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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.