Word: costers
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...