Marm Mandelbaum

Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum
Born	Fredericka Goldman 1818 Prussia
Died	February 1894 (aged 76) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Other names	Fredericka Mandlebaum
Occupation	Criminal
Known for	Criminal fence and underworld figure in New York City during the mid-to late 19th century.
Home town	Manhattan, New York, United States
Spouse(s)	Wolfe Mandelbaum

Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum (1818 – February 1894) was a New York City entrepreneur and operated as a criminal fence to many of the street gangs and criminals of the city's underworld, handling between $1–5 million in stolen goods between 1862 until 1884. Like her principal rival John D. Grady and the Grady Gang, she also became a patron to the criminal elements of the city and was involved in financing and organizing numerous burglaries and other criminal operations throughout the post-American Civil War era.

Mandelbaum was born Friederike Weisne in Kassel, a city in modern-day Germany. Not much is known of her early life, other than that her family was Jewish. She married Wolfe Mandelbaum in 1848; they worked as itinerant peddlers in Germany before emigrating to the United States in 1850, likely because of limited economic opportunity for Jews.

When the family arrived in New York, they began a series of small businesses, taking in goods collected by scavengers and reselling them. The pair purchased a dry goods store on Clinton Street, but by 1854, the business was operating as a front for the Mandelbaums' criminal operations (she would later need to store goods in two large warehouses in the city). Mandelbaum began financing thieves and burglars and was involved in planning some of the biggest thefts in the city's history, including the Manhattan Savings Bank Robbery. Expanding her operations, she controlled several gangs of blackmailers and confidence men as well as a school to recruit and teach younger criminals how to pickpocket. She was also a top competitor to the Grady Gang.

During this time, she had become one of New York's most prominent hostesses of New York's high society, as well as the underworld, regularly associating with some of the most well-known criminals of the day including Queen Liz, Big Mary, "Black" Lena Kleinschmidt, Adam Worth, Sophie Lyons, and George Leonidas Leslie as well as judges and police officials.

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