How quickly we’ve forgotten about New York’s Jewish underworld . . . and how lucky we are that Margalit Fox reminds us in a delightful new biography of the queen of New York’s seamy side, the German immigrant with the innocuous name Mrs. Mandelbaum who traveled to New York on steerage and worked her way up from just another peddler on the Lower East Side to become the captain of her own army of pickpockets, shoplifters, housebreakers, bank robbers, safecrackers and black-market vendors.

Even as Fredericka Mandelbaum pulled off what was then the largest bank robbery in history in 1869, she simultaneously maintained her place as a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist.

Fox’s The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss is a fascinating tour through the city’s underworld in the Gilded Age, when the line between nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs was never quite clear.

A former New York Times writer, Margalit Fox is the author of Conan Doyle for the Defense, the true story of how Sherlock Holmes’s creator reinvestigated a murder case to win freedom for a Jewish cardshark, and The Confidence Men, the tale of two British military officers who escaped from a Turkish POW camp thanks to a Ouija board.