The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum Quotes

“Democratic machine.[*15] In decades that followed, women began to enter gang life, but most, like their male counterparts, were bruisers and not businesspeople. “Among the ladies, Gallus Mag, Sadie the Goat, Hell-Cat Maggie, Battle Annie…and Euchre Kate Burns, whom a newspaper called the ‘champion heavyweight female brick hurler’ of Hell’s Kitchen, were all specialists in election day mayhem,” a historian has written: Gallus Mag, who supported her skirt with suspenders,[*16] was a mean six-foot female who, armed with a pistol and a club, was employed as a bouncer at a dive called the Hole-in-the-Wall. Sadie the Goat, a prostitute and all around rough-and-tumble fighter, ran with the Charlton Street Gang, a group of river pirates. She won her nickname by the way she would lower her head and butt like a goat in a fight…. Hell-Cat Maggie looked like an enraged tiger. Her teeth were filed to points and over her fingers she wore sharp brass spikes. Even the bravest of men lost their poise when she charged screaming into a polling place. (In a celebrated fight, she bit off the ear of Sadie the Goat.) The huge and violent Battle Annie, “the sweetheart of Hell’s Kitchen,” was a terrifying bully. She commanded a gang of ferocious Amazons called the Battle Row Ladies Social and Athletic Club.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“Amid the new Puritanism that underlay the city's reformist fervor, Fredericka Mandelbaum, a brazen immigrant Jewish woman who unabashedly did not know her place, stood little chance.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“Combination locks were not widely adopted by American safe makers until the 1860s and ’70s. But even these were child’s play at first: The earliest, introduced by the Lillie Safe Company of Troy, New York, in 1860, had only three numbers on its dial. If a sequence of three digits was required to spring the lock, then the number of possible combinations (assuming no repetitions within the sequence) was just six. If a burglar needed ten seconds to try each combination, he could whirl through all of them in a minute.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“Before the Civil War, safecracking and bank burglary had been relatively rare: It was impractical, unwieldy and conspicuously loud for a man to plunder a mess of gold and then go clanking down the street—to say nothing of the strain on the poor horse that had to haul the getaway carriage. Paper, by contrast, was discreet, quiet and portable, and by its very nature had huge value proportional to weight.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“On the appointed day, Robinson entered Tiffany’s alone. Approaching the diamond counter, he asked to see one large stone after another. After some time, he declared that he couldn’t decide which one to buy. He’d give the matter some thought, he said, and would return later. As the clerk returned the diamonds to their case, he noticed one was missing. Robinson was asked if he would consent to being searched. Incensed at the implication, he nonetheless agreed. No stone materialized, and he was allowed to leave. Moments later, Mary Wallenstein entered and walked to the diamond counter. She asked to see a series of small stones but, like Robinson, couldn’t settle on one. She, too, told the clerk that she would return, and promptly left the store. “There was no objection made, for there was nothing missing this time,” a chronicler recounted. An hour later, Wallenstein presented Mrs. Mandelbaum with a single large diamond, worth $8,000.[*12] Marm’s scheme had worked brilliantly. Robinson had entered Tiffany’s with a discreet wad of chewing gum concealed in his mouth. At the diamond counter, he deftly secreted the gum beneath the countertop. Then, when the clerk’s back was turned, he palmed a large diamond and pressed it into the gum. Later, Wallenstein, standing precisely where he’d stood, felt beneath the counter, plucked out the stone and spirited it from the store.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“London in those years was a thieves’ paradise. There was no citywide police force: The London Metropolitan Police Department would be established only in 1829. The patchwork of local watchmen, marshals and constables that patrolled the city in Wild’s day proved eminently bribable: Thieves often sold their plunder directly to them, at an attractive discount, which kept them safe from the hangman’s noose. Capitalizing on prevailing conditions, Wild began to gather London’s foremost thieves around him. He set up shop in the parlor of a London tavern, where he presided over the boldly named “Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property.” Suppose an English gentleman awoke one morning to find his gold watch and silver snuff box missing. Calling on Wild in his “office,” he would be informed that Wild “had an idea where the goods might be found, or at least who it was that had possession of them,” and that they could soon be returned to their rightful owner—for a fee. “If the person questioned Wild’s integrity, or asked how he should know so much about the theft, Wild answered ‘that it was meerly Providential; being, by meer Accident, at a Tavern, or at a Friend’s House in the Neighbourhood, [he] heard that such a Gentleman had his House broken open, and such and such Goods Stolen, and the like.’ ” Needless to say, Wild knew exactly where the goods were, because they’d been stolen by one of his own employees. What he’d done, in short, was to perfect a kind of property-kidnapping for ransom. The system proved so effective that he did not hesitate to target some of the country’s wealthiest men and women.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“(“I can hire one half the working class”—i.e., the Pinkertons—“to kill the other half,” the financier and railroad magnate Jay Gould bragged.)[*”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss