H ave you heard the one about the Great Moon-Bag Caper? It happened some time ago in a place not so very far away and involved an unassuming culprit, Max L. Ary, an aging Poindexter who favored oversize glasses and red neckties. He was one of Hutchinson, Kansas' leading citizens and had run the town's Cosmosphere and Space Center pretty much since it started in 1962. For almost 30 years as CEO, he'd built it into an impressive repository of space exploration artifacts, many of them on loan from NASA and other government institutions. But sometime around 1999, he appeared to start breaking bad, selling items from the Cosmosphere and pocketing tens of thousands of dollars. The Department of Justice caught up with him in 2005, charging him with wire and mail fraud. He was convicted and hit with a 36-month prison sentence and ordered to come up with more than $100,000 in restitution. A few years later, to help with the restitution payment, the Feds sold off some of the objects seized as evidence at Ary's house. Among those items: a 12-by-8.5-inch white cloth bag printed with the words "LUNAR SAMPLE RETURN." The government sold it at auction, in… Read full this story
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The Moon Market: Inside The Multimillion-Dollar Craze For Space And Apollo 11 Collectibles have 320 words, post on www.forbes.com at July 13, 2019. This is cached page on Vietnam Art News. If you want remove this page, please contact us.