Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
Speaker 1: of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: Museums can teach us a lot about the darker side
Speaker 1: of human life, from coffins and skeletons to weapons and destruction.
Speaker 1: Museums are brimming with the ominous. But sometimes we get
Speaker 1: so lost in far off history that we don't realize
Speaker 1: there are nefarious tales behind the museums themselves. If we
Speaker 1: look a little closer, we might find stories marked with
Speaker 1: scandal and controversy. And if we look closer than that,
Speaker 1: we might uncover long forgotten curses. In twenty eleven, United
Speaker 1: States customs agents sorted through incoming packages. As they examined
Speaker 1: various items, they paused at one that was particularly heavy.
Speaker 1: The label said that it was from the United Arab
Speaker 1: Emirates and that it contained handmade clay tiles from Turkey.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, something felt a little off. Maybe it
Speaker 1: was the weight of the package, or maybe it was
Speaker 1: the recipient. The package you see was addressed to Hobby Lobby.
Speaker 1: Hobby Lobby runs a chain of craft supply stores, and
Speaker 1: while the agents thought that it might have made sense
Speaker 1: for the company to order tiles, they wouldn't have expected
Speaker 1: those tiles to be handmade from Turkey. The agents were suspicious.
Speaker 1: They shook the package like a child would rattle and
Speaker 1: unopen Christmas present, and noticed the contents felt bulkier than
Speaker 1: a set of tiles would. Suspicious, they sliced through the
Speaker 1: packaging tape and looked inside. What they saw astounded them.
Speaker 1: Over the next few days, Customs seized more packages like
Speaker 1: this one. All of them were either address to Hobby
Speaker 1: Lobby or the company's president, Stephen Green. None of the
Speaker 1: packages had the right documentation, and all of them contained
Speaker 1: things unlike any the agents had seen before. It appeared
Speaker 1: as though Green might have been smuggling. This put him
Speaker 1: under extreme scrutiny. Smuggling is no small matter, and federal
Speaker 1: investigators had to get involved. When they saw everything the
Speaker 1: Customs agents had found, they were equally shocked. Something shady
Speaker 1: was indeed going on. At the same time, Green was worried.
Speaker 1: This ordeal began right as he started planning his latest venture,
Speaker 1: a museum all about the Bible and its history, called
Speaker 1: creatively the Museum of the Bible. He needed to be
Speaker 1: able to focus on that, but the investigation was large
Speaker 1: scale and he didn't expect it to end anytime soon,
Speaker 1: and he was right about that. About six years later,
Speaker 1: the government found out that the goods weren't from Turkey
Speaker 1: at all. They were from Iraq, the country nicknamed the
Speaker 1: birthplace of the Bible. Finally, the government filed the complaint
Speaker 1: against Stephen aptly titled the Union United States of America
Speaker 1: versus approximately four hundred and fifty ancient canea formed tablets
Speaker 1: and approximately three thousand ancient clay boulet. The name said
Speaker 1: it all. Green had illegally smuggled ancient artifacts out of Iraq.
Speaker 1: He then tried to pass off those tablets, along with
Speaker 1: other items, as standard tiles, but most likely he planned
Speaker 1: to put them on display in his museum. It turned
Speaker 1: out that many of the artifacts had been missing for
Speaker 1: decades after being looted from museums and archaeological sites, and
Speaker 1: perhaps the most significant of them all was a clay
Speaker 1: tablet that was about three thousand, five hundred years old.
Speaker 1: Known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, it's inscribed with part
Speaker 1: of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is considered the oldest
Speaker 1: literary work in human history. Archaeologists uncovered the Epic of
Speaker 1: Gilgamesh in eighteen fifty three when they excavated the library
Speaker 1: of an ancient Mesopotamian king. Ironically, the king had protected
Speaker 1: those tablets with a curse on anyone who tried to
Speaker 1: steal them. Now the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet is back with
Speaker 1: its rightful owners. It's not clear how Green thought that
Speaker 1: he could get away with this, but he did own
Speaker 1: up to his mistakes, although the bad news kept coming.
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, experts analyzed five Dead Sea scrolls on
Speaker 1: display at his museum and discovered that they were actually fake.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, I think the lesson from this story
Speaker 1: is pretty clear. Don't take history for granted, and don't
Speaker 1: take history. Everyone called her mother ma or marm, but
Speaker 1: Frederica Mandelbaum was always a mother second and a business
Speaker 1: woman first. Long before she came to Manhattan, she knew
Speaker 1: how to make a buck. She was born in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven in Germany, living a working class lifestyle until
Speaker 1: she married her husband Wolf at the age of twenty one.
Speaker 1: The two of them traveled around the country treside peddling
Speaker 1: goods before emigrating to New York City in eighteen fifty.
