Hers had been a life of big scores and narrow escapes, of fleecing the gullible and outwitting authorities on two continents. A local reporter who interviewed Sophie in her latter years felt he “had been listening to the highly colored yarns … detective story writers had been telling for ages.” Just as striking as her criminal exploits was her transformation into reformer. At the Detroit House of Correction, appreciative inmates tweaked the lyrics to a popular song of the day, “Oh! What a Gal Was Mary:”
Oh! what a gal is Sophie/Oh! what a pal is she.
Sophie’s streetwise ministry never gained the scope she wished. But before joining that Great Rogues Gallery in the Sky, she was a dependable benefactor to numerous criminally minded men and women who, like her, had strayed down the wrong path and were now desperate to chart a new course.
During the 1800s, America’s growing urban centers were a breeding ground for criminals of all types, including an underclass of streeturchins whose schooling came at the knee of experienced adult malefactors. In the case of Sophie Levy, born Dec. 24, 1848, in New York City, the tutor was her own stepmother, an accomplished thief. Little Sophie was only 6 years old when she stole her first pocketbook.
“I was very happy because I was petted and rewarded,” she recalled. “My wretched stepmother patted my curly head, gave me a bag of candy, and said I was a ‘good girl.’ ”
However, when the engaging youngster failed to come home with the requisite number of pocketbooks, she was beaten; once her arm was burned as punishment. Sophie never attended a real school and didn’t learn to read or write until she was 25. By then, she had graduated from petty crime to more sophisticated ruses.
During the 1860s and ’70s, she was part of an elite inner ring of thieves and confidence women headed by Fredrika “Marm” Mandelbaum, a fat Prussian-born society matron who acted as a patron and fence to many underworld characters. Among the guests at Mandelbaum’s lavish dinner parties were Margaret Brown, an elderly Irish immigrant and incorrigible pickpocket, aka “Old Mother Hubbard;” the diminutive Christene Mayer, dubbed “Kid Glove Rosey” for her shoplifting skills; and “Black Lena” Kleinschmidt, who was sent to prison several times for larceny.
Sophie didn’t have the hard looks of those notorious women. She was “beautiful when young, and the traces never quite rubbed off,” a contemporary recalled. “Her features were regular and chiseled into a well-shaped oval face. Her eyes were an indeterminate gray-blue, and her almost-blond hair was piled on top of her head. She was a consummate actress, could be demure when it best fitted the circumstances, or she could assume the grand and lofty manner. She could weep or smile, as she chose.” She wore dresses trimmed in laces and rich embroideries.
Sophie’s beauty, charm, and intelligence made her irresistible to men. She was married four times, first and most famously to Ned Lyons. As one of the country’s most notorious bank burglars, Lyons was a good provider. However, Sophie’s “mania for stealing was so strong that, when in Ned’s company, she plied her vocation unknown to him, and would surprise him with watches, et cetera, which she had stolen,” New York Police Inspector Thomas Byrnes wrote in Professional Criminals of America, the classic compendium of 19th-century scofflaws that was published in 1886. After Sophie gave birth to their first child, Ned provided her with a farm on Long Island, “thinking her maternal instinct would restrain her monomania; yet within six months she returned to New York, placed her child out to nurse, and began her operations again, finally being detected and sentenced to Blackwell’s Island.”
Ned and Sophie would spend the next several years pulling off bank capers and putting on prison stripes. Both were sentenced to Sing Sing, with Ned breaking out first and then returning to arrange Sophie’s escape. One night, just before Christmas 1872, he and an accomplice drove a sleigh in a blizzard up to the prison entrance. They rang the bell and announced they were delivering fruit for a sick prisoner. As a guard reached for the basket, Sophie ran through the open gate and jumped into the sleigh, which then disappeared into the blinding snow.
After a productive spell in Paris, Sophie was re-arrested for picking pockets in 1876 and returned to Sing Sing, where she served out her term. Shortly after her release, she charmed a wealthy merchant out of his clothes inside a Boston hotel room — and then held on to them as she demanded a check for $10,000. Sophie and an accomplice were caught attempting to cash it, but the embarrassed victim refused to testify, allowing the blackmailers to go free. “His money was saved,” Byrnes wrote, “but his character was ruined, and the result was the breaking up of a happy home.”
Around this time, Sophie shifted her base of operations to Detroit. During the 19th century, the city drew more than its fair share of grifters, shoplifters, card cheats, bank sneaks, forgers, burglars, blackmailers, safecrackers, window smashers, hotel thieves, pickpockets, pimps, prostitutes, mystics, medicine men, and murderers. Chased out of one town after another, shadowy career criminals bearing such colorful aliases as Big Rice, Hungry Joe, Bottle Sam, Gentleman George, and The Red Headed Jew eventually tried their luck in Detroit, usually more than once. A big part of the city’s attraction was its proximity to Canada, which at the time did not have an extradition treaty with the United States. “In that era, Detroit was a haven for the polite crooks of the nation,” newspapermen Norman Beasley and George W. Stark wrote in Made in Detroit. “They enjoyed immunity as long as they behaved themselves. Thus, if the mysterious underworld grapevine brought word of an impending arrest, the flight to Canada was easily arranged. All that was needed was darkness, a rowboat, and a pair of oars.”
