Moon Shot

All it took to lure Florida fruit distributor and owner of illicit moon rock Alan Rosen to Tuna’s in North Miami Beach in 1998 was a fake classified ad in USA Today, an alias worthy of a Godfather movie, a trusty sidekick, and a cool $5 million.

Rosen claimed he bought the lunar rock and corresponding plaque—a goodwill gift from the Nixon administration to Honduras in 1973 that was lost after a 1975 military coup—from a Hondruran colonel for $50,000, with the final handoff taking place at a South Florida Denny’s in 1996. Two years later, he sought to flip the chunk of the moon for a massive profit. 

That’s when he saw the ad in USA Today, an idea cooked up by then-senior special agent with NASA’s Office of Inspector General, Joseph Gutheinz—aka Tony Coriasso.

Gutheinz had long been on the hunt for Earthbound pieces of the moon—even the fake stuff. The Nixon administration had gifted approximately 383 rocks to countries and states around the world; many became unaccounted for in the decades after. He hoped his USA Today ad would help him in his quest to track down con men who were swindling fake moon rocks; he didn’t expect to find the real thing so fast.

Gutheinz tagged Bob Cregger, an inspector with the United States Postal Inspection Service—which partnered with NASA on the sting—to pose as John Marta, proprietor of the fictional John’s Estate Sales. 

Together, the two arrived at Tuna’s to reel in their big fish.

“Rosen says, ‘Look, I half expect some guys in military jumpsuits to come around the corner firing AK-47s to get back the moon rock,’” Gutheinz recalls, laughing. “At that precise moment, a waiter drops a pan. I reached for my Glock, which is behind my jacket in my belt. Cregger is going for his in his fanny pack. We almost blew the whole thing.”

The men regained their composure, but Rosen was suspicious. “He said, ‘I think this is a sting operation,’” Gutheinz says. “‘I need five names of customers of John’s Estate Sales and their phone numbers right now. And $5 million.’”

The fake customers were easy—a few U.S. Customs agents played their part. The $5 million? Not so much.

“We contact Postal Inspection, they don’t have it. NASA, the FBI—who we didn’t invite into this case anyhow—they didn’t have it. We even contacted the CIA. No one could come up with this 

$5 million,” Gutheinz says. “Then I’m thinking, ‘My parents are both Marines. My dad had this thing for Ross Perot, who was known for helping military personnel.’ I’m sitting in the office with Cregger and I say, ‘I wonder if Ross Perot would put up $5 million.’”

So the NASA agent cold-called the billionaire’s secretary, not thinking it would lead anywhere. Then his phone rang. “He said, ‘Hello Joe, this is Ross Perot. How can I help you?’” Gutheinz says. “I said, ‘Well, Mr. Perot, we need $5 million to go get a moon rock.’ ‘No problem,’ Perot said.” 

Operation Lunar Eclipse was a go for liftoff.

One trip to a Miami bank vault later, Gutheinz laid his eyes on a piece of the moon; the resulting case, United States of America v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material and One 10 Inch by 14 Inch Wooden Plaque, saw the moon rock turned over to NASA and, eventually, in 2003, returned to Honduras at a special ceremony with Gutheinz in attendance.

Not bad for a kid who once dreamed of space.

“It comes back to Apollo 11 for me,” says Gutheinz, now a criminal defense attorney at Gutheinz Law Firm in Pearland. “I was glued to the TV. Loved every second of it. Always thought, ‘I’d love to go work for NASA.’”

While his boyhood friends wanted to be astronauts, Gutheinz was more realistic. A military intelligence officer and pilot, he got a job with the Federal Aviation Administration, which eventually landed him with NASA’s OIG. “What a fantastic place to be,” he says of his time at NASA. “I got to investigate literally out-of-this-world issues.”

From 1992 to 1996, he ran the Omniplan investigation, which resulted in 180 felony convictions from a NASA contractor’s false claims. Then came the Mir investigation. NASA’s official line to Congress was that the aging Russian space station was a training goldmine—every mishap, a learning opportunity. Gutheinz’s interviews with rank-and-file scientists and engineers told a different story.

“They said it was a disaster waiting to happen,” he recalls.

In February 1997, a fire broke out aboard Mir while U.S. astronaut Jerry Linenger was on board. Russia’s account was that it was a minor flare-up, out in under two minutes. Linenger’s account? A 14-minute blaze, fire extinguishers bolted to the wall, gas masks that didn’t work, and cosmonauts choking from smoke inhalation. 

As Gutheinz dug, he noticed something strange; the people he interviewed were being prebriefed by NASA management, then debriefed again afterward to make sure the official story held. His report said what the official one wouldn’t: The program was dangerous, and the astronauts knew it.

Gutheinz filed his report, and while NASA didn’t love it—his findings contradicted what the agency had been telling Congress—the report stood, and he stayed on.

But, for all these legal-thriller theatrics, the operations weren’t what pushed Gutheinz toward the law.

His father, a 30-year Marine, had become a lawyer just before 50. Gutheinz decided he would do it younger, requesting a transfer to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center so he could attend law school at night and run a 25-person task force by day. Gutheinz was balancing this—along with raising six children—during Omniplan, and was studying for the Bar during Mir.

In 2000, he founded Gutheinz Law Firm. And when he finally got into a courtroom, Gutheinz brought something most defense attorneys didn’t: two decades of knowing how investigators build—and botch—a case. “I tell my clients, ‘I’m a pretty darn good investigator,’” he says. “The first thing I do when I get the offense report the police put together is I grade it. I find every mistake they made, and I try to exploit those mistakes.”

The moon rock hunt, meanwhile, never really stopped. Of the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 samples the Nixon administration gave away, roughly 150 are still missing—each worth millions on the black market. As a law professor, Gutheinz has spent the last 15 years training his graduate criminal justice students to find them.

They’ve recovered 78.

One of his students, Sandra Shelton, tracked down West Virginia’s Apollo 17 rock after the brother of a former friend of the governor saw a newspaper story and called. Gutheinz phoned the man—a retired dentist—to follow up.

“I said, ‘Do you happen to have a moon rock there?’ The guy says yes, and goes out to the garage, and there it is: a piece of the moon, just laying there.”