NEW YORK — People who live in New Jersey can be forgiven if they initially yawned Thursday morning at the news of another federal sting that swept up a wide range of public officials, including the young mayor of Hoboken, who's been on the job all of three weeks.
They might have even shrugged at the report that five rabbis were also snared in the dragnet for allegedly washing $3 million through an international money-laundering ring.
But body parts?
This is round three in a series of New Jersey public corruption investigations that has spanned a decade and taken down more than 100 people, half of them government officials involved in money-for-access schemes.
But the trajectory of this latest inquiry seemed to impress even experienced investigators who, in the course of tracking mayors reportedly taking cash in diners and rabbis depositing untraceable money into the accounts of their charities, stumbled upon Levy Izhak Rosenbaum allegedly selling human kidneys.
Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn, N.Y., businessman, is accused of buying kidneys for $10,000 apiece from donors in Israel and then selling them to American transplant recipients for $160,000, according to a federal complaint.
"I am what you call a matchmaker," Rosenbaum told undercover agents, noting that he had been marketing illegal kidneys for 10 years, the complaint said.
Altogether 44 people were arrested Thursday, 29 of them New Jersey public officials including three mayors, two state assemblymen, several city councilmen, local commissioners, regulatory inspectors and least one unsuccessful candidate who wanted to be mayor of Jersey City.
"The list of people we arrested sounds like it should be the roster from a meeting of community leaders," said Weysan Dun, head of the FBI's Newark office. "But sadly they weren't meeting in a boardroom this morning. They were in the FBI booking room."
Federal officials would not identify the government witness at the center of the sting. According to the Newark Star-Ledger, he is a northern New Jersey real estate developer and son of a prominent rabbi in the Syrian community in Deal, N.J., who turned government witness after he had been accused of defrauding a bank of $50 million.
Over three years, this witness met with a series of so-called middlemen who introduced him to government officials who took a total of $650,000 in bribes, and to the rabbis and their associates who washed millions of dollars for him through charities and connections that reached from Deal to Brooklyn and from Israel to Switzerland, Acting U.S. Atty. Ralph J. Marra Jr. said.