Sophie’s local activities included trying to blackmail a prominent Grand Rapids citizen who had sampled her charms. She would daily show up in front of his home in hopes of embarrassing him into writing her a large check to get out of his life. This fellow was a rare bird. Not only did he refuse to be intimidated, he dowsed Sophie with a garden hose and pummeled “an unfortunate theatrical agent who espoused her cause,” Byrnes wrote.
On Feb. 6, 1883, Sophie was sentenced to three years in the Detroit House of Correction for larceny. The facility, opened in 1861, sprawled over three acres at Russell and Alfred streets, near Eastern Market. It was unusual in many respects. It was progressive, self-supporting, and, though a municipal jail, housed many prisoners from other jurisdictions, including federal prisoners from the western territories. Sophie’s term overlapped with that of celebrated outlaw Belle Starr. If the two lady bandits rubbed shoulders, it probably was in the woodworking shop, where the few hundred prisoners labored 10-hour days building furniture. Inmates cranked out 310,790 chairs in Sophie’s first year alone.
The administration deemed a busy mind as important as busy hands. Thus, prisoners with sentences longer than 90 days were required to attend evening classes. “Candles are provided,” a contemporary noted, “that they may pursue their studies in their cells.” The environment was more humane and supportive than any Sophie had ever known. She was released in 1886. She would later call the House of Correction the nicest institution in which she had ever been incarcerated.
Sophie was now entering her 40s. She had spent a quarter of her life behind bars. Crime was a family affair, with her stepmother, husband, and two oldest sons in and out of prison. She had placed two daughters in Ontario convents before entering jail. Their cold receptions when she visited them stung her. But she continued her criminal ways.
Her notoriety grew on both sides of the Atlantic. She was involved in any number of scams, from “goldbricking” (passing off gold-plated lead bars as solid-gold ingots) to cheating smitten men at cards.
She also was credited with a variety of “firsts.” As a young woman, she was the first to employ the “kleptomaniac” defense, getting a charge dismissed by tearfully explaining to a New York court that her compulsive stealing was something she had no control over because of her upbringing. She was the first to use the “sliding drawer panel” trick, whereby someone lured to her room would place jewelry into a dresser drawer for safekeeping — only to discover long after Sophie had excused herself that she had previously cut a hole in the wall of the adjoining room, allowing her to slide open the panel, reach into the drawer, remove the goods, and be on her way. She may have not been the first to hollow out her heels or use false trunk bottoms to smuggle jewelry from Amsterdam to New York, but she was one of the best.
By now, Sophie had given up on Ned Lyons, a medical miracle who had been shot several different times and had his left ear chewed off while battling the law and fellow miscreants. She married two more men before snagging Billy Burke, a noted burglar.
Modern criminologists might classify Sophie as an adrenaline junkie, an adventurer who craved crime as much for the challenging rush as for the actual monetary rewards. But as she moved through her middle years, the rush slowed to a crawl. There was no grand epiphany, just a gradual realization that a life of sensation in New York, London, and Paris had brought her little true happiness. Her taste for criminal escapades diminished as she focused her energies on real estate, taking advantage of Detroit’s rapid growth to make a tidy profit. The core of her investments was composed of several rental properties on the city’s developing west side. Meanwhile, she worked on a book that she hoped would disprove the old adage, “Once a thief, always a thief,” with her own reformed life offered as proof.
In 1913, a New York publisher came out with Why Crime Does Not Pay, a cautionary tale that described the life of “the cleverest crook in the world” as one ultimately devoid of purpose or true reward. The author told reporters gathered inside her Detroit home that she was now dedicating her life to helping other criminals, especially first offenders. “You know how hard it is for a man or woman to secure permanent work after leaving a prison?” she said, citing her own experiences of being shunned upon her discharge from the House of Correction years earlier. “I am going to help some of these. They will find a friend in Sophie Lyons.”
And they did. “There was never a friendless girl who came to my grandmother and did not receive a welcome, there was never a tenant who was out of work who was asked for his rent,” claimed Sophie’s granddaughter, Esther Bower. She spent thousands of dollars on shoes, clothes, and groceries for desperate families and found them lodging. She provided holiday meals to jails and helped ex-prisoners get back on their feet. Sophie admitted her biggest project was Burke, a classic recidivist who “couldn’t keep his fingers off a dishonest dollar.” The latest stop for her “weak and easily tempted” husband was a prison in Stockholm, Sweden. Upon his release, he moved in with Sophie, who kept a close eye on him.
