NEW YORK (AP) -– In 2005, a rebellious and sporadically employed Israeli man flew to New York to give up a kidney to save an American businessman. For that, he says he was paid $20,000, which appeared in a brown envelope on his hospital bed after the operation.

That payoff would be illegal.
But the kidney donor, 39-year-old Nick Rosen of Tel Aviv, says that doesn't matter. “I smoke pot. That's also against the law.”
Rosen believes he did a good deed and that organ donors like him should be compensated. Much of his story can be confirmed, and the case gives new resonance to claims that a black market for kidneys has thrived even in the United States.
Rosen made a video about his transplant experience, and near the end of it, he is seen reclining on a bed piled with cash. A subtitle says: “This is what $20,000 looks like.” It's hard to tell the amount, but the $100 face of Ben Franklin is visible on the bills.
His tale of organ trafficking might be incredible if he had not made the video — and if the issue of black market organs had not burst into public view with the recent arrest of a New Yorker accused of brokering a kidney sale. Rosen does not know that man, who as far as he knows, had nothing to do with his own transaction.
For years, kidneys have been available on a thriving international black market, but evidence of organ trafficking in the United States is harder to find. However, doctors and others in the transplant field have long suspected an illegal organ market exists here.
Nick Rosen's story — which he says began when he answered a “Kidney Donor Wanted” ad in an Israeli newspaper — may open a window into that world.
Last year, 4,540 Americans died while on transplant lists, waiting for kidneys. The man who got Rosen's kidney says he almost died, too.
“I was on death's doorstep,” says Brad Gursky, a 51-year-old balding, beefy man whose left arm vein is thick and hardened from years of intravenous dialysis treatments.
Gursky confirms much of Rosen's story — except for the $20,000 payment. “It's an embellishment,” he said in an interview on his front porch in Woodbury, a suburb on Long Island.
Is he happy Rosen made a video that essentially accuses him of participating in illegal organ trafficking?
“I have to give the man a pass on the video. He saved my life, and he did a mitzvah,” a good deed.
A month before he got Rosen's kidney, Gursky was in end-stage renal failure and had just endured a huge disappointment: One week before Father's Day 2005, this father of three got the happy news that Mount Sinai Medical Center had a kidney for him, a perfect match. He and his whole family went to the hospital. But 24 hours later, all joy was snatched away. A mistake had been made by the donor network, and the kidney was going to someone else.
“Any hope he had of a healthy life was crushed,” reads a letter of complaint written by Gursky's wife, Gwen, to the New York Organ Donor Network. A reply from the national organ donation network acknowledges the “unfortunate situation” and mentions “corrective actions.”
A month later, in Rosen's video, Gursky is smiling and happy. His hope of a healthy life had been restored by a stranger, Nick Rosen, who Gursky says he found through “a friend of a friend.”
In one scene, Gursky's sister visits Rosen in the hospital. “It's such a mitzvah,” Leslie Gursky tells him. She had donated a kidney to her brother years earlier but it soon failed. In the video, she tells Rosen the experience changed her life for the better.