Angelite Nurses

Posted by Scott Hensley

UCLA Medical Center performed a life-saving liver transplant on one of Japan’s most powerful gang bosses a few years back, the Los Angeles Times reports.
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Yakuza shrine, Sanja festival, Asakusa, Tokyo

Three other men, now prohibited from entering the U.S. due to rap sheets or suspected ties to Japanese organized crime, also got liver transplants at UCLA, the paper reports.

What’s the big deal, you ask? The transplants were done between 2000 and 2004, “a time of pronounced organ scarcity,” the LAT says. “In each of those years, more than 100 patients died awaiting liver transplants in the Greater Los Angeles region.”

Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, told the paper: “If you want to destroy public support for organ donation on the part of Americans, you’d be hard pressed to think of a practice that would be better suited.”

The paper said there’s no evidence that the hospital or the surgeon involved knew at the time of the transplants that the patients had ties to Japanese gangs, commonly called yakuza. “Both said in statements that they do not make moral judgments about patients and treat them based on their medical need,” the paper said.

Photo by apes_abroad via Flickr