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After an exchange of e-mails and phone calls, the traffickers wired Yafimau $100 to buy a ticket on an all-night train to Kiev. Yakovenko and Sliusarchuk took him to a one-room apartment in Kiev, where two other kidney sellers were staying, he says. That was a base for men and women waiting their turn to sell a kidney, according to Yafimau.
In mid-June 2010, the traffickers told Yafimau they had found an Israeli woman who would buy his kidney and the transplant would be done in Ecuador, 11,000 kilometers west of Kiev. The gangsters had Yafimau fly from Kiev to Quito, with a stopover in Amsterdam.
In Quito, he met two other organ sellers and Shimshilashvili, the stocky former kickboxer, according to the Ukraine criminal case.
‘Locked in That Room’
When they arrived in Quito, on June 26, 2010, Shimshilashvili confined the three organ sellers to a small, cream-colored unit at Lugano Suites, a nine-story hotel, Yafimau told investigators.
“We were locked in that room with him, and he watched us all the time,” Yafimau says in Russian, his first language. “He wouldn’t let anyone go outside alone, and we didn’t have any money.”
They spent the time sleeping and watching so much television in Spanish that they picked up some of the language. As they waited, their minders took them often to Metropolitano Hospital for medical tests, Yafimau says.
Soon, a 55-year-old Israeli woman suffering from kidney failure arrived from Tel Aviv, documents in the Ukrainian investigation show. The traffickers put a sworn statement -- in English, Spanish and Russian -- in front of Yafimau and told him to sign it, saying he was voluntarily donating a kidney.
‘I Can’t Investigate’
They took him to Metropolitano Hospital, where kidney specialist Gustavo Salvador sat down with Yafimau. Salvador, who did his medical training at Central University of Ecuador, says Yafimau showed him the document saying he wanted to donate a kidney.
“If someone comes to me and says, ‘I come to voluntarily say that I want to donate,’ then that’s as far as we go,” says Salvador, sitting in an office adorned with Salvador Dali prints. “I can’t investigate the life of the person. That’s not my job.”
Salvador says he was paid $800, his normal fee for referring a patient to a surgeon.
Surgeons removed Yafimau’s left kidney on July 27, 2010, documents compiled by Ukrainian police show.
The Ecuadoran government began an investigation into organ trafficking in 2010 and found 11 cases of transplants of kidneys from mostly Ukrainian donors to Israeli patients since 2009, says Diana Almeida, the director of the nation’s organ transplant agency.
Ecuador Law
The probe, which is looking into Metropolitano Hospital, led Ecuador’s congress in March 2011 to pass a law banning foreigners from having transplant procedures in the nation’s hospitals. No one at Metropolitano has been charged.
Alfredo Vega, Metropolitano Hospital’s medical director, says in an e-mailed statement that the hospital hasn’t broken any laws and can’t talk about transplant cases because of patient privacy concerns.
“We want to make it clear that we reject any claims of wrongdoing by Metropolitano Hospital or its employees,” he says.
Damage from the international organ trade extends beyond the donors.
In Belarus, Karina, a thin 22-year-old woman with short blond hair, sits in her kitchen, weeping about her husband, Sasha. Prosecutor Ratel placed her husband in witness protection, and the District Court of Pristina on July 12 prohibited publication of the family name.
‘I Don’t Know’
Sasha left his family suddenly after he agreed to sell a kidney to the same gang that bought Yafimau’s organ. That ring worked with another gang in Kosovo led by an Israeli of Turkish descent, investigators in Ukraine and Kosovo say.
“I don’t know where he is,” Karina says, whose cramped apartment is in a country that suffered widespread poisoning from radioactive fallout caused by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 25 years ago. “I don’t know if he’s OK, sick, anything.”
As her 2-year-old daughter plays in a corner, Karina describes how her world began to fall apart in late 2008. Sasha, 29, wanted cash to pay off debts, she says. One day, he told his wife that he’d found work abroad and was leaving home for that reason. The truth was that he had answered an Internet ad offering $10,000 for a kidney.
What followed was a frenzied journey across eastern Europe, from Belarus to Istanbul and, finally, to a hospital in Pristina, Kosovo, according to investigators. He had been recruited by Yuri Katzman, a Belarussian-born Israeli.
Lying at the Border
Halfway into the journey, Katzman handed Sasha over to an organ-trafficking gang led by Moshe Harel, an Israeli who was born in Istanbul, according to charges filed in Kosovo. Sasha landed in Pristina on Oct. 26, 2008. Katzman had told Sasha to lie to border guards, claiming he was getting treatment for a urinary tract infection, according to the Kosovo criminal case.
