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