VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: Waking Up in a Hotel Bathtub Missing a Kidney

Posted on: August 5, 2024, 08:04h. 

Last updated on: August 5, 2024, 10:04h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Las Vegas Myths.

Welcome to the one people have requested since we started this series two years and 106 busted myths ago.

AI’s depiction of some people’s deepest Las Vegas fear. (Image: Microsoft Designer)

For decades, businessmen are believed to have awoken in ice-filled Las Vegas hotel bathtubs, remembering that drink they were fixed the night before by the illegal sex worker they asked up to their room.

That’s when, the story goes, they notice a note left on a nearby counter. It reads: “Your kidney has been removed. Seek immediate medical attention.”

Renal 911!

While cavorting with an illegal sex worker gets the occasional tipsy tourist “trick-rolled” for his Rolex and other valuables, none of those valuables ever includes a vital organ. Not one case of illegal kidney harvesting has been documented in Las Vegas or elsewhere in the US.

This myth began spreading in 1991 via the new medium of computer bulletin boards, according to Jan Brunvand’s 1994 book, “The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends.” That happens to be the same year that “the body in the bed” was born. (We’ll get to that one in a few Mondays.)

As originally told, the businessman was visiting New York when the kidney-snatchers struck.

The myth went mainstream when newspapers picked up on it. Though the story was only retold by columnists attempting to debunk it, what stuck with most readers was the myth, not the debunking.

When asked to render a photo-realistic image of a businessman having a kidney removed, AI responded with this disturbing cartoon in which the businessman appears happy to have just snipped a cord off a giant kidney held by the surgeon like a newborn baby. We can’t make this up. (Image: Microsoft Designer)

“It has a classic structure, dealing with already existing myths about dangerous New York and dovetailing into the much-publicized need for transplant organs,” read a March 31, 1991 column from Wisconsin State-Journal reporter George Hesselberg.

Anatomy of a Myth

Around 1996, the myth picked up its more believability-enhancing details — the ice-filled bathtub and the note on the bathroom counter. Initially, the victim woke up on the plain old floor of his hotel with no note. (Just because you’re a kidney thief doesn’t mean you have to be rude!)

The setting also switched from New York to Las Vegas. We suspect that’s because it dovetails better with Sin City’s roots in organized crime, as well as the known lengths that Strip casino resorts go to prevent information about crimes and deaths on their premises from leaking to the media.

“We get about a dozen inquiries a year about it,” Clark County Coroner Ron Flud told the Las Vegas Sun about the myth back in 1996.

As usual, pop culture didn’t help the cause of truth any. TV portrayed kidney thefts on a 1991 episode of “Law & Order” and a 2006 episode of “Las Vegas,” and the movies included scenes in “The Harvest” (1993) and “Urban Legend” (1998).

By 2001, the myth was so widespread that the National Kidney Foundation asked anyone claiming to have had a kidney stolen in the US to contact them for help in documenting a case.

In 23 years, according to the organization, no one has.

We Kidney You Not

Though no documented cases have occurred in the US, and the scenarios differ markedly, kidney theft is reportedly a thing elsewhere in the world.

According to a 2008 report in Britain’s The Guardian, seven people were arrested in the Indian city of Gurgaon that January for luring 600 laborers to an underground medical clinic over the course of a decade.

Victims of illegal kidney harvesting rings in India display scars they received after being coerced into surgery. (Images: Monir Moniruzzaman/Asia Times

The brokers promised the laborers jobs, then either duped or forced them into donating a kidney to wealthy clients who needed one in the US, UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Greece.

Five people were convicted in the black-market ring. According to a March 2013 report in the Hindustan Times, the scheme’s leaders, Dr. Amit Kumar and Dr. Upender Dublesh, both received seven years each of “rigorous” imprisonment.

Art Caplan, co-chairman of the United Nations task force on organ trafficking, estimated that about a quarter of all kidneys transplanted internationally in 2011 appeared to have been trafficked.

Illegal kidney trafficking has even occurred in the US. In the first proven case, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, 60, was convicted in October 2011 of securing kidneys for three Americans from Israeli donors in exchange for payments of $120K each. He served two and a half years in prison.

Again, though, no documented case of case of kidney theft has ever occurred in the US.

That is, not until the morning you wake up in an ice-filled Las Vegas hotel bathtub with a note on the counter.

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