A man working for Harel rushed him to Medicus, a private clinic in a small, run-down building in Pristina, where doctors ordered him to shave his own pubic area and put on a green smock. They took him into surgery and a Turkish surgeon removed Sasha’s kidney, according to the criminal charges.
The surgeon transplanted the organ into an elderly Israeli man who lives in New York, according to the court case. Sasha awoke in pain after the procedure, and when he looked at his belly, he saw a surgical drainage tube coming out of a long incision, according to the charges. The doctor is free on bail, as the Kosovo trial continues.
Two days later, Katzman paid Sasha $8,000 and minders hustled him onto a flight back home, according to court-filed documents.
24 Illegal Transplants
Doctors performed 24 illegal transplants at Medicus Clinic in 2008, for patients from Canada, Israel, Germany, Poland and the U.S. who paid for the life-saving operations, according to the Kosovo criminal charges. Ratel’s office accused Harel on June 6 of leading that organ-trafficking gang.
Harel was released on bail, and prosecutors say he fled to Israel. Harel, 61, who is wanted by Interpol, couldn’t be reached for comment.
Back home, after the surgery, Sasha slid into a reclusive life of depression and heavy drinking, his wife says. Finally, he abandoned his family. What his wife didn’t know was that Sasha’s descent came as thugs were threatening his life. That’s why Sasha, who is the principal witness in the Kosovo case, is being protected by the court.
Across Eastern Europe
The gang that bought Sasha’s kidney used a system to move other sellers across eastern Europe to hospitals willing to participate in their scheme, according to the indictment by Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. Doctors performed at least 18 transplants for the ring for patients from Israel, Ukraine and Georgia, according to the Ukrainian indictment of the surgeon.
Most of the surgeries were done at ABU Clinic in Baku, Azerbaijan, where doctors performed at least 13 of the transplants for the Katzman group, mostly for Israelis, according to his indictment.
Katzman recruited two men with promises that having a kidney removed was as safe as an appendectomy, court records show.
In September 2009, Renat Abdullin, a computer programmer from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, traveled to Kiev, where he waited in an apartment in Akademmistechko, a sprawling, garbage-strewn slum. It was one of three apartments in Kiev that traffickers used as a way station for kidney sellers, documents in the criminal case show.
‘A Way to Make Money’
Abdullin says six other people from across eastern Europe came and went as buyers were found for their organs.
“They saw us only as a way to make money,” says Abdullin, 28, a thin, bespectacled man with pale skin and dark hair. Katzman told Abdullin within a week that he’d found a recipient for his kidney in Baku.
Abdullin and Andriy Kuleshov, a former professional gymnast from Bila Tserkva, Ukraine, went to the Kiev airport and met Ukrainian vascular surgeon Vladyslav Zakordonets, the two men say.
In Baku, the organ traffickers ran into a snag. They lost a suitcase carrying drugs needed for the transplants. The traffickers kept the organ sellers in a room at ABU Clinic for three days as Zakordonets sent to Kiev for more drugs, according to evidence gathered in the Kiev criminal case.
“When I saw the hospital, I wanted to backtrack,” Abdullin says. “But I didn’t have any money for the tickets back, and I was afraid.”
‘So Much Pain’
Once the drugs arrived, Zakordonets removed a kidney from each man. Three days later, Katzman took the two men from the hospital to the Baku airport, along with Zakordonets, Abdullin and Kuleshov say.
“I was in so much pain, I could barely sit, but no one seemed to care,” Abdullin says. On the five-hour flight to Kiev, Kuleshov sat next to an anesthesiologist who assisted in the surgery, Kuleshov says. “Of course, the doctor knew what was going on,” he says.
Zakordonets is now in Lukyanivskyi Detention Center in Kiev, where he’s been jailed on human-trafficking charges with Katzman and four other men since October 2010. The doctor says in a written statement from jail that he performed about 40 transplants in Baku, starting in May 2009.
He says he never met the patients until the day of the operation and didn’t know donors were paid.
“It was an opportunity to work at an international level, an opportunity to grow in my profession,” he says. “I have not been a human trafficker.” The case isn’t yet scheduled to go to trial.
First U.S. Prosecution
The Israeli-eastern European organ-trafficking rings have also extended their reach to the U.S. In July 2009, the Justice Department charged Levy Rosenbaum, an Israeli living in New York, with conspiracy to commit human organ trafficking.
A Federal Bureau of Investigation agent says he caught Rosenbaum, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, offering to sell a kidney for $160,000. Rosenbaum was the first, and so far the only, person arrested for organ trafficking in the U.S. since the activity was outlawed in 1984.
