Organ Trafficking Fueled by Worldwide Market

By DOMINICK TAO

They won’t look the doctor in the eye, and their stories have holes — after all, how often does someone offer a spare kidney to a third cousin he just met?

Eventually, many would-be live-organ donors simply disappear; at one hospital, Hackensack University Medical Center, more than half drop out of the transplant process after initial meetings with doctors.

Dr. Michael Shapiro, the chief surgeon of the hospital’s transplant unit, said he suspects that many of those people are looking to be paid for their body parts, but fear getting caught.

“Sometimes, you have to sit down with the donor and say: ‘It’s illegal to buy or sell organs. You know that, right?’ ” Dr. Shapiro said.

Among the 44 people arrested last week in one of the most sweeping bribery and money-laundering investigations in New Jersey history, one stood out: Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn businessman who was accused of trying to broker the purchase of a kidney for $160,000.

Though most developed countries, including the United States, ban organ sales, there is an international market for transplantable organs: a shady world of unscrupulous doctors, concocted relationships and hotels used as recovery rooms.

The World Health Organization estimates that about 10 percent of the 63,000 kidneys transplanted worldwide each year from living donors have been bought illegally. Lungs, pieces of livers and corneas also command a price.

Last year, the authorities in India said they had broken up a ring involving doctors, nurses, paramedics and hospitals that had performed 500 illegal transplants of organs to rich Indians and foreigners. Most of the donors were poor laborers who were paid up to $2,500 for a kidney. Some were forced to give up organs at gunpoint.

Federal authorities say Mr. Rosenbaum told an undercover investigator that he had been brokering the sale of organs for 10 years and had been involved with “quite a lot” of transplants. According to the criminal complaint, Mr. Rosenbaum was approached by the same government witness who persuaded a number of New Jersey officials, including the mayor of Hoboken, to accept bribes, and who snared several rabbis in a money-laundering operation.

In Mr. Rosenbaum’s case, the witness, believed to be Solomon Dwek, a New Jersey developer arrested on bank fraud charges in 2006, pretended to a businessman whose secretary was looking for a kidney for her uncle. An undercover agent posed as the secretary.

“Let me explain to you one thing,” Mr. Rosenbaum told her, according to the complaint. “It’s illegal to buy or sell organs.”

Mr. Rosenbaum later received $10,000 as a down payment for delivery of a willing organ donor, the authorities said. The total cost, as agreed upon, would eventually have been $160,000.

Mr. Rosenbaum spoke of the strengths and weaknesses of hospitals’ screening procedures. He told the agent that the donor would come from Israel, that he would be young and healthy, and that once he was in the United States, the donor and the recipient would need to make up a story to tell hospital officials.

The donor could not pretend to be a relative, not even a third cousin — the relationship Dr. Shapiro said he sometimes hears — as that would be too easily disproved, Mr. Rosenbaum said. Instead, he said, they should choose a different story, saying, perhaps, that they were neighbors, friends from synagogue or business acquaintances. “Could be friends from the community, could be friends of, of, of his children,” Mr. Rosenbaum said, according to the complaint.

Ronald Kleinberg, Mr. Rosenbaum’s lawyer, said he would not comment because he had not yet obtained all the facts in the case.

Doctors have become more aware of organ-selling schemes, but many still feel powerless.

“When you have the suspicion the donor is doing this for the wrong reasons, the question is — what do we do?” Dr. Shapiro said. “I don’t have a detective on retainer. I don’t have a polygraph. We’re pretty good at surgery, but part of the medical school curriculum is not interrogation techniques.”

Some doctors may feel that the Hippocratic oath prevents them from turning away a sick patient with an organ ready to be transplanted. Others may simply be tempted by the money involved.

“There’s this perverse motivation for me to say yes. It takes a really honest person to say, ‘I’m not going to do this, even if it will reduce my numbers,’ ” Dr. Shapiro said.

To those needing a kidney who are dependent on dialysis machines, the wait for a new organ can seem daunting.

