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(回答先: 後藤忠政：Wikipediaから１時間で削除された部分 投稿者 ×× 日時 2008 年 5 月 26 日 00:17:12)
朝日新聞記事：司法取引移植ヤクザは合計４名だそうです。
http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0530/TKY200805300263.html
暴力団組長、米で肝移植 「情報提供と引き換え」と米紙
2008年05月30日19時00分
【ロサンゼルス＝堀内隆】米紙ロサンゼルス・タイムズ（電子版）は３０日、山口組系暴力団「後藤組」の後藤忠正組長がＣ型肝炎を患っていた０１年、カリフォルニア大ロサンゼルス校（ＵＣＬＡ）の付属病院で肝移植を受けていたと報じた。後藤組長は当時、米入国を禁じられていたが、米連邦捜査局（ＦＢＩ）が情報提供と引き換えにビザ発給を手助けしたと伝えている。
同紙によると、米国では外国人や犯罪歴がある患者への移植を禁じる規定はないが、報道は後藤組長が０１年５月に渡米してわずか２カ月後に移植手術を受けた一方で、同時期に同病院の待機リストに載っていた患者のうち、３年以内に移植を受けられた人が３４％にとどまっていたと指摘。執刀医が後に訪日して後藤組長の診察を行っていたことにも触れ、扱いの公平性に疑問を投げかけた。
ＵＣＬＡは「臓器移植機関ネットワークが定めるガイドラインを順守しており、移植患者の評価は米国人でも外国人でも同じ」との声明を出したが、後藤組長の手術を行ったかどうかはプライバシーを理由に明らかにしなかった。
捜査当局筋の情報として同紙が報じたところによると、ビザ発給は、米国内での日本の暴力団の活動実態についての情報を提供することと引き換えだったという。また、００年から０４年にかけて、後藤組長のほかに３人の日本人がＵＣＬＡで肝移植を受けた。３人ともその後、犯罪歴や犯罪組織との関係を理由に米国入国を禁じられた。
元記事（LAタイムズ）
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-ucla30-2008may30,0,6708926.story?page=1
Four Japanese gang figures got liver transplants at UCLA
- The recipients included one of Japan's most powerful crime bosses. Some in the medical community worry the revelation will have a chilling effect on organ donations.
By John M. Glionna and Charles Ornstein, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
May 30, 2008
UCLA Medical Center and its most accomplished liver surgeon provided a life-saving transplant to one of Japan's most powerful gang bosses, law enforcement sources told The Times.
In addition, the surgeon performed liver transplants at UCLA on three other men who are now barred from entering the United States because of their criminal records or suspected affiliation with Japanese organized crime groups, said a knowledgeable law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The four surgeries were done between 2000 and 2004 at a time of pronounced organ scarcity. In each of those years, more than 100 patients died awaiting liver transplants in the Greater Los Angeles region.
The surgeon in each case was Dr. Ronald W. Busuttil, executive chairman of UCLA's surgery department, according to another person familiar with the matter who also spoke on condition of anonymity. Busuttil is a world-renowned liver surgeon who co-edited a leading text on liver transplantation and is one of the highest-paid employees in the University of California system.
There is no evidence that UCLA or Busuttil knew at the time of the transplants that any of 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.
U.S. transplant rules do not prohibit hospitals from performing transplants on either foreign patients or those with criminal histories.
The most prominent transplant recipient, Tadamasa Goto, had been barred from entering the U.S. because of his criminal history, several current and former law enforcement officials said. Goto leads a gang called the Goto-gumi, which experts describe as vindictive and at times brutal.
The FBI helped Goto obtain a visa to enter the United States in 2001 in exchange for leads on potentially illegal activity in this country by Japanese criminal gangs, said Jim Stern, retired chief of the FBI's Asian criminal enterprise unit in Washington.
Goto got his liver, Stern said, but provided the bureau with little useful information on Japanese gangs.
"I don't think Goto gave the bureau anything of significance," Stern said. Goto "came to the States and got a liver and was laughing back to where he came from. . . . It defies logic."
Although Stern was not involved with the deal, he said he learned the details when he became unit chief in 2004 and continues to be troubled by what happened.
After the transplant, Goto was again barred from reentering the U.S., said the first law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and therefore requested anonymity.
But Goto continued to receive medical care from Busuttil in Japan. The doctor traveled there and examined Goto on more than one occasion, said Goto's Tokyo-based lawyer, Yoshiyuki Maki -- and evaluated Goto while he was in custody in 2006.
Busuttil's medical opinion was cited in a successful court petition to have Goto released for medical care at a Tokyo hospital, Maki said.
The Times is not naming the other three transplant recipients in this article because neither they nor their lawyers could be reached.
