Former LAPD Official Training Pakistani Border Security Force

The U.S. Justice Department has turned over the training of a Pakistani border security force to former LAPD Deputy Chief Daniel Sullivan, who, as a private detective following his retirement, was placed on probation for illegally possessing confidential law enforcement records.

Sullivan began his consultant’s post in mid-May, a Justice Department spokeswoman said. As head of the $1.3-million Border Security and Police Modernization Project, Sullivan directs the training and management of the U.S. program to help Pakistan’s national police secure its borders.

Additionally, Sullivan will help Pakistani police become more responsive to the nation’s citizens, according to the Justice Department. The appointment was made by officials in the Justice Department’s criminal division. “It is a law enforcement and development assistance program,” spokeswoman Casey Stavropoulos said. “It is not a program in which we are administering security on behalf of the government of Pakistan.”

Stavropoulos said she did not know Sullivan’s salary for the post or the number of people who would be under his jurisdiction in the program, based in Islamabad.

The appointment comes eight years after Sullivan, who served in the Los Angeles Police Department for 25 years, became the highest ranking former LAPD official to be sentenced on criminal charges since the department’s corruption scandals of the early 1900s. Sullivan pleaded no contest in 1994 to five misdemeanor counts of illegally possessing confidential law enforcement records while working as a private detective. He was placed on a year’s probation and fined almost $5,000.

The district attorney’s office had charged Sullivan and another private detective with receiving the files from an LAPD officer who resigned after he was arrested on child pornography charges. That officer, prosecutors said, used LAPD computers to get information on people--including witnesses in criminal cases--so it could be passed on to Sullivan and the other private detective.

When he was charged, Sullivan, once seen as a possible successor to then-Chief Daryl F. Gates, expressed anger at the accusations. Denying any wrongdoing, he criticized the LAPD and prosecutors for “trying to determine if I got information that indicates someone is a crook.” But authorities always maintained the seriousness of the charges. “Who knows where this information could have ended up?” one law enforcement official said at the time. “It could have gotten a cop or someone else killed.”

The Justice Department official could not say whether Sullivan’s criminal case was known at the time of his appointment, which can be renewed after two years.