The length of time generally depends on the patient’s condition and blood type; most organ transplants in the United States are based on a waiting-list system formed by Congress in 1984 and run by the United Network for Organ Sharing.

In New York, the average wait for a new kidney is nine years.

For those who cannot or no longer want to wait for a kidney, the only other legal option is to find someone willing to donate an organ of their own free will, and free of charge, usually a relative or friend.

While many doctors and academics sympathize with those who in effect want to buy a longer life, the general concept behind the ban on paying for organs is that society’s poorest people should not be enticed to sell their own bodies and that its richest should not be able to buy their way out of the existing system.

Dr. Luc Noel, the coordinator of clinical procedures in the Department of Essential Health Technologies at the World Health Organization, said the organization has been wrestling for years with whether or how to legalize organ sales.

“The truth is, it’s people in poor countries who choose between selling a kidney or a child,” Dr. Noel said. “It’s not caricature. It’s reality.”

Sheila M. Rothman, a professor of public health at Columbia University who studies living organ transplantation, said it has opened a Pandora’s box of questions no government has been able to answer fairly.

“In principle there’s nothing wrong with selling an organ, but if you try to get someone to articulate it and what it means, nobody can explain an equitable way to do it,” Dr. Rothman said.

Some doctors, however, say that since demand is so high, and waiting times for organs from cadavers so long, organ sales should be legalized, but tightly regulated.

“It has to have a built-in system for checking the individuals’ motivations to be sure they’re not being coerced. There should be a fair and established price,” said Dr. Eli A. Friedman, a distinguished teaching professor and the chief of the Division of Nephrology at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

Dr. Friedman said brokers wanting to find people seeking kidneys had tried turning to him.

“I’ve had kidney agents come into my office and offer to give me $5,000 for every person who I referred to them,” he said.

In Deal, N.J., Sephardic Jews Developed a Shore Haven

By KAREEM FAHIM

A century ago, Deal, a seaside resort carved from New Jersey farmland, was known as a playground for tycoons and magnates like Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim and celebrities who visited, including Mark Twain. At lavish “summer cottages,” garden parties raised money for the favorite charities of residents, predominantly Irish Catholics and Ashkenazic Jews who summered there.

By the 1940s, some of the shine had worn off, and the fabulously rich were replaced by the merely wealthy. In the late 1960s, Sephardic Jews who lived in Brooklyn and spent summers in nearby Bradley Beach began buying land in Deal; by 1973, more than 100 families had bought property in the town. By the mid-1990s, thousands of Sephardic Jews were flocking to the town during the summers, and today, local historians estimate, they make up 80 percent of the population.

That influx has led to occasional tensions with people outside their insular community. The Sephardim in Deal, many of whom call themselves Syrian Jews, include Solomon Dwek, the failed real estate mogul who is believed to have been the government informant who helped bring charges against New Jersey politicians and rabbis in a corruption and money laundering scandal this week. Before this case, Mr. Dwek was a central figure in a community built quickly and from scratch by the Syrian Jews in Deal and nearby towns.

Today, in a town of 1,000 people that swells to many times that size in the summer, there are synagogues and yeshivas, Jewish social service agencies and a main street lined with kosher delis and Syrian Jewish grocers.

Thirty-five years ago, those institutions and businesses hardly existed, said Poopa Dweck, a longtime resident and the author of a cookbook on Syrian Jewish cuisine. Ms. Dweck, who is not related to Mr. Dwek, was part of what she called a “pioneering group” that moved from Brooklyn to Deal not to summer, but to live.

“We loved the life here,” she said. “We were able to maintain our Orthodox Jewish religion and bring up our children. It was beautiful.”

Quickly, she and the other new arrivals started building the structures of their community. “We didn’t even wait,” she said, describing how she helped found the Sephardic Women’s Organization of the Jersey Shore. “We had the first meeting in my living room.”

Dr. Richard G. Fernicola, a physician and local historian, said the first Sephardic Jew in the area might well have been Benjamin N. Cardozo, the Supreme Court justice, who had a house in neighboring Allenhurst in the 1930s. The first Syrian Jewish family in Deal arrived in 1939, moving into a home that the singer Enrico Caruso had once regularly visited, said Jim Foley, the town’s historian.

