TRADE: Progress

A Federal grand jury last week ended three months of hearings by indicting nine men for criminal fraud in helping F. Donald Coster perpetrate his $18,000,000 swindle of McKesson & Robbins, Inc. The nine men were Coster-Musica's three brothers, two brothers-in-law, a vice president, two McKesson & Robbins directors and a shadowy character named Ben Simon who had known the inside story for 20 years and had lived on his knowledge.

Pointing out that both indicted directors and the vice president had resigned, McKesson & Robbins' Trustee William J. Wardall declared: "The indictment . . . should in no way impair the continued public confidence in the administration of McKesson & Robbins, Inc., whose business is progressing soundly towards full recovery." McKesson's net sales for February, said Trustee Wardall, were up nearly three quarters of one per cent from February 1938.

> Last week the estate of the late F. Donald Coster was appraised at $36,260 (exclusive of his McKesson stock, most of which was traded in dummy accounts under other names). Items: his $35,000 yacht Carolita; an $850 automobile $200 in personal property; $210 due his heirs from the U. S. Government for Social Security.

> Who's Who in America—whose editors bit like everyone else on F. Donald Coster, credited him with a Ph. D. from Heidelberg —announced in a promotion booklet that henceforth it would exercise such precautions as checking college degrees. F. Donald Coster's surname and his early "Girard & Co.", speculated Who's Who, might have come from one Gerard F. Coster who was mentioned in a biographical compilation of rich New Yorkers published in 1846.