Speaker 1: Life in New York was hard for immigrants. In Little Germany,
Speaker 1: Marm and Wolf were squeezed into stinking tenements where they
Speaker 1: had no light, air, or running water. Just like back home,
Speaker 1: Marm and Wolf were street pedlars, selling anything they could.
Speaker 1: The Mandelbomb's neighbors, however, were not interested in buying rags
Speaker 1: and broken clocks that were salvaged from the trash bins,
Speaker 1: so the Mandelbombs and their four children were barely scraping by.
Speaker 1: But Marm was a clever woman. When most people saw
Speaker 1: the financial panic of eighteen fifty seven as a disaster,
Speaker 1: she saw an opportunity. With businesses and banks failing and
Speaker 1: thousands losing their jobs, children were sent out onto the
Speaker 1: street to make money however they could. Many turned to pickpocketing, burglary,
Speaker 1: or other petty crimes to survive. When they needed to
Speaker 1: sell their ill gotten gains, they knew they could count
Speaker 1: on Marm. Marm and wolf opened a dry goods store,
Speaker 1: claiming to be simple importers. Their real business, though, was
Speaker 1: in the back room, selling pocket watches, jewelry, fine cloth, silver,
Speaker 1: even furniture that had wandered off from wealthy households. Business
Speaker 1: was good. Soon they rented an entire warehouse just to
Speaker 1: store stolen items. By all accounts, Marm's strong personality was
Speaker 1: her greatest asset in building an illegal empire. She befriended
Speaker 1: crooked cops and judges, setting up a system of bribes
Speaker 1: and favors to keep her thieves out of jail. She
Speaker 1: financed gangs of blackmailers and organized bank heists, and then
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy, she decided to pass her collected knowledge
Speaker 1: along and opened her own school for crooks. At mar
Speaker 1: Mandelbaum's Grand Street School, young men and women could learn
Speaker 1: how to pick a pocket or case a house. Subjects
Speaker 1: included misdirection, safe cracking, blackmail, and burglary, and she especially
Speaker 1: liked to train young women from the working class who
Speaker 1: had few other opportunities to make money. Her best students
Speaker 1: went on to work for her, running keep hart of
Speaker 1: her operation. As Marm Mandelbaum's empire grew, she became a
Speaker 1: fixture of New York society. Her life of crime was
Speaker 1: an open secret. Both of these things made it that
Speaker 1: much harder to stop her though. Not only did Marm
Speaker 1: have an ear of judges and politicians, but she also
Speaker 1: kept a fun handy for bailing out her loyal followers.
Speaker 1: She kept cab drivers on retainer for quick getaways, and
Speaker 1: worked with jewelers to alter stolen pieces. Tammany Hall, the
Speaker 1: political machine that controlled New York, recognized her influence and
Speaker 1: agreed to protect her so long as she delivered Jewish
Speaker 1: and working class voters, which was ironic considering she couldn't
Speaker 1: even vote herself. Marm had carefully crafted a loyal network
Speaker 1: that would never give her up. Too many influential people
Speaker 1: depended on her. Marm also took care never to commit
Speaker 1: any crimes directly. She never picked a pocket or cracked
Speaker 1: a safe. If she was found in possession of any
Speaker 1: stolen goods, she could claim innocence she didn't steal them
Speaker 1: after all, So for decades, Marm's empire was allowed to
Speaker 1: operate in the shadows, safe from the law. By the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties, Marm's criminal empire was regularly trading over five
Speaker 1: million dollars in stolen goods. City officials, corrupt or not,
Speaker 1: couldn't look away any longer, so in eighteen eighty four
Speaker 1: they hired the pin Carton Detective Agency to take her down.
Speaker 1: Silk was ultimately her achilles heel. She knowingly bought stolen
Speaker 1: silk from a pin Carton agent posing as a thief.
Speaker 1: What she did not know was that this silk was marked.
Speaker 1: When police found the marked silk in a raid on
Speaker 1: her warehouse, it was all over for Marm. She'd been
Speaker 1: caught intentionally trafficking in stolen goods and was arrested. Despite
Speaker 1: constant monitoring by the police and the Pinkertons, Marm still
Speaker 1: had some tricks up her sleeve. Late one night, after
Speaker 1: Marm had been released on bail, she slipped out of
Speaker 1: her apartment in New York. She fled to Canada carrying
Speaker 1: nearly a million dollars in cash and diamonds, and she
Speaker 1: lived out the rest of her days a free woman.
Speaker 1: When Marm Mandelbaum died in eighteen ninety four, her body
Speaker 1: was returned to New York to be buried. Attended her funeral, and,
Speaker 1: according to reports, over a dozen mourners had their pockets,
Speaker 1: picked just the way that marm would have wanted. I
Speaker 1: hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
Speaker 1: the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
Speaker 1: was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
Speaker 1: which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
Speaker 1: dot com. And until next time, stay curious.