Background
Phillip Musica was born on May 12, 1884, in New York City, New York, United States, the eldest of eight children (four boys and four girls) of Antonio Musica, a barber, and Assunta Mauro, both recent immigrants from Naples, Italy.
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Philip Mariano Fausto Musica
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also known as
Frank Donald Coster, William Johnson
Education
Philip attended the local public school, where he got good marks, and spent a year or two in high school. He dropped out of school at the age of 14.
Career
About 1898 Musica joined his father, a barber, in operating a small food shop. But throughout his life, Musica was obsessed by a craving for status that transcended his desire for money. He soon persuaded his father to go into the importing of fine cheeses from Italy. The new business prospered, and Musica, a young man, turned into a swell, so much so that authorities grew suspicious.
An investigation (1909) showed that he had been bribing customs inspectors to report less than the actual amounts of cheese the Musicas were importing, with a corresponding saving in duties. Philip pleaded guilty to get his father's case dismissed and was sentenced to a year, but President Taft commuted the sentence after five months.
Musica's next venture involved the importation and sale of human hair, then extensively used in ladies' coiffures. Operating at first on a legitimate basis, he soon set up an international scheme by which, using various forms of commercial voodoo - drafts, letters of credit, falsified invoices - and borrowing from one bank to pay another, he pretended to do much more business than he was really doing. His purpose was to make a stock killing for his concern in Wall Street, and, once again, to live well, which he and his family did.
Finally, two banks became suspicious about some of his drafts, and the bubble burst. Musica's mother and three of her young children were in Italy at the time, but the other six Musicas tried to flee this country from their Long Island home. They got as far as New Orleans, heading for Panama, when the police caught up with them. The fraud cost twenty-two banks a total of some $600, 000. Once again, Philip pleaded guilty to save the rest of his family. He was sent to The Tombs in New York to await sentence. Musica was so naturally nefarious that his talents as a stool pigeon were soon recognized by the district attorney's office.
Over a three-year period, still unsentenced, he served in this capacity, informing on his fellow inmates in a variety of cases. When he was released, he continued to work as an investigator for the county and state governments, his duties including, after American entry into World War I, the ferreting out of German agents and draft dodgers.
He became deeply involved in the notorious murder of Barnet Baff, a poultry racketeer, in which he tried to pin the guilt falsely on some innocent gangsters and ended up by being accused himself of subornation of perjury. He was also the key man in a fraudulent attempt to prove that William Randolph Hearst was conniving with German agents. This was the William Johnson period of Musica's life, and when the Hearst case was climaxed with the exposure of Johnson as Musica before a congressional committee, Musica disappeared and later jumped bail on his perjury subornation indictment.
Adopting the name of Costa, en route to Coster, he became a big bootlegger, first in Brooklyn and then in Mount Vernon, New York, where he used drug companies as his fronts and gave himself a University of Heidelberg medical degree. In 1926 he bought the old firm of McKesson & Robbins with his bootleg profits and transferred its operations from Brooklyn, where it had been in the doldrums, to the Bridgeport-Fairfield area. Here he continued his private bootlegging activities for a time, meanwhile slowly building up McKesson & Robbins into the country's largest distributor of wholesale drugs, climaxing his program by absorbing the nation's major wholesale houses in 1929 - 1930.
Musica then felt himself free to begin his greatest fraud. As president he pretended to buy large amounts of raw, or crude, drugs on the world market, posing as an expert, and then to sell them to international customers at a ten per cent profit. The customers he listed were real concerns, but Musica had learned earlier that, unless asked, accountants in those days made no checks either of physical inventory or of accounts receivable. Actually, nothing was ever bought or sold except on Musica's books.
His purpose was to inflate the market value of the company's stock and, incidentally, to enable him to siphon off what he wanted for his personal use, most of which he apparently lost in the stock market or paid out to black-mailers who knew all along that he was Philip Musica. To help him, Musica employed two of his brothers, who called themselves George and Robert Dietrich (George and Robert Musica), in Fairfield, and another brother, alias George Vernard (Arthur Musica), who ran a phony Brooklyn sales agency. A group of false-front Canadian warehouses and a phony clearing-house bank completed the scheme. The depression was Musica's undoing.
It led the McKesson & Robbins directors to order inventory cuts. Musica hedged as long as he could over cutting his non-existent crude drug inventories, but then the company treasurer, Julian Thompson, one of his long-time admirers, grew suspicious and did some private sleuthing. As Thompson got closer to the truth, Musica threw McKesson & Robbins into a Connecticut receivership. A superseding one, in New York, plus a total reorganization scheme, quickly followed. Finally, after a set of old fingerprints in New York City police headquarters had revealed F. Donald Coster to be Philip Musica, a former two-time swindler, Musica-Coster shot himself in the head in his Fairfield bathroom on December 16, 1938. His three brothers went to jail after pleading guilty to mail fraud and conspiracy. Accountants spent months unraveling his intricate scheme; they set his peculations at $3, 200, 000, though much was simply money that could not be traced. McKesson & Robbins, however, made an immediate recovery, in part, ironically, as a result of Musica's having built it up as a loose, autonomous collection of established drug distributing houses with excellent regional reputations.
Achievements
Personality
Phillip Musica was a short and stocky man.
Connections
In May 1926, Phillip Musica married Mrs. Carol Jenkins, the daughter of a Brooklyn policeman. They had no children.
