Ben Macintyre - The Napoleon of Crime - The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty

Marm’s nickname was a consequence of her maternal attitude towards criminals of all types, for her heart was commensurate with her girth. She was an aristocrat of crime, but unlike the object of Worth’s later affections – namely the portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire – Marm Mandelbaum was no oil painting. ‘She was a huge woman, weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, and 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.’

Like Worth, Fredericka had emigrated from Germany to the United States in her youth, arriving ‘without a friendor relative’, but far from defenceless. Sophie Lyons, who adored Marm, noted that ‘her coarse, heavy features, powerful physique, and penetrating eye were sufficient protection and chaperone for anyone,’ adding unkindly (but no doubt accurately) that ‘it is not likely that anyone ever forced unwelcome attentions on this particular immigrant.’

Soon after she got off the boat, the formidable Fredericka had fixed her beady eye on one Wolfe Mandelbaum, a haberdasher who owned a three-storey building at 79 Clinton Street in the Kleine Deutschland section of Manhattan’s East Side. A weak and lazy fellow, Wolfe was ‘afflicted withchronic dyspepsia’. A few weeks of Fredericka’s voluminous but easily digestible cooking persuaded him to marry her, and ‘Mrs Mandelbaumforever afterward was the head of the house of Mandelbaum’. While still nominally a haberdasher’s, the property on Clinton Street was turned by Marm into the headquarters of one of the largest fencing operations New York has ever seen. She started by selling the ‘plunder fromhouse to house’, and in a few years had built up a vast business which ‘handled the lootand financed the operations of a majority of the great gangs of bank and store burglars’. Warehouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn were used to hide the stolen goods, while the unscrupulous lawyers Howe and Hummel were employed on an annual retainer of five thousand dollars to ensure her continued liberty, principally through bribery, whenever ‘the law madean impudent gesture in her direction’. Most of Marm’s business was fencing, but she was not above financing other crooks in their operations and was even said to have run a ‘Fagin School’ in Grand Street, not far from police headquarters, ‘where small boysand girls were taught to be expert pickpockets and sneak thieves’. A few outstanding pupils even went on to ‘post-graduate workin blackmailing and confidence schemes’.

Marm Mandelbaum is first listed in police records in 1862, and over the next two decades she is estimated to have handled between five and ten million dollars’ worth of stolen property. Criminals adored her. As the celebrated thief ‘Banjo’ Pete Emerson once observed, ‘she was schemingand dishonest as the day is long, but she could be like an angel to the worst devil so long as he played square with her’. As the fame, fortune and waistline of Mrs, soon to be the widow, Mandelbaum (Wolfe’s dyspepsia having returned with a vengeance) grew, so too did the extravagance of her lifestyle and her social ambitions. The two floors above her centre of operations ‘were furnished withan elegance unsurpassed anywhere in the city; indeed many of her most costly draperies had once adorned the homes of aristocrats, from which they had been stolen for her by grateful and kind-hearted burglars’. There Marm Mandelbaum held court as an underworld saloniste, and ‘entertained lavishlywith dances and dinners which were attended by some of the most celebrated criminals in America, and frequently by police officials and politicians who had come under the Mandelbaum influence.’

‘I shall never forgetthe atmosphere of “Mother” Mandelbaum’s place,’ Sophie Lyons recalled wistfully, for here congregated not merely burglars and swindlers, but bent judges, corrupt cops and politicians at a discount, all ready to do business. Such criminal notables as Shang Draper and ‘Western George’ came to sit at Marm’s feet, and she repaid their homage by underwriting their crimes, selling their loot and helping those who fell foul of the law. In a profession not noted for its generosity, Marm was an exception, retaining ‘an especial soft spotin her heart for female crooks’ and others who might need a helping hand up the criminal ladder. Marm was an equal opportunities employer and a firm believer that gender was no barrier to criminal success, a most enlightened view for the time and a verity of which she was herself the most substantial proof. She did not, however, brook competition, and when one particularly successful thief called ‘Black’ Lena Kleinschmidt stole a fortune, moved to Hackensack (more fashionable then than now) and began putting on airs and dinner parties, Marm was livid. She was thoroughly delighted when Black Lena was exposed as a jewel thief and jailed after one of her dinner guests noticed his hostess was wearing an emerald ring stolen from his wife’s handbag a few weeks earlier. ‘It just goesto prove,’ Marm Mandelbaum sniffed, ‘that it takes brains to be a real lady.’

At the time that Worth was desperately seeking a way into the criminal big league, Marm Mandelbaum was already a legend and arguably the most influential criminal in America. ‘The army of enemiesof society must have its general, and I believe that probably the greatest of them all was “Mother” Mandelbaum,’ observed Sophie Lyons, who had taken a shine to young Worth and probably introduced him into Marm Mandelbaum’s charmed criminal circle. Worth became a regular at the Mandelbaum soirees, and it was almost certainly under her tutelage that he made his first, disappointing foray into bank robbery. In 1866 Worth and his brother John broke into the Atlantic Transportation Company on Liberty Street in New York and spent several hours attempting to blow open the safe, before leaving in frustration as dawn broke. Lyons recounts his ‘great disgust’ at the failed heist. Nothing daunted, after a year of organizing some lesser thefts, Worth, now working alone, pulled off his first major robbery by stealing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds from an insurance company in his home town of Cambridge. Marm Mandelbaum, who could fence anything from stolen horses to carriages to diamonds, obligingly sold them on at a portion of their face value – giving Worth her customary 10 per cent and pocketing the rest. He was hardly made a rich man by the robbery, but it was a start and the minor coup effectively ‘established himas a bank burglar’ among his peers. Before long, Worth had gained a reputation as ‘a master handin the execution of robberies’, and stories of his sang-froid began to circulate in the underworld.

Worth seems to have delighted in sailing as close to the wind as he could get, and with every near-escape his contempt for the forces of law and order was confirmed and amplified. As the detectives Eldridge and Watts later recounted: ‘Once, after robbinga jewelry store in Boston, this daring burglar slipped out of the front door, only to meet a policeman face to face. Without an instant of tremor, this man of iron nerve politely saluted the officer and stepped back to re-open the door and coolly call to his confederate within: “William, be sure and fasten the door securely when you leave! I have got to catch the next car.” So, indeed, he did, after bidding the officer a pleasant good night, but he hopped off the car a few blocks beyond the store, slipped back stealthily, signalled to his confederate and both escaped with their booty.’

An avid pupil, Worth appears to have found in Marm Mandelbaum both an ally and a role model. The easy way she farmed out criminal work to others, her lavish apartments and social graces, were precisely the sort of existence he had in mind for himself. Above all, it was perhaps Marm who taught the lesson that being a ‘real gentleman’ and a complete crook were not only perfectly compatible, but thoroughly rewarding. Marm’s dinner table offered an atmosphere of illicit luxury, where superior crooks could enjoy the company of men and women of like, lawless minds.