"My God, Daddy!"

"McKesson & Robbins, Ltd. . . . shifts and changes are in the making . . . as indicated by many planetary influences. . . . Do not speculate." This advice to investors appeared last July in American Astrology Magazine. Last week many bewildered McKesson & Robbins investors. whose holdings had just depreciated on the market by some $35,000,000, must have been ripe for conversion to some such occult science as astrology.

Putting fiction to shame, the McKesson & Robbins story ran the gamut from gunrunning to human hair for sale, even included a trapdoor. And at the plot's centre was one of the most incredible characters that ever left fingerprints in the sands of time--the man who moved in Wall Street as Tycoon F. Donald Coster.

Cheese and Hair. In 1884, the year when Frank Donald Coster (according to his listing in Who's Who) was born in Washington, D. C., Philip Musica, an Italian immigrant boy, was playing in the streets of Manhattan's "Little Italy," where his father Antonio had a barber shop. Antonio made enough money to open a store where he sold cheese imported from Italy. Philip grew up to run the importing end of the business. He ran it so well that the Musicas prospered, moved to the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn and there became leaders of Italian society. Besides Antonio and his wife and Philip, there were then four little Musicas: Arthur, George, Grace, Louise.

In 1909 Philip Musica was convicted of bribing customs weighers to mark down the weights of his cheese invoices and was fined $5,000 and sentenced to a year in Elmira Reformatory. The "Cheese Case" made a small flurry in the newspapers the same year that Frank Donald Coster (according to Who's Who) took his Ph.D. at Heidelberg.

Philip Musica got out of Elmira in 1910 and before long founded something called the United States Hair Co. Antonio Musica knew about hair and Philip knew a few tricks, so they began dealing in human hair which went into the towering coiffure of stylish ladies. Once more the Musicas prospered. Philip became a man-about-town, lived at the Knickerbocker Hotel, wore high heels and spats to match his trousers, palled around with people like Caruso.

In 1911 Frank Donald Coster (according to Who's Who) got his M. D. from Heidelberg. That year and the next United States Hair Co. borrowed nearly $1,000,000 on invoices signed by branch offices in London, Paris, Naples; lenders were the Bank of the Manhattan Co., the Anglo-South American Trust Co., and J. & W. Seligman & Co., some 20 others. But when Philip Musica tried to borrow $370,000 on a bill of lading for $250 worth of hair, the company fell apart. There were no legitimate offices abroad. There was mighty little hair. There was a sudden shortage of Musicas.

Detectives went to the house in Bay Ridge, in the stable discovered a trap door and a cache of hair. They also found that Philip Musica had been reading a book on extradition laws, had left it open at a passage about Honduras.

In New Orleans detectives caught up with the Musicas aboard the S. S. Heridia just as it was about to cast off. Philip tried to barricade the stateroom door. Louise rushed to the rail, pulled $18,000 out of her corset, tried to throw it overboard. Grey-bearded Antonio cried: "I am disgraced!" and tried to kill himself.

Extradited to New York, Philip Musica took the whole blame, pleaded guilty to grand larceny. The rest of the Musicas dropped out of circulation. Philip stayed in the Tombs, helping the District Attorney's office with the case. "The Human Hair Mystery" got a big play in the papers of 1913, when (according to Who's Who) Frank Donald Coster was a practicing physician in New York.

Spies and Drugs. In 1916 Philip Musica got out of jail with a suspended sentence as a reward for helping to untangle his own swindle. In the meantime he had gone to work as a stool pigeon for District Attorney Charles S. Whitman. He soon was engaged in German spy investigations under the name of William Johnson. As a side line he tried to get a man named Cohen a death sentence for murdering a chicken handler, Barnet Baff. But when an indictment against him for subornation of perjury in connection with the Cohen case was handed down, William Johnson disappeared. That was in 1920.

