PRICELESS: Former Manhattan socialite Taylor Stein with her son, Ren Friedrick, whom she adopted after a hellish ordeal with a baby-brokering ring that preyed on wealthy women desperate for a child. (Dimitrious Kambouris/WireImage.com)
DADDY ISSUE: Estée Lauder chief William Lauder, here with then-wife Karen, has a love child with Stein.
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A beautiful city socialite bought a black-market baby for $180,000 — then helped the FBI bring down the kiddie-peddling ring that sold him to her.
Former Manhattan society girl Taylor Stein — who also has a love child with cosmetics billionaire William Lauder — wept at times as she recounted to The Post yesterday how she unwittingly became embroiled in the sensational case involving three female fiends who used cash-strapped surrogates and sperm and egg donors from Ukraine to prey on the rich and desperate, charging at least $100,000 per baby.
“Looking back, there are signs I should have seen. But I didn’t, I just didn’t,” Stein said.
The single mom, who now lives in LA, said her nightmare began in 2009, when she decided to adopt a sibling for Djuna, her 4-year-old daughter with the Estée Lauder chief.
“I was trying to adopt a child in need . . . and it became very, very complicated,” and then an agency popped up, said Stein, the daughter of New York City rock-promoter legend Howard Stein.
“My girlfriend had an attorney . . . [who] told me she had a baby who was originally meant to be adopted by another couple. They had employed a surrogate, and the couple just walked away, and would you like the baby?
“I decided this kid was in need . . . so I went through with it.”
Stein never got that child.
The agency — which recruited surrogates and wealthy parent wannabes over the Internet, peppering them with e-mails dubbed “Baby Dreams” and promises of designer kiddies — told the socialite midway through the deal in September 2009 that “my surrogate had run away.
“They told me she was a crackhead . . . a vegan, and she wanted to give birth with a doula [labor coach],” Stein said.
“In fact, she was already onto the agency and [ultimately] was the first person to contact the FBI. [She] is the heroine in all this.”
The unsuspecting Stein was told not to worry about her supposedly wayward surrogate.
“Within two weeks, [high-powered baby-brokering lawyer Hilary Neiman] called me and said, ‘You are not going to believe this, we have another one!’ ” Stein recalled. “I said, ‘This is crazy. Does this happen often?’ She said, ‘Yes.’
“They said my surrogate was Canadian . . . [and that] her intended parents had backed out of the deal and they were willing to reassign me the contract.”
Still, she and the surrogate “were never allowed to speak directly, which was weird,” she said.
“Usually, they like you to cultivate a relationship. But I thought, ‘You know what, she’s been through a traumatic experience. She just got dumped by her intended parents,’ and I just wanted to do whatever [the surrogate] wanted.
“At that time, I had no reason to believe it was illegal. I thought it was bizarre, but that is why women who want children are great victims, because they do not allow their heads to go into this place because they want a baby so desperately.”
So Stein started wiring payments.
Neiman “had sent me information on what I later learned were fictitious egg and sperm donors,” Stein said. “She sent me profiles of two Texan kids, these blond, blue-eyed, perfect kids who looked so young.
“She thought [they] would fit into my family’s profile. [The ring] gave me their pictures, their dates of birth, their families’ medical history, all fictitious.”
The scheme thrived for at least six years, partly because of the “face” of the ring — Neiman, 32, a “buttoned-up, pretty, pristine girl,” Stein said, from tony Chevy Chase, Md., and Theresa Erickson, 43, a prominent surrogacy attorney frequently recruited as an “expert” guest by local TV and radio stations in San Diego.
The third cohort was a surrogate herself, Carla Chambers, 51, who boasted of having carried at least a half-dozen babies for the business and feverishly recruited other surrogates, too.
By the time the feds caught up with the ring, it had brokered illicit baby deals with at least 12 unsuspecting families.
“I know some of them are from New York,” Stein said.
The ring worked by first luring US surrogates with the promise of payments of between $38,000 and $45,000.
One recruit was a grocery-store cashier from Missouri with five kids, said the LA Times. Another was a mortgage underwriter from Texas.
The women were then whisked to Ukraine to be implanted with fertilized eggs from anonymous donors. The location ensured that the babies would be white and that there would be far less oversight on the medical procedure.
The ring waited until a surrogate was at least 12 weeks along, when the fetus was statistically safe, before lining up a “buyer.”
The would-be parents could even pick their baby’s sex.
One catch was that the babies had to be born in California, one of the few states that allows the name of a nonbiological parent of a surrogate baby to be put on the birth certificate without a lengthy adoption process.
The group flagrantly skirted the other main obstacle: By law, surrogate arrangements must be inked before pregnancy begins, not after.
The ring had apparently been on the feds’ radar for a while, but it took Stein to rein it in.
“Her assistance in the investigation was tremendous,” said one law-enforcement source close to the probe.
Stein recalled, “Two weeks before the baby was born, I got a phone call from the FBI. They were waiting for me outside my house. I was petrified.
“They told me, ‘We believe you have been the victim of an international fraud’ . . . and they told me they needed my help.
“I was the ideal person . . . because my baby had not yet been delivered, so I wasn’t one of those parents who was petrified of losing their child,” Stein said.
“They asked me to make some phone calls, be wired, get information, get as many confessions as possible and bully them into telling the truth, which I did.
“The confessions from Hilary were the best . . . I called her, and I said, ‘I know there were no intended parents [for my baby], and I was the first one. I know that the profiles of the parents are false. You will give my surrogate the remainder of her money, and you will give me the excess of the money back,’ ” Stein said.
“I got Hilary to send me money back the same day,” she said, adding that she wasn’t completely reimbursed, although she made sure her surrogate got her promised $26,000.
Neiman, Erickson and Chambers have pleaded guilty to wire-fraud charges and face sentencing in October.
Neiman’s lawyer, Joseph McMullen, told The Post that his client “is tremendously sorry and remorseful.”
Meanwhile, Stein adopted the baby she’d been promised.
“I went and got [the surrogate], brought her to my home in LA . . . paid her health bills, took care of her, and she gave me the most beautiful son ever,” Stein said.
“My son was born in March 2011. His name is Ren Friedrick, He is 5 months old.”
Stein said she is working on a documentary “about the transparency of donors.
“My son has no information about the identity of his real parents, and I think that is a birth right,” she said.
“I want to go to the Ukraine to track down my son’s donors so that he has some idea of his DNA, and change some laws in DC so that all adopted children have the right to find out the identity of their true parents.
Her documentary will be called “White Collar, Black Market — the Surrogacy Loophole.”
“I want to make a change . . . so [my son] doesn’t feel the victim out of this,” Stein said. “He’s a game changer.
“Hopefully, after his story, everything will be different.”
Additional reporting by Kate Sheehy & Bruce Golding