THE REDDY SEXUAL SLAVERY CASE IN BERKELEY: UNFINISHED STORY
  ^©by Diana E. H. Russell, Ph.D., part II

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Other Deaths and Close Calls

At least one newspaper reported that a young Indian girl painting one of Reddy's properties had fallen to her death from a ladder. In addition, a man in the same Bancroft Way apartment where the girls lived, was found dead by his brother half a year before Chanti's death. The windows and doors of his apartment were closed, as was Chanti's. After learning that there were approximately 63 carbon monoxide leaks in the apartment, the police did not investigate whether this had been the cause of the man's death. Another resident of the apartment with whom I spoke requested anonymity about the fact that he had been poisoned by a carbon monoxide leak in his bedroom. He said he may have died but for the fact that he slept next to an open window. He woke up one night feeling very ill and went to a local hospital for emergency treatment. However, his problem was not correctly diagnosed. When Chanti died from carbon monoxide poisoning, he realized that this had been the cause of his illness. He commented that Chanti's death had saved other residents from being similarly struck down by the leaks in their apartments because Reddy only had the leaks repaired after her demise when he was under considerable scrutiny by the public.

Colluders with Reddy

Some members of WASS and many other individuals who passed by when we were picketing the Pasand Restaurant believe that the police colluded with Reddy by ignoring the many obvious signs of illegal behavior going on inside and outside the Pasand. For example, a man who said he was a former employee at the Pasand Restaurant reported to me that the Berkeley Police have known about Reddy's criminal behavior for years, but have overlooked it because Reddy paid them off. Many other passersby mentioned that they had seen the young girls on high ladders painting the Pasand Restaurant in their saris. It was clear to them that the girls were underage and inappropriately dressed for the job. The girls, who couldn't speak a word of English, also worked in the kitchen at the Pasand Restaurant. A couple of people mentioned seeing Reddy promenading on the sidewalk outside the Pasand Restaurant with the young girls on his arms. One passerby reported knowing a group of construction workers at a nearby building site who had figured out what Reddy was doing and reported it to the police about five years ago. The workers were upset and angry when the police ignored their report.

As previously mentioned, the police also ignored Marcia Poole's report about the very suspicious events that she had witnessed. Furthermore, they exonerated Reddy of any wrongdoing almost immediately, overlooking the attempted kidnapping that Poole had told them about. They also discounted Poole's astute observation that the individual whom Reddy had identified as the father of the girls was lying. Most serious of all, the police very quickly decided that Chanti's death was an accident. Many people observed that it seemed to be only the police who showed no awareness of the obviously suspicious occurrences going on at the restaurant.

In this context it is relevant to note that Reddy imported young girls to satisfy his pedosexual(6) desires for approximately 15 years. Furthermore, he "had been under scrutiny by the Investigations Branch of the Immigration and Naturalization Service since February 1998" (AP, January 19, 2000). In addition, he behaved like a slum landlord, using some of his untrained indentured servants as well as his three sex slaves to make repairs in his apartment buildings on the rare occasions that he responded to tenants requests; hence the repairs were frequently botched. Many of his tenants complained that Reddy illegally hiked their rents, refused to correct substandard housing conditions, evicted them without just cause, and refused to return their security deposits. Many angry tenants brought suits against Reddy resulting in more complaints being made against him to the ?Rent Stabilization Board than for any other landlord in Berkeley. Consequently, Reddy was notorious as an unethical landlord who ripped off his tenants and endangered some of them by failing to repair hazardous conditions in their apartments.

The night club that Reddy owned in Berkeley, which was located next door to the Pasand Restaurant, was well-known as a place where drugs were used and sold and where violence frequently occurred. This also earned Reddy a fair amount of notoriety that the police in particular must have been well-informed about. Reddy had formerly owned another night club in San Francisco that had been closed down because of all the complaints of violent incidents, drug consumption and sales that occurred there. In the light of Reddy's notoriety, it seems inconceivable that the police remained genuinely ignorant of what he was doing, especially when so many other people were aware of at least some pieces of the elaborate puzzle of his many illegal and immoral activities. WASS wonders why the Police Review Board did not investigate the police's hands-off policy toward Reddy.

WASS members also believe that Mayor Shirley Dean and many Berkeley council members turned a blind eye to Reddy's many illegal activities because of his wealth and power in the community and especially because he had donated money to her election campaign, and provided the location for her victory celebration.

Trafficking and Sexual Slavery

From a very young age Lalitha and Chanti worked as cleaners in Reddy's mansion. It was in this setting that he started sexually abusing them. According to an Associated Press article, Lathitha "told authorities she had been given to Reddy by her parents when she was 12," presumably because they couldn't afford to support her and Chanti (January 19, 2000). Lalitha told the police that Reddy started having sex with her in India when she was 12 years old. The sisters' roommate Laxmi "told investigators her father sold her to Reddy when she was 14 because of economic hardship" (AP, January 19, 2000). Reddy, along with other members of his family, falsified documents to smuggle the girls into Berkeley so that he could continue to impose sex on them whenever he felt like it. The girls were completely trapped in their relationship with Reddy: they could not speak English; they had no money; they were still minors; they would be unable to survive if they ran away. Furthermore, they were fearful that angering Reddy could cause him to act retributively toward their families in Velvadam, possibly endangering their lives. Finally, they were in awe of him, which added to their inability to resist his many ways of exploiting them. In short, the girls were his sex slaves. Reddy also forced them to work in his Pasand restaurant and to clean and paint some of the numerous buildings he owns.

Reddy's Plan to Escape to India

When the Berkeley Police arrested Reddy in January, 2000, they did so just in time. He had purchased airline tickets to India for himself and his two surviving sex slaves, as well as large amounts of gold.