Three years later Frank D. Coster turned up in Mount Vernon, New York, with $2,000 and started making hair tonic in a small factory he called Girard & Co. Coster's assistant was known as Philip Girard. Prohibition agents often got after Girard & Co., which used a great deal of alcohol, but they never proved anything. By 1925 Coster had $37,000 and wanted to expand.

He was introduced to Julian F. Thompson, who worked for Bond & Goodwin, Inc., New York investment house. Mr. Thompson looked over Girard & Co.'s books and found them showing such good profit that he did not bother to investigate Mr. Coster personally before arranging additional bank credit for Girard & Co. Next year he helped Coster borrow from Connecticut bankers $1,000,000 with which Coster bought the 105-year-old drug firm of McKesson & Robbins.

In 1928, after McKesson & Robbins had shown a $600,000 profit under the Coster management, a syndicate of underwriters floated a $10,000,000 stock issue. With that money Coster began putting together a nationwide distributing organization under the name of McKesson & Robbins, Inc. Frank D. Coster became F. Donald Coster and moved to Fairfield, Connecticut, to live in smug respectability. Julian Thompson quit Bond & Goodwin to become treasurer of McKesson & Robbins.

Fortnight ago McKesson & Robbins went into temporary equity receivership (TIME, Dec. 19). Last week Treasurer Thompson appeared before New York's Assistant Attorney General Ambrose V. McCall to tell how his suspicions of the company's crude drug department, which reported profits yearly but always "plowed them back" into inventory had finally forced a showdown. Mr. McCall decided to arrest Messrs. Coster and Dietrich, who ran McKesson & Robbins' mysterious crude drug department.

At his Fairfield home, where he was "ill," Mr. Coster was fingerprinted. "Testy," he grumbled at the proceedings. Twelve hours later the reason for his grousing became clear. Tipped off by a man who had once worked with Musica and recognized Coster's picture in the papers, Mr. McCall had matched Coster's fingerprints with Musica's and found them identical.

Newshawks, who had not had such a story in a coon's age, went to Brooklyn to call on a character named George Vernard, who had represented one of Coster's dummy agents and was also wanted by the police. They found a car being packed with luggage outside his door. Police arrived and arrested Mr. Vernard, who admitted that his real name was Arthur Musica. It then came out that George Dietrich was really George Musica and George's brother Robert, who also worked for McKesson & Robbins, was a fourth Musica brother, Robert, never before mentioned.

F. Donald Coster read the story of his true identity in the morning papers. As two U. S. marshals drove up to his house, he gulped a drink of whiskey, locked himself in the bathroom, poked a revolver in his ear and pulled the trigger. The marshals found him in the bathtub with his feet sticking out. His wife, for whom he had named his yacht, was pacing the floor downstairs and wailing: "My God, Daddy, why did you do it? . . ."

Alcohol and Guns. With bright-eyed, flabby-cheeked Philip Musica dead, there began to be some doubt whether anyone would find the missing $18,000,000 in McKesson & Robbins assets. That Coster's crude drug department and its agencies had masked bootlegging operations during prohibition was generally agreed; that it had later turned from alcohol to bootlegging munitions was indicated by reports 1) that rifles had been received in Spain in cases labeled milk of magnesia; 2) that a McKesson & Robbins official had asked a Bridgeport bank to collect $30,000,000 owed the company for an arms shipment. It remained uncertain whether the missing money had been stolen or whether it had never existed--possibly fictitious profits had been built up merely in order to collect commissions on non-existent sales.

At week's end the case was still full of explosive possibilities. Investigation of McKesson & Robbins' activities involved a brace of Connecticut politicians and Congressman Wright Patman. Executive Vice President Charles F. Michaels was revealed to have unloaded $118,500 worth of common stock a month before the receivership. Hollywood set to work on a Musica movie.

While rumors flew and suits piled up, Treasurer Thompson and a few others stubbornly insisted that the company would not be wrecked. In Wall Street, which remembered Richard Whitney and Ivar Kreuger, savage wit ran riot. F. Donald Coster's epitaph became: "He couldn't face the Musica."

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