10 years for murder-for-hire plot spurred by contentious divorce

Sun-Times file

A federal judge handed a 10-year prison sentence Friday to a man convicted of an $8,000 murder-for-hire plot in 2019 aimed at his wife’s uncle amid contentious divorce proceedings.

Venkatesh Bhogireddy, 46, told U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood he feels “like most of my life has been clouded with shame,” and that to “simply say ‘I’m sorry’ is not enough.” But Wood later noted that Bhogireddy’s actions could have had far worse consequences.

Instead of hiring an actual hitman, Bhogireddy wound up enlisting an undercover ATF agent who posed as a motorcycle gang member named “Joe.”

“I would offer that Mr. Bhogireddy might consider himself lucky that he found an ATF agent instead of an actual killer when he was deciding how to respond to the frustrations that he was considering in his personal life,” Wood said.

A jury found Bhogireddy guilty in 2021 of five separate counts. But in explaining her sentence Friday, Wood noted that Bhogireddy had hatched one plot, involving one individual, carried out over a period of months — and if combined into one count, she could have given him no more than 10 years.

Prosecutors had sought a sentence that exceeded 20.

Defense attorneys Joshua Herman and Todd Pugh predicted that Bhogireddy will be deported once his sentence is complete. He has been in custody since his conviction in May 2021.

During that trial, prosecutors offered jurors multiple audio and video recordings of Bhogireddy plotting with “Joe” to have his wife’s uncle “taken care of.” Bhogireddy and his wife were in the midst of a divorce, and Bhogireddy thought the uncle was convincing his wife to do “a lot of stupid things.”

Prosecutors noted that Bhogireddy traveled from Deerfield to Joliet each time he met with "Joe," a commute that took at least two hours even with no traffic.

"This underscores how serious Bhogireddy was," they argued in court filings.

The discussions between Bhogireddy and “Joe” culminated in an October 2019 conversation at a Joliet restaurant where Bhogireddy confirmed that the supposed hitman should go forward with the plot.

Bhogireddy said he wanted it “done” and made to look like an accident.

“Like accident dead?” the undercover ATF agent asked him.

Bhogireddy replied, “Yeah, yeah.”

The undercover agent said he’d thought about pushing the victim in front of a subway train. Bhogireddy left their meeting and walked out to the parking lot, but he ultimately turned around and returned to the undercover agent inside the restaurant.

“The train thing is good,” Bhogireddy said.

Herman and Pugh argued in a recent court memo that “there was never a certain, unequivocal, and direct order to the agent to kill.” They insisted that Bhogireddy made “terrible choices” while “petrified by the terrifying prospect of losing his children forever” in the divorce.

They said their client, a native of India, didn’t seek crucial mental health treatment for cultural reasons.

“Mr. Bhogireddy needed a therapist to talk to,” they wrote, “not an intimidating ATF agent who was an expert in sting operations.”

But Wood said the jury rejected the argument that Bhogireddy’s ambitions fell short of murder.

Rather, she said jurors were “on very solid ground” in finding “that Mr. Bhogireddy intended to find a person who would carry out a murder-for-hire.”