Cash, connections can buy you a kidney in NYC (and a baby anywhere you live)
Paying for organs [and babies] is illegal in U.S., but brokers find ways to skirt law
"I have met many, many people who have told me in confidence that they have bought a kidney. Prominent New Yorkers. And it happens right here in America," said Robert Berman, founder and director of the Halachic Organ Donor Society.
Nick Rosen, a man who lives in Israel and made a video about donating a kidney to a Long Island man in 2005 for $20,000.
"I've met some brokers, and they are not evil people," says Rosen...the same thing many adopters would sau about their facilitators and agency workers.
In 2003, a group of Israeli organ brokers were charged with recruiting as many as 100 impoverished Brazilians to donate kidneys for prices ranging from $3,000 to $20,000. The transplants were performed at a hospital in South Africa.
In the summer of 2007, police charged nine people with paying Israeli donors $30,000 each to give up a kidney. The operations allegedly took place in Ukraine. Investigators in Israel said they began probing the ring when one of the donors complained that she hadn't been paid.
