Amid all the unsavory connections unearthed by the sting that snared a Broward County School Board member, a weirdly incongruent entity kept popping up.

It just didn't calculate. What was this do-gooder operation, a self-described ``nonprofit, all-voluntary, blood collection agency,'' doing there in the midst of a federal corruption investigation, playing big-money politics to protect an exclusive deal with the Broward County School Board?

Why would the Community Blood Center of South Florida pay Neil Sterling, king of the school board lobbyists, $100,000 a year?

Or invent a mystery job for a school board member -- make that ex-school board member, since Beverly Gallagher was nabbed by the FBI. It's the kind of business plan you'd expect from a conniving, for-profit contractor. But a life-saving nonprofit? For the right to collect volunteer blood donations from school kiddies?

BIG BUSINESS

Me? I was confounded.

State Sen. Don Gaetz? Not so much. ``This is a multi-hundred-million-dollar business,'' he said.

The Senate Health Regulation Committee, chaired by the Republican senator from Destin, has been investigating the peculiar finances of the state's blood bank industries. ``We're looking at the costs of blood and what goes into those costs,'' said Gaetz. The committee report is due Dec. 1. ``And it could lead to legislation.''

After church services at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Niceville, Gaetz regularly meets with a few parishioners -- his personal focus group. On Sunday, he asked them to guess the market value of a pint of blood that they had donated at the church drive. ``The blood they thought they were donating to a charity,'' Gaetz said. ``They're amazed to learn that their donated blood can be sold for as much as $350 or even $400 a pint.''

Gaetz's suspicions about the blood bank industry were piqued by an Orlando Sentinel investigation into the high salaries and luxurious expenses enjoyed by executives of the Florida Blood Centers of Orlando, with a CEO who knocked down $595,675 in 2007 and nine others making more than $100,000. Nonprofit? Yes. Charitable? Only if you worked in the executive suites.

BIG SALARIES

The 2007 IRS nonprofit Form 909 filed by the Community Blood Centers of South Florida indicated that in 2007 CEO Charles Rouault made $484,447 (not counting $100,000-plus in benefits) while his top six executives enjoyed salaries ranging from $117,347 to $281,666. The salaries come out of the $90 million the outfit grossed from blood sales (against $81 million in expenses).

Suddenly, I understood why the blood center executives would spend an unseemly amount of money to protect their monopoly on Broward public school blood drives.

``I want to know if we have restraint of trade going on here,'' Gaetz said. ``I want to know if they've carved up the state and effectively precluded competition.'' The senator suggested that inflated blood prices were a factor in driving up the cost of healthcare.

``I think that people in my church group might be surprised that a blood bank would pay a school board member for a no-show job,'' Gaetz said. ``Given the fact that we all pay for this with higher healthcare bills and higher insurance premium, they might be angry.''

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