Of Lakireddy Balireddy and Unlucky Women
Sid Harth
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Reddy's Son Scraps Plea Deal By OUR STAFF 12/19/2000
Prasad Lakireddy confronts a protestor in front of the family’s Pasand
restaurant.
The case against Berkeley landlord Lakireddy Bali Reddy took yet
another hairpin turn yesterday, when one his sons bailed out of an
impending plea bargain deal, crippling negotiations for the entire
family. Reddy, 63; his two sons, Vijay Kumar Lakireddy, 31, and Prasad
Lakireddy, 42; Reddy’s brother, Jayaprakash Lakireddy, 47; and sister-
in-law Annapurna Lakireddy, 46, were expected to plead guilty on
February 6 to reduced charges of importing Indian villagers for slave
labor and sex, stemming from the death of a pregnant young girl last
November. But according to documents filed in court yesterday, Prasad
Lakireddy has had a change of heart. And if the deal is not salvaged,
the federal government says it will issue a lengthier indictment
against the family and proceed to trail promptly.
Prasad Lakireddy asks protestors not to prejudge his family.
U.S. District Judge Saundra Armstrong held a hearing this morning to
sort out the new developments in the scandal that has haunted the
Indian American community in the Bay Area for over a year. Armstrong
said she received a call from a probation officer assigned to case,
informing her that Prasad Lakireddy, and other defendants named in the
indictment, were consistently skipping meetings mandatory to the
pretrial assessment.
She ordered both sides to renew their dialogue and, in light of Prasad
Lakireddy’s decision, set a new date—February 27—for the next court
hearing. According to Jayashri Srikantiah, a lawyer with the American
Civil Liberties Union representing several victims of the Reddy family,
the hearing and the judge’s response were not unusual. “This is fairly
routine,” she said. “February 27 is now the next date when everyone
will come back into court. Our goal is to bring justice via trial or
plea. Between now and the next court date, both sides will meet and
hopefully resolve our differences.”
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Reddy Family Will Plead Guilty, Civil Lawsuit Looms Large By NIRSHAN
PERERA and SULEMAN DIN 10/26/2000
For months, Lakireddy Bali Reddy maintained his innocence in the face
of sordid accusations that he imported poor Indian villagers for cheap
labor and sex. Protestors picketed his popular Pasand restaurant,
outraged by the death of a pregnant 17-year-old girl that he reportedly
kept in an apartment and used for sex. Disney even pursued a made-for-
TV movie, inspired by the teenage sleuths who broke the story. But the
ballooning furor was deflated this week with the mundane filing of
court documents.
On Wednesday, the federal government handed in a revised indictment,
signaling a plea agreement in the long simmering case. Reddy, however,
still faces the looming danger of a civil case that could jeopardize
his $70 million real estate empire in Berkeley’s East Bay. Reddy, 63,
and four members of his family are expected to plead guilty next week
to criminal charges that include importing at least 50 Indians to work
as indentured servants and sex slaves. The U.S. District Attorney’s
Office dropped three of the nine counts against Reddy and his 31-year-
old son, Vijay Lakireddy.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kennedy also expanded his list of
defendants to include Prasad Lakireddy, 42, another son; Jayaprakash
Lakireddy, 47, Reddy’s youngest brother; and Annapurna Lakireddy, 46,
Jayaprakash Lakireddy’s wife. All five are charged with conspiring to
bring Indians illegally into the U.S. since 1986, utilizing false
identities and sham marriages. Reddy faces additional charges of
trafficking minors for illicit sex, and tax evasion. Vijay Lakireddy is
also charged with helping his father to smuggle girls into the country
for sex.
The impending compromise marks the culmination of a nearly year-long
police investigation of Berkeley’s wealthiest landlord. Local media
initially attached little importance to the obscure death of 17-year-
old Chanti Prattipati in a Reddy-owned apartment. But two tenacious
high school reporters dug around the troubling details surrounding her
accidental November 1999 death from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Their article, which appeared in the Berkeley High Jacket, asked the
obvious: Why was a girl their age not attending school? Megan Greenwell
and Iliana Montauk speculated about the possibility of indentured
servitude, lifting the lid on the Reddys’ immigrant ring. At the same
time, police received an anonymous letter from Reddy’s hometown of
Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh. In the ensuing investigation,
Prattipati’s 15-year-old sister—who survived the gas leak—and the
girls’ teenage roommate told authorities that Reddy brought them into
the country to be used for manual labor and sex.
Reddy and Vijay Lakireddy were indicted in February for violating
federal immigration law. Authorities say the Reddy family imported
Indian villagers through a dummy tech company in order to staff the
family-owned Pasand restaurants and maintain the 1,100 East Bay
apartments under the control of Reddy Realty. Reddy also took frequent
sexual privileges with the young girls he helped smuggle into the
country. By pleading guilty to a reduced list of charges, observers say
the Reddy clan may have escaped greater scrutiny and harsher
punishment.
But at the same time, the alleged victims may launch a class-action
civil lawsuit against the family. Reddy is worth over $70 million and
earns about $1 million a month in rental income alone. “This is
something we have been actively pursuing for the quite a few months,”
attorney Michael Rubin told the San Francisco Chronicle. Rubin, who is
a member of the legal team recently assembled by the American Civil
Liberties Union to represent Prattipati’s surviving sister and roomate,
added: “We’re talking about allegations or a complex conspiracy that
involves individuals and victims beyond those outlined in the
information.”
