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Reddy Plea Bargain Made Public

Nirshan Perera

The man who helped East Bay landlord Lakireddy Bali Reddy bring two Indian girls into the country by posing as their father struck a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, according to court documents made public for the first time.

Venkateswara Vemireddy pleaded guilty on May 29, 2000, to one count of conspiring to bring illegal aliens into the United States. In return, the US government agreed not to pursue additional charges against him and perhaps used the deal as leverage in brokering Lakireddy's guilty plea last March.

'I assisted (the girls) in obtaining fraudulent Indian passports so they could travel to the United States under false identities,' Vemireddy wrote in the seven-page plea agreement unsealed after protracted legal proceedings undertaken by lawyers for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The court papers detailed Vemireddy's role in the immigrant smuggling operation that draped infamy around one of the richest and highly regarded Indian families in Berkeley.

According to the authorities, Reddy met Vemireddy in India and gave him and his sister $ 6,500 to pose as the girls' parents and come to the US with them. Although Vemireddy's H-1B visa lists him as a company analyst, he washed dishes in Reddy's restaurant.

Vemireddy's guilty plea carries up to five years in prison and $ 250,000 in fines. His sentencing date will be scheduled on May 22.

Reddy, his brother Jayaprakash Lakireddy and sister-in-law Annapurna Kaireddy, have all pleaded guilty to importing poor villagers from Andhra Pradesh for cheap labor. In court, Reddy also admitted that he and other male family members often had or conspired to have sex with the immigrant girls, some as young as 11.

Reddy's two sons, Vijay and Prasad Lakireddy, have bowed out of the family's package plea deal and may go on trial later this year.

According to the authorities, for 15 years, the Reddys brought Indians into the United States and exploited them in their vast real estate empire, which includes 1,100 apartment units and two popular Indian restaurants, both named Pasand. Many immigrants were brought into the country on fake H-1B visas through a dummy tech company set up by Vijay Lakireddy. Others were fraudulently sponsored by Vemireddy.

The story was exposed a few months after 17-year-old Chanti Prattipati, a girl sponsored by Vemireddy, died from carbon monoxide poisoning in an apartment owned by Reddy. Her November 1999 death, and a deluge of tips and allegations it spurred, forced the authorities to launch a federal investigation of Reddy and his cohorts.

The real estate mogul was finally picked up in January 2000 and placed under house arrest, while prosecutors negotiated a plea with his lawyers. Over the following month, other family members were also arrested and charged with immigrant smuggling. Vemireddy was indicted in March and kept in a federal safe house in the East Bay.

Reddy faces seven years in prison and was ordered to pay $ 2 million to his victims and their families.

A multimillion dollar civil suit again Reddy is also in the works. A lawyer representing the victims did not leave out the possibility that Vemireddy may be sued or his testimony used as evidence against Reddy.

"The civil suit is still in the investigation stage, so it would be premature to rule out anything at this point," said Jayashri Srikantiah, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who represents Prattipati's surviving sister and several other young victims.

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