They are dark, unsightly and lifeless, but they fetch a handsome price in the black market. The underground world of moon rock trafficking is filled with colorful characters and it reaches out to many countries in the world.

Ever since moon rocks first arrived on Earth with the Apollo space missions, they have been gifted, stolen, fenced, passed around and recovered numerous times. The latest discovery of moon rocks in the wrong hands involves Costa Rica, Nicaragua, a guerrilla fighter, a missionary, and a gambler.

Las Vegas casino entrepreneur and legendary poker player Bob Stupak lost a fight against leukemia in 2009. He left behind an estate that includes tiny chips of moon rocks. The probate attorney in charge of the late Mr. Stupak’s estate sent a plaque containing the moon rocks encased in glass to the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for analysis. Officials at the Johnson Space Center in Houston -where the Ad Astra Rocket Company of Costa Rica has a research facility- are currently engaged in certifying the provenance of the rocks.

The plaque on which the moon rocks are displayed is adorned with a flag of Nicaragua. They are believed to have been given to the Central American nation by the administration of former U.S. President Richard Nixon. The recipient of the moon rocks, General Anastasio Somoza, would eventually be deposed by Sandinista guerillas, and it is believed that an unnamed fighter from Costa Rica entered the former dictator’s mansion and made off with the moon rocks.

The Tico guerrilla fighter is supposed to have been a mercenary who eventually switched sides and fought for the Contras in Nicaragua during the Cold War -similar to the infamous Eden Pastora, the man behind the Google Maps invasion.

Mr. Stupak met his widow Silvina in Costa Rica. According to a news story written by Ken Ritter for the Associated Press, Ms. Stupak remembers that her late husband acquired the rocks from a baptist missionary for the amount of $10,000 in cash and 200,000 shares of a casino owned by Mr. Stupak. The paperwork proving the transfer of the moon rocks shows that a man named Bob Stone from Golfito conveyed the rocks over to Mr. Stupak, but the widow remembers the missionary as Harry Coates.

The black market for moon rocks is a murky one, and thus it is possible that the Bob Stone character either does not exist or served as a straw man for the protection of the parties involved who knew that they were dealing with pilfered property. Mr. Stupak displayed the lunar bounty at his own Moon Rock Cafe, in the Vegas World Casino.

The Goodwill Moon Rock program distributed 270 fragments collected by the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions to several nations across the world. According to Wikipedia, there may be up to 180 moon rocks that may have suffered a fate similar to those that ended up in Costa Rica during the Sandinista revolution.

Moon rocks have also been stolen directly from the Johnson Space Center by a team of cat burglars led by a couple of young and super-smart NASA interns. Another set of Goodwill Moon Rocks gifted to the Central American nation of Honduras was recovered by NASA investigators in an unusual sting operation that involved running ads in the USA Today newspaper and borrowing $5 million in cash from former U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot.