Book Review: ‘The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum,’ by Margalit Fox; ‘The Incorruptibles,’ by Dan Slater

“The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum” serves up a platonic ideal of the criminal mastermind. Fredericka Mandelbaum was a clever 25-year-old in 1850, when she arrived in the United States from Germany. Her husband, Wolf, worked as a peddler, and Mandelbaum began her career the same way, hawking lace door-to-door on the Lower East Side. By 30, she had established herself as a reliable “fence,” a receiver and seller of stolen goods. Converting plunder into clean cash is critical in any underground economy. But Mandelbaum had grander ambitions. She began cultivating her own army of skilled pickpockets, shoplifters, housebreakers, bank robbers, safecrackers, metalsmiths and black-market vendors, aided by scores of unscrupulous policemen, magistrates and politicians.

Soon Mandelbaum was commissioning major heists. In 1869 she pulled off what was then the largest bank burglary in American history, stealing nearly $1 million (close to $20 million today). By the mid-1880s an estimated $10 million worth of goods had passed through her hands (approximately $300 million now). In 1884, the police finally mustered enough evidence — and gumption — to arrest her. But when they released her on bail, she fled to Canada, taking nearly $1 million worth of loot with her. She died in exile, still running a small fencing operation in Ontario.

“The Incorruptibles” picks up the narrative where Fox leaves off, in the 1890s, as immigrants from Russia, Poland and Hungary began flooding into New York. Slater offers a more panoramic view of the underworld, framing his story as an epic battle between the gangsters, with their co-conspirators in law enforcement, and a small cadre of Jewish reformers — “the Incorruptibles” — who are determined to clean up the Lower East Side.

Many of these villains, like Big Jack Zelig, Louis “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg and Mother Rosie Hertz, are longtime legends. Slater gives center stage to Arnold Rothstein, the infamous dean of gangland, who was accused of fixing the 1919 World Series and inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to write “The Great Gatsby.” In the mode of Mrs. Mandelbaum, Rothstein was a criminal visionary who commanded a national network of bookmakers, bootleggers, blackmailers, drug dealers, con artists and corrupt lawmen. His murder in 1928 marked the beginning of the end for Jewish dominance of the underworld.