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New York Daily News — When Cindy Ramos wanted to quit her job as a diplomat’s maid, just giving notice wasn’t an option.

Like a number of immigrants brought to the U.S. on special visas to work for consulate officials, she had her passport taken, little money and orders to stay inside.

It took a cloak-and-dagger operation to secure her escape — ending an eight-month nightmare that advocates say is an all-too-familiar tale.

“I was always thinking to myself and asking, ‘How can I leave?” said Ramos, 38, a Filipina whose real name has been changed to protect her identity.

Immigrant groups say they have helped dozens of virtual prisoners like Ramos in the city, becoming experts at engineering getaways. Ramos was one of the 3,000 foreigners allowed into the U.S. every year on A3 and G5 visas to work in the homes of diplomats or other international honchos.

Starting in 2008, she worked for an African “ambassador,” declining to be more specific because she fears retribution during a federal probe into her case.

“Even the first day, I felt fear already,” she said. “After one week of working I asked if I could get a day off, and he said I couldn’t go out. He told me I couldn’t talk to other people.”

For three months, she worked 17-hour shifts without a day off. The boss told her an alarm would go off if she opened the front door of the Manhattan home.

He also confiscated her passport, called her stupid and threw a fork at her, she said.

“The ambassador wanted all of his clothes ironed — but before he would leave (in the morning) he wanted them ironed again so that they would be warm,” she said.

Though her sister and five kids back home relied on her $1,000-a-month salary, Ramos told her boss’ Filipino driver she had to get out.

He called the Damayan Migrant Workers Association, and Ramos had to figure out how to get out to meet a staffer.

“There was a grocery close to the house and I told the ambassador that I got my period and I really had to buy sanitary pads,” she said.

She hurried to a nearby McDonald’s, met her savior, and hatched a plan to flee the ambassador’s residence forever.

A week later, Ramos received rare permission to go to church. When she came out, a Damayan member was waiting in a car and whisked the nerve-wracked woman to a safe house in Queens.

She had barely any clothes and no shoes. “I left in a pair of flip flops,” said Ramos, who now works as a $600-a-week nanny. Damayan case manager Leah Obias says the group has overseen the escape of about a dozen women who fled their jobs as live-in maids and helped 20 others who got out on their own. Seven of the women, including Ramos, have been certified by the feds as human trafficking victims, which could help them stay here. “These women were literally trapped inside homes,” Obias said. “Diplomats were able to control their workers in the extreme way that they could because they face no accountability.”

Suzanne Tomatore of the City Bar Justice Center said she has represented a dozen diplomat trafficking victims since 2002. There is no definitive data, but a 2008 Government Accountability Office report cited 42 trafficking complaints about diplomats since 2000. The State Department says in 2010 there were more than a dozen allegations of abuse or servitude of A3 and G5 visa holders. From 2005 to 2008, the Justice Department opened at least 19 probes into human trafficking by those with diplomatic immunity. Damayan is hosting a rally Sunday to urge the feds to suspend special visas for countries they say are repeat offenders: the Philippines, Kuwait and Tanzania. Representatives of those countries would not comment on specific cases. The State Department says it takes the cases seriously. Criminal charges for diplomats are very rare, but in some civil cases, judges waive diplomatic immunity.

After Damayan helped maid Marichu Baoanan escape in 2006, she successfully sued her ambassador employer. Baoanan, a Filipina who says she was “enslaved” in an E. 66th St. townhouse by United Nations ambassador Lauro Baja, got an undisclosed settlement in 2011.

“She said that she felt like she was in prison,” said Ivy Suriyopas, of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Baoanan’s opportunity to escape came after she disobeyed orders to answer the home phone and pleaded for help to the Tagalog-speaking stranger on the other end, who alerted Damayan. Damayan finds other trapped workers through word of mouth. One live-in maid confided in a housekeeper who worked in the same building. That woman told her boss, who got Damayan involved. Messages were passed along in a chain to plan an escape. The Queens non-profit Adhikaar has aided Nepali-speaking maids.

Executive director Luna Ranjit said one woman turned up gaunt from three years of near-starvation, after a fellow maid she met shopping helped her. Last month, a Manhattan judge ruled the woman, Shanti Gurung, deserves nearly $1.5 million from her boss, Indian diplomat Neena Malhotra, who is accused of making Gurung sleep on the floor and work three years for only $150.

“She’s in a much better place now,” Ranjit said.

By Erica Pearson

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