Near-victim alerted FBI
An Upper West Side woman says she was nearly duped by the same black-market baby ring as socialite Taylor Stein -- but saved herself big bucks and heartache after she grew suspicious of the shady group.
"They gave me the same story as they told Taylor Stein. They said they had a pregnant surrogate and the intended parents had left" and they now had a soon-to-be-born baby who needed a parent, Christine Ciampa, 45, who lives on Central Park West, recalled to The Post yesterday.
Stein, a former Manhattan society girl living in California, had shelled out $180,000 for a baby in the scam -- and then worked with the FBI to help bring the ring down, The Post reported in an exclusive, front-page story yesterday.
Ciampa, who is single, said she had been struggling to become a mom herself for five years.
"When I was unsuccessful in having my own pregnancy, I tried to adopt," said Ciampa, who works for her family's Flushing-based real-estate firm, the Ciampa Organization.
"Being a single woman in her 40s, I was told over and over again it was easier to do a private adoption than through an agency, because parents often don't choose a single woman in her 40s, especially one living in a city."
So she embarked on the private route, placing ads seeking help on the Internet and in newspapers.
That's when she was contacted a year ago by the rogue ring, which was illegally trafficking babies carried by US surrogates impregnated in the Ukraine by anonymous egg and sperm donors.
"What made me suspicious is that at first, they said the child was a boy," Ciampa said. "Then they told me the baby boy had already been rematched . . . [and] it became a girl due even earlier.
"They told me the fertility treatments took place in California . . . [but] the agency would only give me brief information on the donors," she said.
"I kept asking for more documents on the donors and the fertility clinic, which I knew was standard practice, and they could not provide that.
"It sounded very shady, and when I asked questions they got very defensive," Ciampa said.
"Then a month into the process, they began pestering me for money. They sounded very desperate," she said.
"They were asking me for $150,000 when it was all done, in increments. I stopped contact," she said. "I took advice from three lawyers who . . . all said, 'I wouldn't touch this situation with a 10-foot pole.' "
She said that shortly after, last fall, the FBI contacted one of her lawyers, and she handed over all her paperwork .
"[The FBI] said they had been tracking [the ring] for a long time," she said.
Stein wound up playing a crucial role in the ring's takedown, working with agents to get a key player to admit her guilt on tape. She later legally adopted her child delivered by surrogate.
As for Ciampa, her story is ending happily, too.
"Thankfully, I am now expecting through a legitimate surrogate and agency in California," she said.
"It will be twin boys for me in November!"
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