Meet ‘The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum:’ America’s first gangster

They were branded the “Jewish Mafia,” or the “Kosher Nostra” — four violent street-tough Jews with lots of criminal smarts who dominated tabloid headlines and the wanted posters that festooned the bulletin boards of US post offices across the land:

Among them was Meyer Lansky, dubbed the kingpin of organized crime in America; Arnold Rothstein, known as “The Brain,” considered the pioneer executive of the nation’s crime wave in the Roaring Twenties; Benjamin Siegel, known as “Bugsy,” handsome, hot-headed and ruthless with Hollywood good looks, and then there was Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called “he most dangerous criminal in the United States.

But decades before their crimes made them legends, there was Fredericka Mandelbaum, a portly German immigrant mother of four — the ultimate Jewish mother who a Drew Barrymore of the era — the mid to late 1800s — might have lovingly called “Mamala.” Except for her looks. 

At a mannish 6 feet tall, apple-cheeked and of Falstaffian girth, she weighed between 250 and 300 pounds and resembled what one reporter viewed as “the product of a congenial liaison between a dumpling and a mountain.” 

She dressed in voluminous black, brown or dark blue silk gowns, topped with a sealskin cape, a bonnet of ostrich feathers and covered, eventually, in diamonds estimated at a worth of more than $40,000 — earrings, necklaces, brooches, bracelets and rings — worth some $1.3 million today.

Before long, Mandelbaum, who started in New York’s immigrant alleys on the Lower East Side as a street peddler, became America’s first major organized crime boss.