Los Angeles  - Four top members of Japanese crime gangs the Yakuza were allowed to jump waiting lists and received liver transplants in Los Angeles hospitals, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

Four surgeries were done between 2000 and 2004 at the UCLA hospital at a time of pronounced organ scarcity when more than 100 local patients died each year awaiting liver transplants, the report said.

The most prominent recipient was names as Tadamasa Goto, who heads a gang known as the Goto-gumi and who was officially banned from entering the US. However, the FBI reportedly helped him obtain a visa in exchange for information about US Yakuza activities, the report said.

Surgeons are given huge leeway on deciding who should receive organ transplants and the operations on the Japanese crime bosses do not appear to have broken any laws. But experts on the organ donor system worried that news of the controversial procedures would seriously damage public willingness to volunteer for organ donations.

"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," Arhur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, told the paper.

Goto's operation was performed in 2001 by Dr. Ronald W. Busuttil, executive chairman of UCLA's surgery department and one of the world's top liver surgeons, the report said. The three other men who received transplants were not named since the paper was unable to contact them or their representatives. Liver transplants at UCLA generally cost more than 500,000 dollars, but operations for US persons are generally paid for by insurance companies which receive heavily discounted rates not available to foreigners.

Transplant centers are widely expected to determine whether a patient would be a worthy custodian of an organ and to protect potential donors' faith in the system. But both UCLA and Busuttil said they had acted by the rules. "As a surgeon, it is not my role to pass moral judgment on the patients who seek my care," Busuttil was quoted as saying. "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." (dpa)