NEW YORK -- An international transplant Mafia based in the former Soviet Union is capitalizing on America's organ-shortage crisis by smuggling live donors into the country to sell their lungs and kidneys, the New York Daily News has learned.

Illicit organ donors from Moldova, the poorest country in the former Soviet Union, enter the United States, mostly at Kennedy Airport, on false student or tourist visas. They are whisked to hospitals where their organs are removed and sold, government sources said.

The Moldovan connection, the first organized-crime, organ-selling ring uncovered in the United States, takes advantage of the vast difference between the need for lifesaving organs and the scarcity of supply.

But a source involved in the investigation confirmed the FBI and the State Department's visa fraud section is closing in on the gang ringleaders.

In some cases, the Moldovans have duped doctors into believing they are giving their organs altruistically to family members. But, the source said, "There are clearly some doctors who knew what the entire deal is about and profit from it."

The United Network for Organ Sharing estimates 200 to 300 Americans a year buy organs in shady overseas transactions.

"Some of these outlaw transplant operations are cloak and dagger, others operate in the world of loopholes and soft corruptions of waiting lists for tightly regulated and rationed organs," said University of California anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

Patients are traveling to China, where at least 68 offenses carry the death penalty and executed prisoners provide a rich source of supply.

The Chinese government denies the practice, but only last month a patient died after receiving an executed prisoner's kidney in Guangzhou, according to a report in the Hong Kong newspaper Cheng Bao.

"We have patients who have received a kidney in China," said Dr. Mark Hardy, director of renal transplantation at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center.

Other patients pay donors to come to them.

One, a wealthy 70-year-old New York dialysis patient, was told that because of his age he would have to wait as long as 12 years for a kidney even after he had registered at 10 U.S. transplant centers.

Instead he found a doctor who arranged for an African donor to come to the United States for an illicit operation that cost more than $100,000, a family member told the New York Daily News on the condition of anonymity.

The man's nephrologist "certainly knew what was going on, but the operation could not be done at his hospital (in New York), so we had to go out of state, where the doctor would not question too closely," the family member said.

"The basic concern is creating a system where only the rich can afford organs," said Dr. Frank Riddick, former chairman of the American Medical Association's ethics committee. In several countries -- Belgium, Austria and Spain among them -- organs can be harvested from all deceased citizens unless they had signed legal papers prohibiting it. The practice, known as presumed consent, is illegal in the United States.

"Presumed consent certainly would increase donations," Hardy said. "To my mind, it is the correct way of going." Hardy, like most other transplant surgeons concedes, "most Americans would resist Big Brother determining what could happen to your body after you die." But he said the shortage of donated organs is a crisis that invites criminal activity.
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