Swedish paper's organ harvesting article draws Israeli outrageStory Highlights

It was replete with tales of the illegal sales of body parts; of furtive negotiations in diners, parking lots and boiler rooms; of nervous jokes about “patting down” a man who turned out to indeed be an informant; and, again and again, of the passing of cash — once in a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- One of the sweeping criminal complaints unveiled Thursday in New Jersey against 44 public officials and others includes a New York man accused of trying to arrange the private sale of a kidney from a donor in Israel.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who lives in Brooklyn and is not a licensed physician or medical professional, faces charges of acting as a human organ broker. He offered to obtain a kidney for an undercover FBI agent and a confidential witness working for authorities, the criminal complaint says. The price was $160,000.

"I am what you call a matchmaker," Rosenbaum is quoted as saying at a July 13 meeting with the two undercover agents.

The undercover FBI agent told Rosenbaum one of her uncles needed a kidney because he had been on dialysis for two years and on a transplant list at a Philadelphia hospital, the complaint says. The first meeting took place at Rosenbaum's home on February 18, 2008, three days after the confidential witness contacted Rosenbaum by telephone, the document says.

At that meeting, the complaint alleges, Rosenbaum said he could obtain a kidney for $150,000. He later raised the price to $160,000.

"I'm doing this a long time," the complaint says Rosenbaum told the two agents. He then added: "Let me explain to you one thing. It's illegal to buy or sell organs. ... So you cannot buy it. What you do is, you're giving a compensation for the time."

At their last meeting, on July 13, Rosenbaum said he had been arranging kidney sales for 10 years, the complaint says. Asked how many transplants he had brokered, Rosenbaum is said to have responded, "Quite a lot. ... Quite a lot."

Rosenbaum also told the agents he had brokered a transplant two weeks before their meeting, the document says.

Boström's article, first to appear in English on Haaretz.com, makes a link to the recent exposure of an alleged crime syndicate in New Jersey. The syndicate includes several American rabbis, and one Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who faces charges of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant.

"Now that [the story] has once again risen to the surface, I wanted to point out the link [to the New Jersey affair] and the fact that there needs to be an investigation of the claims," Boström said.

Boström said he had offered the story to another Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, which turned it down "with no explanation."

The reporter said Aftonbladet, the most popular evening tabloid in Sweden, published the article without making any editorial changes.

The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israel Defense Forces, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs.

"'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,' relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied," writes author Donald Boström in his report.