The Mumbai police missed the spotlight by a whisker. They had allegedly set the ball rolling on the spot-fixing racket arrests, except that they fell short of assessing how wide ran the web of bookies and players. Their loss, as it turns out, was Delhi’s police gain.

Sources claim that the Mumbai police had been on the heels of bookies for some time now. It took them seven days to zero in on three of them — Ramesh Vyas, 52, Pandurang Kadam, 41, and Ashok Vyas, 32 — mediating the placing of bets among bookies in Dubai, Pakistan and India from a tiny room in a building in Kalbadevi. That was just three days ago. Vyas was arrested for a similar offence in 2003.

“The three used to put Dubai and Pakistan-based bookies on conference calls and connect them to others in different parts of India. Of the 92 mobile phones seized from the house, the conference call facility between Indian and foreign bookies was activated in 30,” reveals a crime branch officer.

The three bookies were in touch with others in Delhi, says Himanshu Roy, joint commissioner of police (crime).

The next logical step was to send a team to the national capital to nab the other bookies, says a police source. “We had their names and we were planning to send our team to Delhi on Thursday. But the Delhi police swung into action and nabbed them. This led to the arrest of a few other bookies and IPL players in Mumbai, which would have been our third course of action.”

But the Delhi police didn’t exactly steal their Mumbai counterparts’ thunder. They had been working independently on the betting syndicate since April, having intercepted many of the calls some bookies made to each other.

The information about the involvement of Pakistani- and Dubai-based bookies that the Kalbadevi raid revealed, though, was shared with central intelligence agencies.

This added grist to the mill that the Delhi police saw an opportunity to snatch the Mumbai police’s laurels from right under their noses. “When they found out that we were heading to Delhi for our investigation, they swiftly caught the local bookies,” says the crime branch officer.

The Mumbai police, however, haven’t given up as yet. They are now investigating if the Pakistani bookies have links with any terrorist organisation or an organised crime syndicate. “We need to find out where this money [from the betting] was supposed to be used. The deals were taking place through a hawala channel and we are yet to trace this,” says a police source

Niket Kaushik, additional commissioner of police (crime), says the Delhi police can get custody of the three bookies arrested in Mumbai as part of their investigation.

Meanwhile, the Mumbai crime branch on Thursday arrested another bookie, Pravin Behra from Bhandup. It wasn’t known if he was in any way related to this betting racket.Code names for bookiesWhen the Mumbai police seized mobile phones from Ramesh Vyas and his two aides three days ago, they found code names of a number of bookies from across India on the phones’ conference call records. Some of those names were P Jaipur, Bunty Jaipur, Lokesh Delhi, Master Jaipur, Kothari, Bablu, Ketan, KP Badri, Vicky, AA, Jupiter, Shobhan, Paresh, Bunty and Lotus.