Rosenbaum, 60, pleaded guilty on Oct. 27 to brokering the sale of human kidneys. Free on bail, he could be sentenced to five years in prison. He declined to comment.
Rosenbaum worked with Sammy Shem-Tov in Jerusalem to lure young men and women to sell kidneys, according to Avichai Osuna, who says he was recruited to sell a kidney by both men.
Osuna, an unemployed 27-year-old man in Be’er Sheva, a city in the Negev Desert south of Jerusalem, moonlighted as an apprentice for Shem-Tov, before he became a seller. Shem-Tov paid Osuna 1,500 shekels ($410) a month to use his ability to speak English to arrange illegal organ transplants with foreign hospitals, Osuna says.
‘Off My Back’
Shem-Tov, 67, asked Osuna to sell his own kidney in June 2008, says Osuna, a heavyset man who wears an earring in his left ear.
“Just to get him off my back and because I needed a little cash, I said all right,” he says.
Soon, Osuna told Shem-Tov that he had changed his mind, concerned about the dangers of giving up an organ, according to Shem-Tov’s indictment in Jerusalem District Court.
Late one evening, Shem-Tov called Osuna to a meeting in Be’er Sheva. Next to him were two men Shem-Tov described as mafia enforcers, the indictment says. Shem-Tov told Osuna that if he didn’t sell a kidney, he’d be in debt to the two men and the mafia group, the indictment says.
“He said, ‘You don’t want to back out now,’” Osuna says. “I felt trapped.”
Constantly Watched
Shem-Tov flew him from Tel Aviv to New York on July 31, 2008, because the trafficker thought he could arrange a transplant in New York, according to Shem-Tov’s indictment. Rosenbaum met Osuna at the gate and took his mobile phone and passport.
He had Osuna and other prospective organ sellers housed and constantly watched by a minder in a house near Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
Rosenbaum kept Osuna waiting for six months, Osuna says. While in New York, Rosenbaum brought Osuna to Mount Sinai Medical Center for a blood test, Osuna says. Sander Florman, director of Mount Sinai’s Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute, says the hospital does all it can to avoid illicit procedures.
“We make them jump through incredible hoops,” he says. “We have all the rules. People find ways around them.”
Threats of Retaliation
The transplant recipient backed out, and Osuna says Rosenbaum sent him back to Israel. A year later, Shem-Tov flew Osuna from Israel to Manila. Osuna tried again to cancel the deal, and his minders threatened him with mafia retaliation, the indictment says.
He says he felt trapped, and a few days later was taken to Cardinal Santos Medical Center. Surgeons removed his left kidney on Oct. 21, 2009, the indictment says.
Four days later, Osuna was on a flight back to Israel, and the recipient, a Tel Aviv man, paid him 94,000 shekels ($26,000). Osuna says he couldn’t recover in peace, for fear of what would happen when he got home.
“When I look in the mirror and see that scar, it’s a daily reminder of what I went through,” he says. “I feel this raw grievance inside.”
Cardinal Santos Ethics Committee Chairman Juanito Billote says the hospital can’t comment on specific cases to protect patient privacy. The hospital scrutinizes every transplant to ensure it complies with all laws, he says.
‘We Make Sure’
“In doing any foreign-to-foreign transplant, we make sure that the rules are adequately addressed,” he says.
The laws and rules designed to prevent the trafficking in organs aren’t working. While prosecutors in places such as Israel, Brazil, Kosovo and Ukraine have successfully crippled some of the organ-trading gangs, they’re fighting powerful economic forces.
As long as there’s a worldwide shortage of legal donors for life-saving transplants, the exploitation of the poor will only grow, Kosovo-based prosecutor Ratel says.
“There’s burgeoning organized-crime activity in trafficking of human organs,” he says. “It will take serious efforts by governments and hospitals to stop it.”
Governments around the world need to cooperate to enforce existing laws on illicit procedures, Harvard’s Delmonico says. Nations have to ensure they have systems making it safe and easy for people to donate voluntarily, he says. Unless that happens, the traffickers will continue to cultivate a growing legion of impoverished organ sellers who can end up with a quick infusion of cash -- and a lifetime of humiliation, pain and illness.
To contact the reporters on this story: Michael Smith in Santiago at Mssmith@bloomberg.net
To contact the reporter on this story: Daryna Krasnolutska in Kiev at dkrasnolutsk@bloomberg.net
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-01/organ-gangs-force-poor-to-sell-kidneys-for-desperate-israelis.html
Topic: Organ Trafficking Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis (Read 4942 times)