ABSTRACT
F. Donald Coster, M.D., Ph.D. was the president and largest shareholder of McKesson & Robbins, a 100-year-old pharmaceutical company with annual revenues exceeding $170 million. The 1937 edition of Who’s Who in America listed Coster as a graduate of Heidelberg University, a director of the Bridgeport City Trust Company, and a member of the exclusive Black Rock Yacht Club. Philip Musica was the son of poor Italian immigrants. He grew up in a
crowded tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and quit school at age 14 to work in his family’s small grocery. Musica was an alumnus of the New York State Reformatory at Elmira and The Tombs prison in New York City, having been convicted of fraud twice before his thirtieth birthday. On December 15, 1938, federal agents learned that F. Donald Coster and
Philip Musica were the same man. Marshals arrived at Coster’s mansion early the next morning to take him into custody on suspicion of committing fraud at McKesson & Robbins. But Musica would not be convicted a third time. Like Ivar Kreuger six years earlier, Coster picked up a revolver and took his own life.
