From Rogue to Reformer

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Illustration by Craig LaRotonda

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.

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