Willgerodt reaction is now commonly named Willgerodt-Kindler (WK) reaction." Recently, sulfur has been substituted by selenium. 5 Whde the WK reaction is cited in most organic textbooks? and is of considerable synthetic interest, it has suffered from a rather poor reputation due to low yields and complex reaction mixtures generally encountered with multifunctional substrates.'It is noteworthy that the yield drops sharply when the number of ...