Reddy's younger son Vijay went into hiding before he was finally arrested. The police and concerned members of the public feared that he had escaped. However, for reasons unknown, he didn't flee, and the police were finally able to apprehend him.

Charges and Arrest

Reddy was arrested on January 18, 2000, and accused of smuggling young Indian girls into the United States for the purpose of prostitution or other immoral purposes. Despite the fact that he had been trafficking young girls from India to Berkeley to satisfy his pedophilic desires for approximately 15 years, the criminal investigation was confined to his sexual exploitation of the three girls whom he had been raping on a regular basis prior to Chanti Prattipati's death.

According to Reddy's arrest warrant, he had had sex (sic) with these three girls in India, then brought them to the U.S. to continue having sex (sic) with them.

Vijay, owner of a Berkeley computer software company called Active Tech Solutions, was charged with helping his father bring these three teenage girls into the country under fraudulent circumstances in August 1999. Vijay was also charged with falsifying documents enabling the entry into the United States of many other illegal Indian immigrants. Later, he and his brother Prasad would be charged with raping and beating the same young girls whom their father had raped and enslaved.

A federal indictment "charged that during a 13-year period, Reddy ... and members of his family used fraudulent visas, sham marriages and fake identities to bring at least 33 men, women and children into the United States" from Velvadam (Chabria, 2001). Since this federal indictment, the period of time during which Reddy has acted in these illegal ways has increased to 15 years, and the number of exploited males and females from India is thought to be closer to 500. Although the visas obtained for many of these illegal Indian immigrants claimed that they would be working in Vijay's software company, these individuals were unqualified for this work. Instead, they were used as waiters, cooks and kitchen workers at the Pasand Restaurant, as well as at Reddy's other business establishments. Given Reddy's pedosexualism, it is worth noting that the walls of his restaurant was decorated with pictures of young females who are nude above their waists.

Reddy forced his indebted Pasand Restaurant employees, who had to repay him for getting them to the United States, to work long hours for minimal wages. He also pocketed their tips. They were given one meal a day at the Pasand Restaurant and had to live in Reddy's often poorly-maintained apartments. They were trapped in their exploited circumstances by their illegal status, their debts to Reddy and his power over them.

Reddy's Incarceration and Bail

After a short period of incarceration, Reddy was released and confined to his brother's mansion in Merced after paying $10-million bail. In order to discourage Reddy from fleeing the country, Judge Brazil constructed the bail to result in heavy financial losses for other members of his family if he fled. This strategy proved effective. Vijay was also released after paying $500,000 bail.

Plea Bargains

Although Reddy and four family members were described by the media as intending to enter guilty pleas on October 30, 2000, they refused to do so when Judge Armstrong opened the proceedings to the media. Hence the plea bargaining and sentencing was postponed until the following year (2001). In the end, Reddy's sons Prasad and Vijay decided against joining their father and his younger brother and sister-in-law, Jayaprakash and Annapurna, in a guilty plea. Therefore, the plea bargain based on their joint admission of guilt was revoked.

On March 7, 2001, Reddy pleaded guilty to smuggling teenage girls from India for sex (sic) -- including one as young as 13 -- in a plea deal. In return for this admission, John Kennedy, the Assistant U.S. Prosecuting Attorney, whose job it was to represent Reddy's victims, recommended that he spend only between 5 and 6 1/2 years in federal prison and pay only two million dollars in restitution (his Berkeley properties alone are worth more than $80 million) to three surviving victims and the parents of the Prattipati sisters. Shockingly, in return for Reddy's limited admission of guilt, the Alameda District Attorney agreed not to charge Reddy for statutory rape of the girls despite the fact that he had forced sex on them for many years. Kennedy was clearly derelict in his duty to Reddy's victims when he accepted Reddy's outrageously minimal admissions of guilt as well as for proposing an equally outrageously minimal sentence for these extremely serious crime.

Reddy's Sentence

On June 19, 2001, Judge Armstrong was scheduled to sentence Reddy for "two counts of transporting minors for illegal sexual activity, one count of conspiring to commit immigration fraud and one of filing a false tax return"! These are the absurdly few crimes Reddy was permitted to admit to for his plea bargain. However, Judge Armstrong had the prerogative to reject the minimal sentence that Kennedy had proposed. Specifically, she could choose to sentence Reddy to up to 38 years in prison as well as impose on him a much larger fine than the two million dollars Kennedy had recommended.

After hearing the probation report on the extreme pain and suffering experienced by Reddy's victims, Judge Armstrong argued that the plea bargained sentence of a maximum of six years did not take into account the severity of the trauma to Reddy's female victims. Hence, she ordered the attorneys for the Defense and the Prosecution to leave the courtroom to work out a sentence that addressed her concerns, and return to the courtroom in the afternoon. Appallingly, the Judge had to argue this point against all the attorneys, including ACLU Attorney Jayashri Srikantiah who allegedly represented the victims, all of whom insisted that six-and-a-half years was sufficient. Srikantiah even claimed that the victims were happy with this number of years for Reddy's incarceration.

After meeting during the lunch break, the Attorneys in the Reddy case proposed that the sentence be raised to eight years. Surprisingly, Judge Armstrong accepted this minimal increase in Reddy's sentence. Even more shocking, she granted Reddy's request to serve his sentence in Lompoc Prison, a luxury institution nicknamed "Club Fed." Very few pedophiles are ever cured, so after his brief sentence is over, there are sound reasons to believe that he will continue his pedophilic behavior. A long and more appropriate sentence would have protected other girls from being victimized in the future by this sexual pervert who apparently used viagra to facilitate raping his sex slaves (viagra was found in the apartment where the three girls' resided).

Go to part III