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Lakha, his father, Yasmin and her husband partnered to buy the business from Chicago bluegrass musician Chip Covington. Check out their magnificent 1973 Rounder Records album, “Lake Michigan Ain’t No River.” Riedy’s band backed acts like Eddy Clearwater, Magic Slim and Koko Taylor at Biddy’s. Riedy was the leader of the Bob Riedy Chicago Blues Band, which included harmonica player Carey Bell, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, bassist Jim Wydra and drummer Sam Lay. During the mid-1970s the Chicago blues pianist Bob Riedy (1946-2020) booked the club. He ended up on a first-name basis with many of them.”Ī vintage ad highlighting Redd Holt Unlimited and a 25 cent beer special/ Courtesy of Chip Covingtonīiddy Mulligan’s was up and spinning when Lakha landed in Chicago. We never heard of blues bands in Pakistan. “He had so much energy and booked all those bands. “Omigosh, he was the star at Biddy Mulligan’s,” she continues. Yasmin came to Chicago two years after her brother’s arrival. Although this was dangerous, he was able to make his way up and jump onto the balcony. My brother made a quick decision and started climbing the drainage pipe on the side of the building. My apartment was on the third floor and about forty-five feet from the ground. Back then, there was no fire department or emergency line to call. I could not reach my husband or building manager to let me back in. “My neighbor stopped by for a chat, my door suddenly shut and I was locked out of my apartment!,” she says. Her son was playing in a crib and Yasmin was cooking in the kitchen. In an interview from Seattle, she remembers her brother’s act of bravery in 1979, when she was living in an apartment in Pakistan with her husband and nine-month-old son.
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Yasmin is six years older than her brother. “It was hard to compete with the Mexican busboys,” Lakha says. Lakha’s first job in America was as a busboy at The Pinnacle restaurant, the revolving dining room atop the Holiday Inn, 644 North Lake Shore Drive. He then spent two years studying at Truman College and one year studying business and accounting at the University of Illinois Chicago. Lakha graduated high school in Karachi, but enrolled in Senn High School in Chicago for his senior year. He died in 2020 of complications from COVID-19. The family’s father, Shamsuddin Lakha, was in retail in the iron and steel business. When Andy was three years old, the family moved to Karachi, Pakistan, for better business opportunities.
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His sister, Yasmin, operates four gas stations in Seattle and two Popeyes restaurants in Los Angeles. His older brother, Salim, was a graphic designer in downtown Chicago and is now a Seattle-based stockbroker and private investment banker. He was born in Bombay, India (now Mumbai), the youngest of the family’s four children. Lakha came to Chicago in 1979 at the age of seventeen. I never grew up with any kind of prejudice.” I was just in my teens and early twenties. I look back at Biddy’s as my favorite time of my life. We proved ourselves to be educated, business-oriented people who contribute to society. About once a week I would hear, ‘Go back to your country.’ But we got accepted. “People didn’t believe in us,” he continues. You can hear the sound of a distant shore. It was hard, especially in the beginning.” “That is what has made me successful now,” he says in a reflective February conversation from his winter home in Cap Cana in the Dominican Republic. But he developed his business acumen by running Biddy Mulligan’s. Lakha founded Fortress Development in 2015. He built twenty-two gas stations that opened the door into commercial real estate projects with McDonald’s, Walgreens and other corporations. In the late 1990s Lakha was one of the biggest independent Chevron dealers in America. The Avenue Bellevue project will be completed in the summer of 2023. In August of last year, an Avenue Bellevue condo penthouse under construction sold for just over eight million, a record for the Pacific Northwest, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. Lakha broke ground in 2020 for Avenue Bellevue, a high-end condo-retail-hotel development in the city’s downtown. It took some digging, but I learned that Lakha is now principal and CEO of Fortress Development, a $1.1 billion commercial real estate firm in Bellevue, Washington, ten miles outside of Seattle. Social media posts said he had “vanished.” In recent months I wondered what happened to him. Lakha’s story is an important celebration of a New America. Miller had left his job as a vice president at Leo Burnett Worldwide in Chicago. When he sold Biddy’s he mentored new owner Mike Miller (no relation to the Delilah’s owner of the same name) who had never run a music venue. He was a young immigrant from Pakistan who owned a blues-and-rock club with an Irish name in predominantly Jewish Rogers Park.