jarrett’s neighbors were some of the wealthiest and most influential men in America, trophy ranchers who’d come West to enjoy magnificent mountain views, not stare at 500-foot wind turbines.
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A glimpse behind the curtain of wealth and outside interests in Montana
- By Karen D Nard on 04-21-25
By: Amy Gamerman
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The Glassmaker
- A Novel
- By: Tracy Chevalier
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.
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Fascinating "time-travel" concept
- By Sollidrampen on 07-23-24
By: Tracy Chevalier
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The Friday Afternoon Club
- A Family Memoir
- By: Griffin Dunne
- Narrated by: Griffin Dunne
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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At nine, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion and uncle John Gregory Dunne’s legendary LA launch party for Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At sixteen, he got kicked out of boarding school, ending his institutional education for good.
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Griffiths phrasing made it easy to listen and absorb.
- By Nancie Keay on 06-17-24
By: Griffin Dunne
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Kingmaker
- Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue
- By: Sonia Purnell
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 16 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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When Pamela Churchill Harriman died in 1997, the obituaries that followed were predictably scathing–and many were downright sexist. Written off as a mere courtesan and social climber, her true legacy was overshadowed by a glamorous social life and her infamous erotic adventures. Much of what she did behind the scenes–on both sides of the Atlantic–remained invisible and secret. That is, until now: with a wealth of fresh research, interviews and newly discovered sources, Sonia Purnell unveils for the first time the full, spectacular story of how she left an indelible mark on the world today.
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Pamela reigns! But.....
- By Lucy Johnson on 11-30-24
By: Sonia Purnell
Excellent cultural history
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One of the most famous fences of the 19th and early 20th century!
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That she worked so well in a man’s world
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They familial name, Mandelbaum
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History
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Great story
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I kept reminding myself. I never learned this in school, ever. Definitely a book worth a listen!
An astounding an American woman
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Fabulous read. I loved this character.
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An unimpressive biography
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Boring
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