Police sources say detectives in the Organized Crime Intelligence Division conducted an unauthorized investigation of the chief, including surveillance of his trips to Las Vegas, then leaked their findings to discredit him. “This was a rogue operation to get rid of Williams,” says a police source. The source says that OCID detectives compiled a “dossier” on Williams’s Vegas activities, then passed the information to Stephen Downing, a retired LAPD deputy chief and dose associate of ousted chief Daryl Gates. It was a letter from Downing to the police commission in December that launched the official investigation of Williams. Gates denies any effort to discredit his successor. “I had absolutely nothing to do with getting this information on Williams,” he says. A spokesman for the LAPD had no comment.
