Boston, April 1878.

A suite at the Parker House.

The old lawyer came in smiling.

He left three hours later without his coat, without his pocketbook, and without a thousand dollars,

and he did not go to the police because the woman who had just

robbed him owned the thing he valued more than the money. She owned his reputation. Her name on the

register that week was something other than Sophie Lyons. Over the course of her career, she went by

maybe a dozen names, but the woman behind the names was Sophie Levy, daughter of a New York

shoplifter, pupil of the city's most efficient fence, and by the reckoning of the men who

policed her, the most accomplished female criminal America had yet produced. She was 29 years old in that

Boston hotel room. She had already done two stretches in Sing

Sing, walked out of one, crossed into Canada twice, and married her way through the upper ranks

of the Northeast's bank burglar aristocracy, and the most profitable work of her life still

lay ahead of her. She was not a bad woman because her childhood was hard.

Her childhood explains her.

It does not excuse her.

What she became, she chose.

And what she chose was to make her living by finding the worst thing in strangers

and charging them for it.

She was born on Christmas Eve, 1848, on the Lower East

Side to Jewish immigrants whose trade was theft. Her mother, Sophia, shoplifted for a living.

Her father was mostly in jail. The household language was the argod of the fence and the flash house,

...