Several transplant experts and bioethicists contacted by The Times said they were troubled by the transplants, especially because organs are in such short supply in this country. In the year of Goto's surgery, 186 people in the Los Angeles region died waiting for a liver, U.S. transplant statistics show.
Some, but not all, of the experts said a transplant center has an obligation to determine whether a patient would be a worthy custodian of an organ and to protect potential donors' faith in the system.
"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," said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.
In a statement, the UCLA Health System said it could not comment on specific cases because of federal patient privacy laws. Generally, it said it complies with all the rules and regulations of the United Network for Organ Sharing, the federal contractor charged with ensuring the safety and fairness of the U.S. transplant system. Last year, UCLA performed more liver transplants than any other U.S. hospital.
"UCLA's processes for evaluating a patient -- both for mental and physical suitability for organ transplants -- are the same regardless of whether the individual is a U.S. citizen or a foreign national," the statement said.
Hospitals and doctors in the U.S. have the final say on which patients get added to their waiting lists and have the discretion to refuse patients with unhealthy lifestyles that could compromise the transplant's success. Patients may be refused on other grounds as well, including an inability to pay.
At the time of Goto's 2001 transplant, liver allocations were made based on both a patient's medical status and waiting time. Since 2002, livers have been allocated to patients based almost entirely on how sick they are.
It is unclear when Goto joined UCLA's waiting list. He had been in the United States two months when he received a new liver. Overall, 34% of the patients added to UCLA's liver waiting list between January 1999 and December 2001 received a new liver within three years of being listed, national transplant statistics show.
Busuttil, a former president of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons who has testified before Congress on who should receive priority for transplants, released his own statement this week. He did not directly address the transplants of the Japanese patients but said in part:
"As a surgeon, it is not my role to pass moral judgment on the patients who seek my care. . . . If one of my patients, domestic or international, were in a situation that could be life-threatening, of course I would do everything in my power to assure that they would receive proper care.
"I consider that to be part of my responsibility and obligation as a physician."
'A serious player'
On May 18, 2001, Tadamasa Goto boarded Japan Airlines Flight 0062 at Narita International Airport, bound for Los Angeles with his son Masato.
Goto, now 65, had hepatitis C and was worried it would develop into cancer, Maki, Goto's lawyer, said in an interview last week in his Tokyo office. Because Japan has an extreme shortage of organ donors, many sick patients feel they need to go abroad to seek treatment.
The FBI did not help Goto arrange his surgery with UCLA but did help him gain entry to this country, Stern said. The agency had long been frustrated by the reluctance of Japanese law enforcement to share information on yakuza members in the United States.
"For American law enforcement, it's been like pulling teeth to get criminal intelligence from Japanese authorities," said David Kaplan, a journalist who co-wrote the book "Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld," published in 2003 by the University of California Press.
In his book, Kaplan describes Goto's gang, the Goto-gumi, as an offshoot of the largest Japanese organized crime group, the Yamaguchi-gumi. In an interview, Kaplan said Goto is "a serious player in the yakuza. His gang is known for being particularly ruthless and violent."
A senior member of the group and an affiliated gang member were sentenced to prison for the 1992 slashing of a Japanese director whose film portrayed the yakuza as violent thugs, according to a story in the Japan Times. Goto was not personally implicated in the case.
Goto underwent a successful transplant in July 2001. He received the liver of a young man who died in a traffic accident, Maki said. "Goto is over 60 now, but his liver is young," he said.
Several years after the transplant, in May 2006, Goto was arrested in Japan on suspicion of real estate fraud.
Maki said he and other lawyers worried that their client was not well enough to be interrogated. In addition to his liver problem, Goto was suffering from heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
The lawyers asked that Goto be released immediately, but authorities rejected the request, Maki said. He said the lawyers asked that Goto be given his medication at precise times, but that did not happen either. "Goto lost his appetite, had a terrible headache, scratched his arm until it started to get infected, and he was throwing up," Maki said.
Maki used the interview to vent against Japanese prosecutors, saying he believes they were attempting to exploit his client's poor health to obtain a conviction on what Maki considered groundless charges.
He said Busuttil, along with doctors from Tokyo University Hospital and Showa University Hospital in Tokyo, examined Goto and recommended that he be released for outside medical treatment.
On May 24, 2006, some 16 days after he was arrested, the court temporarily released Goto and he entered the hospital.
Goto was acquitted of the charges in March of this year.
"The UCLA doctor [Busuttil] examined Goto during his detention and again one week after he received his not-guilty ruling," Maki said.
The law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Goto's criminal history includes prison time. But Maki said that his client's last conviction was three decades ago, for assault, and that his previous convictions were as a youth.
Court records in Japan are kept by prosecutors who generally do not share them with anyone not party to a case.
