Lakireddy Bali Reddy

Lakireddy Bali Reddy (1937 – November 8, 2021) was an Indian and American landlord, convicted felon, and chairman of the Lakireddy Balireddy College of Engineering in Andhra Pradesh.

Reddy exploited the Indian caste system to bring young Indian women and girls to Berkeley, California.

Reddy was born in 1937 in the village of Velvadam, in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, India and at age 17 was married for the first time to a 14-year-old girl.

Married three times, Reddy has three sons, Raj, Vijay and Prasad Lakireddy.

Reddy came to the United States in 1960 to study engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reddy completed his Bachelor's in Science and Bachelor's in Technology degrees from Osmania University in Hyderabad and then attended the University of California, Berkeley on a scholarship in 1960, graduating with a master's degree in chemical engineering.

By 1975, Reddy had opened a successful Indian cuisine restaurant in downtown Berkeley.

In 1975, Reddy opened the Pasand Madras Indian Cuisine restaurant in downtown Berkeley.

Over the years, he used its profits to acquire more than 1,000 run-down apartment buildings.

Raj died in a motorcycle crash while attending Chennai Medical college in 1985.

From 1986 to 1999, he and his family members and associates forced them into servitude and sexual slavery.

Beginning in 1986, Reddy used his status to convince them that he could better their lives by bringing them to America.

Reddy brought as many as 99 people, mostly women and girls, to the United States.

In many cases, he used fraudulent visas, sham marriages, and fake identities.

Anita Chabria, a California-based journalist, wrote, "Reddy ruled over his victims like a feudal lord, imposing his law rather than U.S. law by keeping his targets isolated and afraid — of him, and of their tenuous position as illegal immigrants — and by importing the rules of the caste system, an apartheid that India has fought to eradicate but that still governs the daily lives of many Hindus".

On November 24, 1999, Marcia Poole, a longtime Berkeley resident, while driving on a side street in Berkeley, became suspicious when she saw four Indian men moving what she first thought was a rolled-up rug out of a Reddy-owned apartment building and putting it into a Reddy Realty van.

Upon looking more closely at the rug being carried, she noticed a leg sticking out of it.

Poole noticed, in the crowd of bystanders, a distraught young Indian girl, later identified as 18-year-old Laxmi Patati.

When the men tried to drag that girl into the van too, who was "resisting with all her might," Poole stopped them and was able to get a passing driver to call the police.

Police found the body of 13-year-old Sitha Vemireddy (later identified as one of Reddy's concubines) in the apartment building's stairwell.

Her sister, Lalitha, was alive but disoriented in the van.

Police investigators, who did not know what had happened when they arrived on the scene, asked Reddy to interpret for them, which Lt. Cynthia Harris, chief of detectives and public information officer for the Berkeley Police Department, later admitted was a mistake.

Reddy told the police that Patati was the roommate of sisters Sitha and Lalitha and had discovered them both unconscious when she returned to their shared apartment.

Police accepted Reddy's story, and the coroner ruled the death of Sitha to be accidental carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked heating vent, and the investigation was closed.

Less than a month later, in December 1999, the Berkeley Police received an anonymous letter saying that Reddy had lied to them which caused a new investigation to be opened into Sitha's death, but, by that time, her body had been cremated on Reddy's orders.

The Berkeley Police then joined with the INS in a larger investigation of Reddy that was joined by the FBI and the DOJ.

Following the November 24, 1999 death of 13-year-old Sitha Vemireddy and the December 1999 anonymous letter they had received about her death, the Berkeley Police Department opened a new investigation into Reddy teaming with the INS and re-interviewing her roommates Lalitha and Patati, and the man who Reddy said was their father, Venkateswara Vemireddy.

Using their own interpreters for this new investigation, the Berkeley Police and INS caused Reddy associates Venkateswara Vemireddy and his sister, Padma, to confess that he was not Sitha's father.

He used its profits to purchase over 1,000 run-down apartments, making him, by the year 2000, the largest and wealthiest landlord in the city (other than the University of California), with a worth estimated at US$69million.

In 2000, Reddy was indicted by the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California who charged him with sex trafficking, visa fraud, and tax code violations following a lengthy investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor, and the Berkeley Police Department.

By 2000, he had used its profits to become the second largest property owner in the city, second only to the University of California.

By 2000, he owned real estate assets valued at US$69million and had income of US$1million per month from his 1,000 rental properties.

Reddy also owned a construction company with his brother Hanimireddy Lakireddy (a Yale University-trained cardiologist) that was located near his restaurant in Berkeley.

He opened a second Pasand Indian Cuisine Restaurant in Santa Clara and owned nightclubs in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Reddy used his money to improve his home community of Velvadam, where he built two elementary schools and a high school, created sources of clean drinking water, and paid for a new wing at the local hospital.

Because of Reddy's many capital expenditures, Velvadam became known as a "mini-U.S.A."

Some villagers adored him for his power and spending.

The majority of the villagers in Velvadam were of the Dalit ("untouchable") caste.

On June 21, 2001, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California announced that Reddy pled guilty to one count of conspiring to commit immigration fraud, two counts of transportation of minors for illegal sexual activity, and one count of subscribing to a false tax return for which he was fined US$2million (~$ in ) and sentenced to serve a prison term of 97 months (8 years 1 month) in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Reddy's case ultimately served as the building block for California's anti-trafficking movement.