Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [795]
Not all the opportunities afforded by the city were on this munificent scale, but there was as much work available for the minnows of crime as for the whales. Crowded streetcars became traveling meccas for the hordes of pickpockets (and, on occasion, the hijacking of an entire vehicle). Packed department stores turned into stamping grounds for light-fingered ladies. Commercial sex offered great opportunities for panel game entrepreneurs, some of whom, like Shang Draper, were highly organized: he had thirty salaried women working out of his saloon on Sixth Avenue between 29th and 30th streets enticing drunks to a house with sliding panels behind which confederates waited to relieve preoccupied marks of their possessions. Even old-fashioned muggers got up-to-date by purchasing knockout drops—chloral hydrate or morphine—from one of Diamond Charley’s traveling salesmen; a teaspoon’s worth in the victim’s beer saved time and muscle.
Professionals avoided violence as much as possible; of the forty-eight murders in 1868, almost all were committed by “youthful ruffians.” The best ones avoided drink and drugs, kept themselves in shape, and exchanged tips and tricks only with one another. Slowly a professional community emerged among the perhaps twenty-five hundred full-time criminals. Certain concert saloons became well-known hangouts, like Paddy Quinn’s Island No. 10, on Catherine Street just off the Bowery, or Bill Varley’s joint, in the basement of a Bowery hardware store.
This community had a distinctive hierarchy of criminal careers, ranked by skill and daring. Robbery, the premier form, had its own subspecialties: bank robbers ranked from bank-sneaks of the first class at the top down through damper-sneaks, safe-blowers, safe-bursters, and, the lowest grade, safe-breakers. Somewhere near the bottom in the community’s estimation dwelt the ghouls—grave robbers like the ones who snatched A. T. Stewart’s remains shortly after they were buried in St. Mark’s, and demanded a ransom of twenty thousand dollars from his widow, which the hard-nosed lady took a good two years to pay. The Vanderbilts took Stewart’s postmortem dilemma very much to heart and had Richard Morris Hunt design them an impregnable mausoleum on Staten Island.
Fencing too got professionalized in this period. Pawnbrokers and junk dealers still operated, but the smart thieves and prominent pickpockets like William Burke (better known for his later western exploits as Billy the Kid) patronized sophisticated operators like Rosenburg, who fronted as a respectable jeweler on the lower Bowery, or Traveling Mike, who frequented the Thieves Exchange (near Broadway and Houston).
The state-of-the-art practitioner, however, the queen of fences, was unquestionably Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum. This 250-pound, black-bonneted matron got her start after the war running teams of young pickpockets, supplying them bail if arrested and fencing their harvest from a clapboarded wing behind her haberdashery store at Clinton Street on the corner of Rivington. In time Marm concentrated on financing and directing operations of gangs of bank and store burglars, though, being a proto-feminist in her own way, she always found time to help female pickpockets, blackmailers, and con women get their careers off the ground. She particularly enjoyed throwing fancy dinner parties, á la Mrs. Astor, for members of the criminal fraternity.
One reason Marm Mandelbaum could dine in relative repose, despite the perils of her profession, was that she had the law firm of Howe and Hummel on an annual retainer of five thousand