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In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?

In the intervening years, \u201cMarm\u201d Mandelbaum had become the country\u2019s most notorious \u201cfence\u201d\u2014a receiver of stolen goods\u2014and a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called \u201cthe nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime,\u201d she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country.

But Mandelbaum wasn\u2019t just a successful crook: She was a business visionary\u2014one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chains\u2014turning theft into a viable, scalable\xa0business.

To discuss this story is today\u2019s guest, Margalit Fox, author of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. We look at a colorful fixture of Gilded Age New York\u2014a city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and \u201clegitimate\u201d commerce.