Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Levy-Izhak (Isaac) Rosenbaum Accuser

Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of Anthropology at UC Berkely and the founder and director of Organs Watch. Professor Scheper-Hughes notified the FBI seven years ago that Rabbi Levy-Izhak (Issac) Rosenbaum was trafficking organs. Listen below to the audio of Scheper-Hughes talking this morning about Rosenbaum and organ smuggling. She begins the audio at about 2.40 minutes in.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes

UPDATE: See below for Scheper-Hughes' implication of Mt. Sinai Hospital and Albert Einstein Medical College in Organ Trafficking. Professor Scheper-Hughes recounts stories of Rosenbaum using a gun to keep an unknowing donor from a fast retreat. She says the Rabbi is "the main U.S. broker for global human organ sales.

Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum’s name, address and even phone number were passed to an FBI agent in a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan by a prominent anthropologist who has been studying and documenting organ trafficking for more than a decade.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California, Berkeley, was and is very clear as to Rosenbaum’s role in the ring.

“He is the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network,” she said.

Her sources include a man who started working with Rosenbaum imagining he was helping people in desperate need. The man then began to see the donors, or to be more accurate, sellers, who were flown in from impoverished countries such as Moldova.

“He said it was awful. These people would be brought in and they didn’t even know what they were supposed to be doing and they would want to go home and they would cry,” Scheper-Hughes said.

The man called Rosenbaum “a thug” who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, “You’re here. A deal is a deal. Now, you’ll give us a kidney or you’ll never go home.’ ”

Scheper-Hughes felt she had to stop Rosenbaum. She met with the FBI.

“I always thought of it as my Dick Tracy moment,” she said Thursday.

She waited and waited for something to be done. The FBI may have been following the lead of the State Department, which dismissed organ trafficking as “urban legend.”

“It would be impossible to conceal a clandestine organ trafficking ring,” a 2004 State Department report stated.

Scheper-Hughes also went to Brazil and South Africa with her information, where it was taken seriously and acted upon.

But the ring kept operating elsewhere. Scheper-Hughes visited villages in Moldova where, “20% of the men were siphoned off to be kidney sellers in this same scheme.”

Mid-2008, some 80,000 patients were waiting for a kidnye transplant. It is estimated that 3,000 to 4,000 names are added to the waiting list each year. The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has the following children's transplant policy:

If there is no living donor available, then a deceased donor is used. Once your child has completed the evaluation process, and we've determined a transplant is the best option, he will be placed on the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) waiting list to receive a kidney transplant from a suitable donor.

With lives saved and lengthened by organ donors, and the need for organs substantially increasing annually, competition is quiet and under-the-radar but, nevertheless, it is the life saving issue that many around world awake to each morning and go to bed with each night. Scheper-Hughes' story is chilling and that story, according to her, involves some of America's finest hospitals. She has the names of hospitals and doctors. Click the arrow below, on the left to listen to Ms. Scheper-Hughes incredible story: Update 7-25-09: According to Nancy Scheper-Hughes a willing participant in an illegal operation to sell his own kidney documented his story on video as it happened at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. The kidney seller says "I met a broker in Brooklyn and I sold my kidney." Speculations are that Rabbi Levy-Izhak (Isaac) Rosenbaum, arrested in a human organ trafficking FBI sting this week, may be involved. Albert Einstein Medical College in New York City is also implicated. Read the full story here. Related: Mt. Sinai Hospital Organ Trafficking? Albert Einstein Medical College Organ Trafficking? Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Levy-Izhak (Isaac) Rosenbaum Accuser Isaac Rosenbaum is Rabbi Arrested for Organ Trafficking Solomon Dwek is FBI Witness in Money Laundering Sting Mordchai Fish is Brooklyn Rabbi Arrested for Money Laundering Peter Cammarano is Hoboken Mayor Arrested Dennis Elwell is Secaucus NJ Mayor Arrested Leona Beldini is Deputy Mayor of Jersey City Arrested