Jake Adelstein, a former reporter at Japan's largest daily newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, said he received a tip about the circumstances surrounding Goto's liver transplant in 2005. Within days of making inquiries, however, Adelstein was visited by men who told him: "Erase the story or be erased," he said in an interview.
Adelstein did not pursue the story but mentioned the incident in a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post. He said he would elaborate on it in a forthcoming book.
Dealing with scandals
Word of the surgeries at UCLA comes as the U.S. transplant system is slowly recovering from scandals that forced the closure of three transplant programs in California. In one of those, St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles moved a Saudi national up a liver waiting list, bypassing dozens of others, and then covered it up by falsifying paperwork, officials there have acknowledged.
Overseers of the U.S. transplant system say they are unaware of other cases in which hospitals have provided organs to foreign criminals. But some hospitals, including Stanford University Medical Center, have performed transplants on U.S. prisoners -- often controversial because taxpayers foot the bill.
According to the ethics committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, "one's status as a prisoner should not preclude them from consideration for a transplant."
The network encourages transplant programs to give foreign recipients less than 5% of organs from deceased donors each year, but that is not a hard-and-fast rule. At one point, in the 1980s, the threshold was 10%, but it was lowered after Congress considered banning transplants for foreign nationals entirely.
Centers that exceed the 5% guideline are asked for an explanation in writing, but none has been sanctioned publicly. In 2001, the year Goto received his transplant, UCLA slightly exceeded the guideline.
Typically, transplant experts say, foreigners cannot receive transplants at U.S. centers unless they are willing to pay the full cost of the procedure out of pocket -- without the substantial discounts given to insurers. Charges for a liver transplant and immediate follow-up care generally exceed $523,000, according to an April report by Milliman Inc., an actuarial firm.
It could not be determined how much UCLA and Busuttil were paid for the Japanese transplants.
Tom Mone, chief executive of OneLegacy, the group responsible for procuring and distributing organs in much of Southern California, said transplants for foreign criminals are "an unfortunate result of a system that's magnanimous to the world."
Mone also said hospitals do not have the resources to investigate their patients. "The enforcement should be at the borders, not at the hospital," he said.
In recent years, nonresident foreign nationals have accounted for less than 1% of all transplant recipients nationwide, transplant statistics show.
Dr. Mark Fox, associate director of the Oklahoma Bioethics Center, said the UCLA transplants may create pressure to eliminate transplants for foreign nationals entirely, which Fox said he does not support.
"For some people, there are misgivings for transplanting foreign nationals at all. For some people, there are misgivings about transplanting criminals at all," he said. "When you put those two together, it is certainly reasonable to expect that a certain portion of the population would say, 'This is not what I expected when I signed my donor card.' "
続報（LAタイムズ）
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-ucla31-2008may31,0,7495360.story
After livers, cash to UCLA
Japanese Police
Tadamasa Goto received a life-saving liver transplant at UCLA Medical Center. Goto is one of Japan's most powerful gang bosses, which experts describe as vindictive and at times brutal.
A Japanese mob boss and another man said to have gang ties each donated $100,000 after their transplants. The university said the gifts had absolutely no bearing on the surgeries.
By Charles Ornstein and John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
May 31, 2008
» Discuss Article (348 Comments)
A powerful Japanese gang boss who received a liver transplant at UCLA Medical Center donated $100,000 to the Westwood hospital shortly after the surgery, The Times has learned.
A plaque dated November 2001 at the entryway to a seventh-floor surgery office reads, "In grateful recognition of the Goto Research Fund established through the generosity of Mr. Tadamasa Goto."
UCLA confirmed the amount of the donation Friday. Law enforcement sources say Goto, 65, is the leader of the ruthless Goto-gumi gang. He received a transplant at UCLA in July 2001, The Times reported Thursday. He made his donation less than three months later.
UCLA also acknowledged that it received a separate $100,000 donation from another man who figured in Thursday's story. He donated in 2002, the year of his transplant.
The man was identified by a law enforcement official as one of four Japanese men now barred from entering the United States because of their suspected gang affiliations, criminal records, or both. All four received new livers at UCLA between 2000 and 2004, The Times reported.
The Times is not naming the second donor because it has not been able to reach him or his lawyer about the law enforcement assertion. Japanese police do not generally make public information about gang affiliations.
UCLA spokeswoman Dale Tate said the university had "no reason to question" the source of the money given by Goto or the other donor. Both donations were deposited into the Department of Surgery's Discretionary Fund, she said. When asked if the money had any bearing on the men's transplants, Tate said: "Absolutely not."
In a written statement, Tate said the surgery discretionary fund was used to support research and education for the liver transplant program.
UCLA's actions drew attention Friday from a leading U.S. senator and mixed reaction from doctors and transplant professionals.
