A Sensational Development

Northern Advocate, 17 December 1938, Page 9

A Sensational Development

NEW YORK. December 16

A sensation was caused when the police identified F. Donald Coster, president of the huge drug and chemical firm of McKesson and Robbins, who has been arrested in connection with the alleged fraudulent withdrawal of 18.000. dollars from the concern’s assets, as Philip Musica, the central figure in the famed “human hair” swindle of 25 years ago. ’Musica was convicted in 1913 of a 2.000. dollars swindle, involving the United States Hair Company, and received a suspended sentence, after assisting the authorities in tracing the losses. The similarity of the methods of Coster and Musica caused the revelation of Coster’s identity, and recalled the incidents of one of the most amazing American swindle episodes.

. Musica was also convicted earlier in his career of swindling the Government with false weights when, with his father, he had ,a large cheese-im-porting business. He had also been convicted of subornation and perjury in-connection with a murder.

His “Who’s Who” biography, written by himself as Coster, gave him a fictitious Heidelberg Doctorate of Philosophy, and showed him to be a member of the most fashionable clubs, and one of the most prominent members of the New York financial community. Actually, Musica was the son of an immigrant Italian barber. The Federal Government is now investigating, as an angle of “Coster’s” activities, vast , illegal sales of arms to South America, and possibly to Spain, all of which were shipped by McKesson and. Robbins in boxes marked “Milk of Magnesia.”