Episode 214: New York's Female Mob Boss
Guest: Margalit Fox
Sunday, September 8, 2024
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This Week on History Happy Hour: Frederika Mandlebaum was a nice Jewish mother living in New York in the 1870s. She was also America’s first great organized crime boss. She planned robberies throughout the country - handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters to turn street crime into big business.
Chris and Rick explore the story of this entrepreneurial criminal mastermind with HHH Alum Margalit Fox, author of The Talented Mrs. Mandlebaum.
Margalit Fox originally trained as a cellist and a linguist before pursuing journalism. As a senior writer in The New York Times’s celebrated Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. Winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of four previous books, she joined us on HHH in 2021 to talk about her book The Confidence Men.