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Even by New Jersey standards, Thursday’s roundup of three mayors, five rabbis and 36 others on charges of money laundering and public corruption was big. But what put this FBI dragnet head and shoulders above the rest are the charges of trafficking in human body parts.
According to a federal criminal complaint filed in district court in New Jersey, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn conspired to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant. The cost was $160,000 to the recipient of the transplant, of which the donor got $10,000. According to the complaint, Mr. Rosenbaum said he had brokered such sales many times over the past 10 years.
“That it could happen in this country is so shocking,” said Dr. Bernadine Healy, former head of the Red Cross.
No, it isn’t. When I needed a kidney several years ago and had no donor in sight, I would have considered doing business with someone like Mr. Rosenbaum. The current law—the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984—gave me little choice. I would be a felon if I compensated a donor who was willing to spare me years of life-draining dialysis and premature death.
The early responses to the New Jersey scandal leave me dismayed, though not surprised. “We really have to crack down,” the co-director of the Joint Council of Europe/United Nations Study on Trafficking in Organs and Body Parts told MSNBC. That strategy is doomed, of course. It ignores the time-tested fact that efforts to stamp out underground markets either drive corruption further underground or causes it to flourish elsewhere.
The illicit organ trade is booming across the globe. It will only recede when the critical shortage of organs for transplants disappears. The best way to make that happen is to give legitimate incentives to people who might be willing to donate. Instead, I fear that Congress will merely raise the penalties for underground organ sales without simultaneously establishing a legal mechanism to incentivize donors.
Al Gore, then a Tennessee congressman who spearheaded the National Organ Transplant Act, spoke of using “a voucher system or a tax credit to a donor’s estate” if “efforts to improve voluntary donation are unsuccessful.” After 25 years, it is clear they have been unsuccessful.
More than 80,000 Americans now wait for a kidney, according the United Network for Organ Sharing. Thirteen of them die daily; the rest languish for years on dialysis. The number of donors last year was lower than in 2005, despite decades of work to encourage people to sign donor cards and donate to loved ones.
Sen. Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) is circulating a draft bill (the Organ Trafficking Prohibition Act), cosponsored by Sens. Bob Casey Jr. (D., Pa.) and Tom Harkin (D., Iowa), to enable governmental entities to offer donor benefits while raising penalties for brokering. States could offer health and life insurance to living donors, or funeral benefits to families of posthumous donors. Donors could also be offered a tax credit or perhaps a very generous contribution to a charity of their choice.
The rewards could come from state governments or approved charities, not from individuals, and the organs would be distributed according to formulas already in place. That means organs will not be available only to the wealthy.
What Mr. Rosenbaum is accused of doing is indeed against the law, and if he is found guilty he will be held accountable. But his alleged actions were a symptom of a deeper problem: the dire organ shortage.
Congress must permit donors to accept third-party benefits for saving the life of a stranger. Otherwise desperate patients and donors will continue to be reluctant co-conspirators in crime.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970204886304574307932274150934.html
Along with the various public officials and religious leaders arrested yesterday, 58 year old Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn was charged with trying to arrange a kidney donation for $160,000. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper- Hughes has investigated the illegal organ racket for almost a decade. She talks about how she blew the whistle on Brooklyn's organ bazaar:
. Posted @ 11:22
Post Title: About That Jew Jersey Organ Scandal
New Jersey’s Corruption Scandal: The Israeli Connection and thier insulting leader
Posted by realistic bird under
Time, By MATTHEW KALMAN / JERUSALEM – Tue Jul 28,
The mass arrests in the New Jersey corruption scandal last week were big news – in Israel. Images of prominent rabbis and Jewish businessmen being cuffed and arrested after morning prayers filled the front pages under headlines trumpeting the discovery of the “Jewish laundry” used to bribe prominent New Jersey officials allegedly using Israeli charities. In particular, Israeli commentators seized on the connection between several of those arrested and prominent figures in Shas, the ultra-orthodox Sephardi Torah Guardians Party, founded by the octogenarian Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who remains its spiritual leader.
Among those arrested on July 23 were Rabbi Eliahu Ben Haim and Rabbi Edmund Nahum, who are reportedly close to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and his son, Rabbi David Yosef. Ben Haim and Nahum were allegedly major fundraisers for Shas and Yosef family networks of educational institutions. According to a report on Israeli television, Rabbi David Yosef was also said to have been the target of Solomon Dwek, the FBI’s chief informant, who asked the rabbi to help him launder a check for $25,000. David Yosef reportedly declined.
Leaders of Shas, which won 11 seats in the Knesset and is the fourth largest member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, told TIME the party has no connection to the scandal. Roei Lachmanovich, spokesman for Shas Party leader Eli Yishai, told TIME that fundraising by the American rabbis for Sephardi institutions in Israel did not mean they were connected to Shas. He said that Shas institutions – including the rabbinical schools, or yeshivas – received their budget directly from the Israeli government and denied that Shas had been involved in any money-laundering or illegal activity. Furthermore, he said that Rabbi David Yosef was not a member of Shas and did not represent the party. “Besides the fact that he is Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s son, he has no formal connection to the Shas organization,” said Lachmanovich.
One of those arrested was a Brooklyn man, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who was charged with trading in human organs. In Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox community this week, Rosenbaum, who claimed to be a real estate dealer, was described as a macher (fixer) who assisted renal patients in finding appropriate medical treatment in the United States. According to the official complaint, however, Rosenbaum planned to give an Israeli donor $10,000 and then charge the client who requested the kidney $160,000. The payment would be laundered through what Rosenbaum described first as a “congregation,” then as a charity. According to published reports, Rosenbaum ran the Brooklyn branch of Kav Lachayim, a charity for sick children that was once supported by convicted financier Bernie Madoff.
The Shas media reacted to the entire scandal with countercharges of anti-Semitism. Yitzhak Kakun, editor of the Shas newspaper Yom Le’Yom told the Jerusalem Post: “The FBI purposely attempted to arrest as many rabbis as possible at once in an attempt to humiliate them.” Meanwhile, Nissim Ze’ev, a Shas Knesset member, said, “The U.S. police are trying to make it seem as though there is some kind of Jewish mafia.”
This is not the first time, however, that the Shas party has been embroiled in a corruption controversy. Two Shas ministers have been convicted on corruption charges in recent years. Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, explains that some parts of the ultra-orthodox community tend to disregard secular law, despite a tenacious adherence to the minutest detail of Jewish religious ritual. Says Halevi: “You have a kind of borderless community that in its best expressions maintains international charity efforts that are second to none. But the dark side of this is a mentality that often too easily slides into rationalizations for acts that cannot be rationalized, with the idea that the end justifies the means. Here we are raising money for charitable institutions, and therefore we’re allowed to cut corners.”
Halevi adds: “There have been other examples in the past of drug-running happening under cover of certain religious institutions here. There have been too many examples of abuse in the past.”
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