Fifty years later, when Sephardic Jews started moving to Deal in large numbers, there were occasional fights for control. In the mid-1990s, a dispute over a plan to build a synagogue on the site of a house on Main Street underscored growing divisions between the Sephardim and other residents, including other Jews. Today, some of those strains persist: in interviews, some non-Jewish residents professed resentment of the Sephardim, largely because of the crowds that descend on Deal every summer.

Generally, however, residents interact peacefully, many mingling at the Deal Casino, a historic beach club that only recently started allowing out-of-towners to become members. Much of the Sephardic summer social scene takes place in huge houses set on gigantic lawns where Victorians and Queen Annes once stood.

A generation still speaks Arabic, though some of the earliest Sephardic settlers have moved away, tired of the commute back to Brooklyn.

Some of their children have been shaped by the town’s seaside charms. Henry Garfield, 19, a Syrian Jew who called himself “somewhat religious,” ate a slice of pizza Friday afternoon along Norwood Avenue and seemed not to notice the tension that has developed in Deal. This might as well have been Malibu.

“It’s a very laid-back atmosphere,” he said. “Everyone is chilled out. We surf all day.”

Ann Farmer contributed reporting.

US Corruption Arrests Shock Jewish Community

By Victoria Cavaliere New York 24 July 2009

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The arrests of more than 40 prominent politicians and Jewish leaders in New Jersey and New York on corruption and money laundering charges have sent shockwaves through the close-knit Syrian Jewish community there.

Federal investigators in New Jersey announced Thursday they had arrested more than 40 people, including public officials charged with corruption. Charges against others included international money laundering, selling counterfeit goods, and the black-market sale of human organs.

Acting US Attorney Ralph Marra Jr. speaks at a news conference with Newark division special agent in charge Weysan Dun (R), 23 Jul 2009, Newark, N.J.

In addition to three mayors, officials arrested five influential rabbis from New Jersey and the New York borough of Brooklyn.

"They used purported charities, entities supposedly set up to do good works, as vehicles for laundering millions of dollars in illicit funds. The rings were international in scope, connected to the city of Deal, New Jersey, Brooklyn, New York, Israel and Switzerland," said Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph J. Marra about the money-laundering scheme.

The rabbis are accused of using their congregations' charitable organizations to launder about $3 million by passing money from alleged illicit activity through their charities' bank accounts. The FBI said the rabbis then kept about 10 percent for themselves.

All of the rabbis come from the close-knit and wealthy Sephardic Jewish communities of southern New Jersey and Brooklyn - and the arrests have put the spotlight on a usually quiet community.

Rabbi Saul Kassin (C) leaves federal court in Newark, N.J., 23 Jul 2009

One of the rabbis arrested, Saul Kassin, is considered the leading cleric of the U.S. Sephardic community, comprised of families that emigrated mostly from the Middle East, Syria in particular, following the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Rabbi Kassin leads the largest Sephardic synagogue in the United States, Shaare Zion in Brooklyn, and has written books on Jewish law.

Members of the community have expressed shock and disbelief over the allegations against Rabbi Kassin. Many have been reluctant to speak publicly. One member of Shaare Zion, Ezra Kassin, told reporters he did not believe the charges.

He's just a very honorable person. I can't believe it, I don't believe it. Whatever they want to say, it's hogwash," he said.

Authorities said an FBI "cooperating witness" helped federal investigators gather evidence in the case. Media reports said he was arrested in 2006 for bank fraud.

FBI agent Weysan Dun said the probe seeks to root out corruption in New Jersey, wherever it is found.

"This case is not about politics. It is certainly not about religion. It is about crime, corruption, arrogance. It is about a shocking betrayal of the public trust," he said.

The FBI said the two-year probe is part of a wider investigation into political corruption and money laundering that started 10 years ago.