In this new phase of her life, Sophie moved among the same kind of shady characters she had as a crook. A lifetime of flim-flam enabled her to separate the charlatans from those who sincerely desired her help in turning straight, but her vulnerability was a worry. She made little effort to hide her wealth, freely wearing her jewelry even as she lived in an unimposing weather-beaten frame cottage at 908 23rd St., between Savoy and Lafayette. It was rumored that cash and gems were stashed inside the walls and attic. Burke’s presence was somewhat of a deterrent, but after he died in 1919, it was just Sophie and, later, a live-in housekeeper.
Inevitably, the elderly evangelist became a crime victim herself, being robbed at least twice. Once, bandits took $10,000 cash from her as she shopped in a neighborhood grocery store. The second time, she returned from a July 4th outing to find thieves had broken into her home. “Look,” she told reporters, “the fools loaded themselves up with a lot of useless bric-a-brac, but they overlooked that gold-headed umbrella in the corner there. That is very valuable. It’s solid gold, and it was given to me by my late husband, Mr. Burke.” Published comments like these seemed an open invitation to mayhem.
Despite the recognition Sophie received for her good works, some questioned her sincerity. Cynics said she found the righteous path only after she “got hers.” While she may have made honest profits in real estate, they said, the seed money had come through larcenous means. And for all her contributions to children’s charities, the truth was Sophie had been a horrible mother. Her two oldest sons were career felons; her firstborn, George, died in prison. She admitted to having had nine children overall; it appears that most, if not all, had at one time or another been placed in orphanages or convents. They were scattered among at least four countries. One daughter, Lotta, had grown up to be an opera singer in Paris. Another lived in London. Her favorite child was Carleton, a Spanish-American War veteran who, ironically, worked for the Internal Revenue Service in Seattle before dying in 1922.
The only one of Sophie’s offspring to live in Detroit was Florence, who as a young girl entrusted to nuns had changed her name in shame over her mother’s notoriety. Florence had since made a new life of her own, then fallen on hard times after her husband died. She was reduced to begging on downtown corners. Sophie once passed her impoverished daughter on the street, ignoring her completely. Still, it was a sign of Sophie’s mercurial morality that the estranged Florence would wind up a major beneficiary of her will. Guilt was a powerful engine. Years earlier, Sophie had sent a check to a down-on-her-luck actress to reimburse her for the jewelry she had stolen from her when times were flush.
Sophie’s many imperfections gave what many other reformers lacked — street cred — while her energy and unbreakable spirit endeared her to the petty criminals to whom she spoke. She would visit them, an old woman with a Bible in her gnarled, knotted hands and a black shawl thrown over her hunched shoulders, “preaching the doctrine of goodness.” She became involved with a welfare organization called the Pathfinders. Inspired by their work in prison reform, she announced plans for a home where preschool children could stay while their parents were in jail. To that end, she intended to donate land worth $35,000.
All of Sophie’s plans and good intentions came to an immediate halt on May 7, 1924. That day, the 75-year-old philanthropist was found comatose on the floor in her home. She was taken to Grace Hospital, where she died.
The circumstances surrounding her death were cloudy. The autopsy revealed death was due to a cerebral hemorrhage, but did her demise have anything to do with the trio of underworld types who had reportedly been alone with her earlier that day? According to the Detroit Free Press, “hold-up men she had befriended and tried to reform, but whose names she always kept secret, had threatened to ‘get’ her after accusing her of ‘squealing’ to the police.” Someone had heard the shout, “Quit, don’t do it.” However, other newspapers reported the visitors had been discussing legitimate real-estate business with Sophie, and that one of them had summoned help when she suddenly collapsed.
While allegations of foul play were soon dismissed, it’s possible that certain close-mouthed types in her circle of criminal acquaintances knew more than they ever let on. It was noted that three weeks earlier, three men had accosted Sophie inside a restaurant, roughing her up and throwing her under a table as they robbed the place. Some suggested the robbery was a smokescreen, that the brazen treatment of the old woman had been a “message.” One detail not in dispute was that a copy of Why Crime Does Not Pay was on the table next to her hospital bed when she died.
Sophie was cremated and her ashes placed in her son Carleton’s grave at Woodmere Cemetery. After several years of wrangling, her estate was finally settled in early 1929. Among her bequests was $1,000 for the purchase of a piano for the new House of Correction being built in Plymouth. Perhaps the repentant Queen of the Underworld imagined future generations of the misguided gathered around it, singing the praises of their big-hearted benefactor with the reworked chorus of a favorite parlor song:
Though she is gone/Love lingers on/For Sophie/Old pal of mine.
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