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‘U’ Visas Offer New Hope to Battered Women By JULIAN FOLEY 12/19/2000
When President Clinton signed the 2000 update to the 1994 Violence
Against Women Act (VAWA II) on October 28th, lawyers at Nihonmachi
Legal Outreach breathed a sigh of relief. The bill contained badly
needed tools to help some of their most vulnerable clients—abused
immigrant women. Nihonmachi is part of a growing network of support and
assistance for South Asian women who are abused by their spouses or
even employers.
Although domestic abuse cuts across ethnic lines and affects nearly
every American community, immigrant women face special challenges that
often make it difficult for them to seek help through mainstream
networks. Many South Asian women come to the United States through
arranged marriages, sometimes without family or friends of their own,
and often without knowledge of the language or culture. They often
depend for support on very small communities in which talk of domestic
violence is still very much in whispers.
“We have very tight knit communities,” said Kavitha Sreeharsha, a
second generation Indian woman who is lawyer with Nihonmachi. “A woman
who is an immigrant knows maybe 20 families, and if none of those 20
people talk to her, then that is very isolating.
The non-immigrant circle is wider. Three Bay Area organizations have
emerged over the last ten years to break through this isolation and
provide abused South Asian women with access to resources: Narika
Helpline in Berkeley; Maitri in San Francisco; and Aasra, a shelter and
hotline in Fremont. All three provide counseling and support for women,
as well as translation services, legal referrals through Nihonmachi and
the International Institute for Immigration Issues, and access to
shelters like Cameron House and the Asian Women’s Shelter.
Run mostly by volunteers and funded by a grab bag of city and state and
federal money and private donations, they help women with whatever they
need, whether it is just someone to talk to, or a something as complex
as new greencard. “We had a South Asian woman being held against her
will here,” said Firoza Chic Dabby, executive director of Narika. “She
had come over to see new grandchild, and the family would not let her
leave. They hid her passport.
We could go to the consulate with her and say, will you issue new
passport? Or, how can you help? In these situations we will activate a
network not traditionally associated with domestic abuse.” Narika helps
women tap into services that are already available through a variety of
agencies and organizations, but that the women might not know about. It
is not a crisis hotline. Instead, it offers beginning to end support—
finding lawyers or shelters, sending out translators, helping women
find their own housing, or lending a sympathetic ear.
Among of the most important services the three groups provide are legal
referrals to help women navigate incredibly complex immigration
laws. “A lot of times immigration status is held over a woman’s head by
her abuser, saying if you report me, I will deport you,” said
Sreeharsha. “Without knowing the law, the woman will not call police,
or get a restraining order, or feel comfortable in telling anyone else
because she is scared of deportation.” Many women fear rejection and
isolation by their home communities if they return. “If they go back as
divorced or with a child, they know they will deal with a lot of life
struggles, especially in Asian countries, so they want to stay here to
get financial independence and get on their own two feet,” said
Sreeharsha.
Before VAWA passed in 1994, an immigrant spouse of a naturalized
citizen had to either be sponsored for a greencard by that citizen, or
petition jointly with him. The first Violence Against Women Act changed
that, finally permitting abused women to petition for
themselves. Until October, spouses of permanent residents were still
not eligible to self-petition, presenting a real challenge for
immigration lawyers trying to help them. But according to a summary
released by the National Lawyer’s Guild Immigration Law Project, VAWA
II created a “new nonimmigrant visa with adjustment possibility after
three years for non-citizens who suffer ‘substantial physical or mental
abuse’ as result of a laundry list of criminal violations (and things
like them), including domestic violence, peonage and involuntary
servitude.”
Sreeharsha hopes these new “U” visas will be the key to assisting
abused spouses of H1-B visa holders whose numbers have increased
dramatically in the last two years. “The fact that so many [H1-B visa
holders] are coming here with wives as dependents, who as dependents
have very few recourses here, it is affecting the middle class
population,” said Dabby. “It is getting a lot of attention, and
disrupting all kinds of assumptions that domestic abuse does not happen
to educated folks.” Narika, Maitri and Aasra also work to raise
awareness both inside and outside the community.
“If we do not talk about domestic violence, we are part of problem We
are contributing to silence women feel around them,” said Sreeharsha.
Narika conducts workshops in places where South Asians work, like dot-
coms, or small businesses, and for people who might be able to
intervene, like police and hospital workers, hoping to sensitize them
to culturally specific issues. They also target community members.
“The women can be very sympathetic,” said Riva Enteen, one of two staff
members at Aasra. “But still, it is a slow change, because many men
still do not believe it exists. It is a big cultural issue.” The
younger, second generation has been more vocal in speaking out about
abuse. The youth group sponsored by Narika and Nihonmachi won a 2000
Asian Emmy for Best Documentary for Young Asianz Rising! Breaking Down
Violence against women.
Hediana Utarti, the volunteer program coordinator at the San Francisco
Asian Women’s Shelter believes that the key to changing community
attitudes toward domestic abuse is changing the way women are viewed in
the society. “A lot of women bear burden of taking responsibility of
everything,” she said. “If the family is falling apart, it is the
woman’s fault. If the partner is upset or angry, it is the wife’s
responsibility to make sure calms down. It is hard to get out of that
mythology, or ideology.”
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