Business Notes Black Markets I'D

What links 4,500 years of Asian medicine with black bears in American forests and a mysterious murder in Brooklyn? Answer: the burgeoning global trade in scarce animal parts, some used for exotic medical purposes. Police think that a theft of bear gallbladders may have been behind the killing last week of Lee Haeng Gu, a Korean-born businessman who was found in his apartment with his throat slashed. Lee apparently conducted a lucrative international trade in bear parts and kept his wares at home in three freezers.

Bear gallbladders fetch about $18,000 each in Asia, where they are converted into tablet form and taken as a panacea. Conservation officials are worried that high prices for bear parts will bring an increase in illegal bear killings. Most endangered is the grizzly, of which only 1,000 are left in the continental U.S. But not only bears are taken -- sometimes customers are too. Many dealers pass off pig gallbladders as the genuine article.