A compelling and evocative biography of the redoubtable Mrs. Mandelbaum
If you thought organized crime in the United States had its roots in the Prohibition era, think again. As Margalit Fox demonstrates in this compelling and evocative biography, its seeds were sown half a century earlier, when a resourceful, daring and ingenious woman enjoyed a long and successful career as a forerunner of the familiar twentieth-century “Godfather” figure. By the mid-1880s, she was the boss of America’s most notorious crime syndicate, presiding over a multimillion-dollar criminal empire which stretched across the country and even into Mexico and Europe. Born in Kassel, Germany in 1825, Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum came to America in 1850, part of the mass exodus of European Jews in that period.