New York Council Votes to Add Muslim Holy Days as School Holidays

By KIRK SEMPLE

Spurred by a broad coalition of religious, labor and immigrant groups, the City Council overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday to add two of the most important Muslim holy days to the public schools’ holiday calendar.

But the vote, which was nonbinding, put the Council in conflict with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has the final say to designate the days off and has said he is resolutely opposed to the idea.

The mayor told reporters before the vote that not all religions could be accommodated on the holiday schedule, only those with “a very large number of kids who practice.”

“If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” he said. “Educating our kids requires time in the classroom, and that’s the most important thing to us.”

The current school calendar recognizes major Christian and Jewish holy days like Christmas and Yom Kippur, but no Muslim holy days.

Mr. Bloomberg’s stance has irritated advocates of the measure, and some said he risked alienating many in New York’s fast-growing Muslim population as he seeks re-election in the fall.

Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, a leader of the campaign to add the holidays, said that if the mayor continued to oppose the move, the results for him at the voting booth could be “catastrophic” among the city’s roughly 600,000 Muslims.

“We really have confidence in the mayor’s intelligence,” said Imam Talib, head of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem. “It’s an election year.”

The proposal to add the two holy days — Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha — has not drawn much visible public opposition. Some council members have expressed reservations about subtracting more classroom days from the school calendar, though only one, G. Oliver Koppell of the Bronx, voted against it.

After the vote, Mr. Koppell said the existing schedule of religious holidays might have to be reviewed and trimmed, lest other growing religions in New York start demanding their own days off. “Where are we going to end with this?” he asked.

The resolution’s advocates said that since about 12 percent, or more than 100,000, of the city’s public school students are Muslim, they deserved recognition. The two holidays have already been adopted by school districts including Dearborn, Mich., and several municipalities in New Jersey.

Supporters also say that since the Ids (pronounced eeds) are floating holidays whose timing is set by the lunar calendar, they often fall on other religious holidays, on weekends or during the summer. During the next decade, for instance, at least one of the two Ids each year is expected to coincide with summer recess or an existing school holiday, according to a report by the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University.

It was unclear on Tuesday whether Mr. Bloomberg would continue to have final say on the issue, because the State Legislature still has not passed a bill to extend his control over the schools. But some officials said that even if the bill did not pass, he would be able to exert indirect control through appointments to the Board of Education.

The Council resolution also urged the Legislature to pass two pending bills that would amend state education law to require the holidays in the city’s school calendar. That could allow the move without the mayor’s approval, said Councilman Robert Jackson of Manhattan, a co-sponsor of the resolution and a Muslim.

Id al-Fitr celebrates the end of Ramadan, the sacred month of fasting, and Id al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, marks the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Muslims traditionally observe these days by praying in the morning, then celebrating with family and friends, exchanging gifts and sharing a large meal.

The holy days have long posed a painful choice for Muslim students: Should they go to class in the interest of their grades and attendance record, or cut class to be with their families?

When Rebecca Chowdhury, 18, was young, she said, she generally skipped school. But as she grew older and faced more academic demands, she often had to forgo the celebrations.

“It created a great divide between myself and my family,” said Ms. Chowdhury, who graduated last week from Stuyvesant High School.

The campaign to recognize the two holy days has been coordinated by La Fuente, a grass-roots organizing group, and supported by a coalition; at its core are dozens of Muslim organizations.

Some leaders said the coalition’s successes reflected the political maturation of the city’s diverse Muslim population, which has at times seen its social and political ambitions hamstrung by schisms among competing groups.

“When there are issues of common concern and broad-based impact,” Imam Talib said, “the people put aside other differences and unite around a common cause.”

Members of the coalition said the current effort stems from a decision by the state in 2006 to schedule the Regents exam on Id al-Adha, which angered Muslims and spurred state legislators to pass a bill ordering the State Department of Education to make a “bona fide effort” to schedule mandated exams on days other than religious holidays.

While there have been scattered efforts for years to put the Id holy days on school calendars, the efforts finally coalesced into a formal campaign after the passage of the state bill.