Kidney Broker Said to Use Johns Hopkins in Organ-Traffic Case

Bloomberg Businessweek | David Glovin, David Voreacos, Michael Smith

WE ARE INSISTING THAT THE UNITED NETWORK FOR ORGAN SHARING (UNOS) INVESTIGATES THESE ALLEGATIONS OF U.S. TRANSPLANT CENTERS PERFORMING TRANSPLANT SURGERIES UTILIZING BLACK MARKET KIDNEYS AS IT IS ILLEGAL TO BUY OR SELL ORGANS IN THE UNITED STATES AS THIS UNDERMINES THE INTEGRITY OF OUR DONATION AND TRANSPLANT SYSTEM.

An Israeli man who brokered black- market sales of human kidneys in the U.S. arranged transplant surgeries at medical centers, including Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, according to five people familiar with the case.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, 60, pleaded guilty yesterday to three counts of organ trafficking and one count of conspiracy, becoming the first person convicted in the U.S. of organ trafficking. A 1984 U.S. law bans the sale of human organs.

He said in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, that three ailing people paid him a total $410,000 to arrange the sale of kidneys from healthy donors, and an undercover FBI agent paid him $10,000.

Rosenbaum, who lives in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, was arrested in a July 2009 crackdown by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on money laundering and political corruption in New Jersey. After yesterday’s hearing, Rosenbaum’s lawyers depicted him as a lifesaver.

Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-28/kidney-broker-said-to-use-johns-hopkins-in-organ-traffic-case.html