High Finance: Hadacol Hangover

Time magazine's contemporaneous report on the October 1951 collapse of the LeBlanc Corporation, filed weeks after Dudley LeBlanc sold his ownership interest in Hadacol to a group of Manhattan investors. Fetched directly at the cited URL (Time's own archive). Reports: the buyers had paid LeBlanc $250,000 down for the company against a price previously announced at $1,100,000, a figure that diverges sharply from the $8.2 million and $8 million figures the case's other two sources separately report; the buyers found a $1.8 million second-quarter loss where LeBlanc had previously reported a $3.6 million profit over the prior 15 months; accuses LeBlanc of concealing roughly $2 million in unpaid bills and $656,151 in federal tax debt, and of listing $2,272,000 in "accounts receivable" that largely did not exist; states the Federal Trade Commission had challenged Hadacol's marketing claims as "false, misleading and deceptive"; describes Hadacol itself as comparable to a vitamin-enriched cocktail; and reports a federal court appointed a trustee for the purchasers' financial reorganization. This is the case's primary contemporaneous professional/press source for the disconfirmation record, satisfying the Historical Evidence Proportionality standard (a contemporaneous national-magazine assessment of the marketed claims and the company's collapse).