Bizi chatter in a soft light flickering from a golden candelabra

spilled from the windows of a second floor dining room in a building located at

the corner of Clinton and Rivington on New York's lower east side.

In a neighborhood otherwise characterized by cramped tenements and squalid poverty,

within this room a team of servants hover, circling a long mahogany table filling and refilling glasses with German wine

as guests clad in silk, diamonds and feather boas tuck into a dinner of lamb and mint jelly.

As their fineries indicate, these gilded age invitees represent the upper

echelons of New York wealth, captains of business and industry. Others at the table though are of a different but no less

powerful circle, the well-heeled lords of the criminal underworld. And presiding

over the occasion, seated at the head of the table and wearing a shrewd smile.

Is the Queen Penn herself, the matriarch of organized crime, Mrs.

Frederica Mandelbaum.

But you can call her Ma.

Everyone else does. And then. It is American History Hit and hello welcome back to our regulars and

greetings if this is your first time listening. Hope you like what you hear.

One fascinating and ironic aspect of American

like, frequently the subject of a throwback nostalgia, even romanticism, is the storied industry

of organized crime. It's of course the stuff of epic movies and television dating all the way back to the

black and white noir pictures to Bogart Robinson Cagni but that cinema

mythology is based on a singular understanding of organized crime as the result of immigrant egos, arriving on our shores to make their mark in the land of freedom and opportunity, using machine guns and brass knuckles to purvey protection, sex work, and illegal booze.

But there was a woman who comes before all this, whose life story offers up an alternative

career in crime, one that was very profitable, far-reaching, and quite organized.

...