Word: crude
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
Alcohol and Guns. With bright-eyed, flabby-cheeked Philip Musica dead, there began to be some doubt whether anyone would find the missing $18,000,000 in McKesson & Robbins assets. That Coster's crude drug department and its agencies had masked bootlegging operations during prohibition was generally agreed; that it had later turned from alcohol to bootlegging munitions was indicated by reports 1) that rifles had been received in Spain in cases labeled milk of magnesia; 2) that a McKesson & Robbins official had asked a Bridgeport bank to collect $30,000,000 owed the company for an arms shipment...
Last month, while checking up on inventory insurance, Treasurer Thompson found that the insurance did not cover crude drug inventories. Dr. Coster told him the insurance was handled by W. W. Smith & Co., the company's Montreal agent. Mr. Thompson found several Dun & Bradstreet reports in the company files showing W. W. Smith to be a worldwide trading company with assets of between $6,000,000 and $7,000,000. Suspicious Mr. Thompson went to Dun & Bradstreet and was told the reports were forgeries. Next Mr. Thompson began checking up on W. W. Smith and on another Montreal firm...
...Smith had moved its New York office to Brooklyn, where Mr. Thompson interviewed a "funny looking customer" named Vernard who remarked: "I hear you're doing a lot of alcohol business these days." Mr. Thompson found that the crude drug department warehouses were nothing but addresses-one a stenographer's, another a mimeograph operator's. While he was wondering what to do next, the receivership was granted...
...wife, Carol, on the ground that "she is in all probability in possession of funds which . . . may be ... derived from . . . fraudulent practices." That seemed to point to a possible answer to one question in the mystery: what happened to the money? Other questions remained unanswered. What the crude drug department's real business was, nobody knew. Whether there were any real warehouses where drugs or liquor might be cached, nobody knew. How long the crude drug department had been making false inventory reports, or whether it had ever traded in legitimate drugs, nobody knew. Unless Dr. Coster would talk...