TRADE: 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.