Soon as the cab halted, the 20-something woman came out and walked past me,” Bagwan said. “I could see Manya sitting inside with an unidentified woman. The sub-inspector was wearing a black shirt with white polka dots, white trousers, gum boots and aviator sun-glasses and stood leaning against the Hillman Classic, apparently busy reading a book, while his colleagues, also in casuals, hung around the place.Īfter a while, a taxi drove past Bagwan before pulling up at a distance. “Our plan was to pose as college students from affluent backgrounds and mount surveillance before Manya arrived,” Bagwan said.īagwan and four of his colleagues reached the bus depot adjacent to the college parking lot before 11 am.
Manya was to pick it up at 11.30 am.Īfter senior inspector Pandurang Seth had chaired a meeting to draw up the strategy for the morning – Manya was good at giving cops the slip, so the plan had to be perfect, said Bagwan – the sub-inspector picked up a Hillman Classic, a car that was a fashion statement in the city then, from a garage in south Mumbai. The ‘khabri’ did what he was told to he also left the car’s doors unlocked, and placed the ignition key below the front seat. “Manya wanted to use the car to rob a bank in Navi Mumbai,” Bagwan, who retired in 2011 as assistant commissioner of police (ACP), recalled. Little did Bagwan know, as he discussed the details of the tip-off with his colleagues, that their plan to trap Surve would lead to the first ever police encounter, a term that spawned a culture of its own in the Mumbai police force.īagwan told his colleagues that Manya had instructed the informer, a vehicle thief who had once spent a year with the gangster in Arthur Road jail, to leave a stolen car for him in the parking lot at Ambedkar College. Sub-inspector Issac Bagwan, one of the branch’s ace detectives, had received a tip-off from one of his ‘khabris’ (informers) that gangster Manya Surve, who had eluded the cops for long, was likely to show up near Ambedkar College at Wadala in north-central Mumbai the next morning. The afternoon of January 10, 1982, there was feverish activity in the office of the detection crime branch, an elite wing of the Mumbai police, inside the police headquarters at Crawford Market.