The surgeries took place at a time of persistent shortages of donor livers. In the year of Goto's transplant, 186 patients on the list for livers died while waiting for the operation in the greater Los Angeles region.
U.S. transplant rules allow hospitals to provide organs to patients with criminal histories and to a limited number of foreign patients, but both topics have been controversial. News that UCLA had provided livers to foreigners barred from the country generated considerable comment Friday.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who has considerable influence on federal health policy and an interest in transplant oversight going back several years, said he was "worried about the credibility of the transplant system" and would demand additional information from the university.
If the transplant system "doesn't have credibility, we're not going to have people donate organs," said Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees federal hospital funds. "I think I have to get to the bottom of things."
Some said they worried the surgeries would discourage people from donating organs; others said that there are so few transplants going to either foreigners or criminals that it should have no effect.
All four of the transplants were performed by Dr. Ronald W. Busuttil, executive chairman of UCLA's surgery department, according to a person familiar with the cases. Goto's lawyer, Yoshiyuki Maki, previously confirmed that his client received a transplant at UCLA and that Busuttil subsequently examined Goto in Japan. Neither Maki nor Goto could be reached for further comment Friday.
Goto had been prohibited from entering this country before his transplant, but the FBI agreed to help him get a visa in exchange for information on potentially illegal activities in the United States by Japanese gangs, commonly known as yakuza, a former FBI official said. Goto provided little information of use, he said.
There is no evidence that UCLA or Busuttil knew at the time of the surgeries that any of the patients had a criminal record or ties to the yakuza. Both said in statements earlier this week that they do not make moral judgments about patients and treat them based on their medical need.
Busuttil, a world-renowned surgeon and co-editor of a leading text on liver transplantation, said in his statement that he considers it "part of my responsibility and obligation as a physician" to ensure that his patients receive proper care whether in the U.S. or abroad.
Busuttil declined to comment Friday through his attorney, citing federal patient-privacy laws.
It is not uncommon for transplant recipients or other grateful patients to donate money to hospitals after receiving life-saving medical care. Businessman Robert A. Day and his wife Kelly, for instance, donated $30 million last year to the UCLA Department of Surgery to express their gratitude for his liver transplant two years earlier.
Even so, Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said hospitals have a responsibility to inquire about the source of their gifts.
"It starts to defy credulity that you're not going to be curious about who these people are, if only to ask them for more money down the road," he said. "Any development officer who didn't follow up a $100,000 gift with a check of who this guy is and who his friends are would be an ex-development officer."
Wealthy foreigners, he added, are attractive to transplant programs because not only do they pay the full cost for their procedures, but they often make gifts of gratitude later.
Dr. Joseph Tector, chief of transplant at the Clarian Transplant Institute at Indiana University, defended UCLA's actions. The occupations of his patients are not relevant, he said.
"As doctors, you are not a member of the clergy to ascertain someone's worthiness," he said. "You don't want to discriminate. These calls don't come so much into questions with other procedures. But with livers, the water is muddied because not everyone can get transplants. There aren't enough livers. "
But Dr. David Mulligan, a liver transplant surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, took issue with UCLA's statement that it does not make moral decisions when it adds patients to its transplant waiting list. He said transplant professionals make such decisions every day.
"By saying that we don't impose any kind of a moral judgment on people is not entirely complete," he said, "because I think that every transplant center has members of the [selection] committee who are social workers and financial aid advisors and psychiatrists who are intensely involved in the estimation of every potential recipient and their ability to progress with a full and long-standing recovery."
"I don't think that transplant centers can turn a blind eye to patients' social histories and their backgrounds," he said, adding that his center has run criminal background checks on some American patients about whom it has questions.
Transplant rules give hospitals and doctors the final say on which patients get added to their waiting lists, and they have the discretion to refuse patients with unhealthy lifestyles that could compromise the transplant's success. Patients may be refused on other grounds as well, including an inability to pay.
One L.A. doctor said he believes that UCLA's reputation as a first-class transplant center will suffer from the news of the four transplants.
"It's going to have a real negative effect," said Dr. David Boska, an internist in Brentwood who says he has referred 10 patients to UCLA over the last decade. "Their interest is to make sure people know they have a first-rate program. This isn't going to help."
Boska, who said he is a friend of Busuttil, added: "I have lost faith in the system, not the program," he said.
"You have a brother who dies because he doesn't have $500,000 to spend on a liver. That's a terrible thing to think about. Then you learn that we have foreign criminals who come in and get livers. That's not good.
"But it's terrible thing that we don't have any guidelines. We should have them. We have all these people dying in Los Angeles."
ニュースビデオ
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-ucla30-ktla,0,6086017.worldnowvideo
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