You could call me a "matchmaker," said
Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, organ trafficker
Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested and
a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum's matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys for $10,000, from poor people. He then proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for $160,000. The accusations have shaken the American transplantation business. If they are true it means that
organ trafficking is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell the
New Jersey Real-Time News.
On the question of how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies:
"Quite a lot. And I have never failed," he boasts. The business has been running for quite some time. Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard and member of the National Kidney Foundation's Board of Directors, tells the same newspaper that organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel, is carried out in other places of the world as well. 5 - 6,000 operations a year, about ten per cent of the world's kidney transplants are carried out illegally, according to Delmonici.
Comment: Needless to say, when this story broke 14 years ago, the only thing that resulted was an international 'scandal' Israel whipped up that resulted in it being dismissed away as 'anti-semitic blood libel'.