“He had all these crazy ways of hiding money and we kept catching him.” Some of those ways included owning a number of pizza franchises in the “Papa Primo’s” chain, funding a feature-length horror movie filmed in Spain called “Demons of the Dark” and keeping 35 separate bank accounts. “There couldn’t have been a more egregious bad guy than Ralph Montijo,” said Gutheinz. Through their investigations, they discovered that Montijo was laundering his stolen money through a variety of channels. Once that fact was established, the NASA OIG officially put together a task force. Gutheinz and his investigative team went over Montijo’s invoices to NASA for leasing buildings, equipment, cars and other business expenditures from third parties and quickly discovered something fishy - Montijo owned all the buildings and equipment outright already there was no third party that needed to be paid. Montijo owned Omniplan which was under contract by Rockwell Space Operation Company - a prime contractor for NASA. When Gutheinz began the case in 1992, they received a tip on the NASA hotline about a subcontractor, Omniplan. Gutheinz was a senior special agent at the NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) during the investigation that ultimately led to the arrest and prosecution of Montijo. Montijo Jr., fleeced the government for millions of dollars that he then laundered through a wide array of colorful schemes.
It may seem unthinkable that NASA could have unknowingly financed such unrelated things, but as Joseph Gutheinz Jr., CFE, explained to attendees at the 28th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, even large government entities can fall victim to crafty fraudsters.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has paid for all these things, whether knowingly or unknowingly. What do pizza chains, horror movies and ski lodges have in common with rockets, satellites and space stations? The U.S.
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