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. 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.