LEGAL BINDINGS

In the now-filming “Billionaire Boys Club” miniseries, one of the characters depicted is up on charges in two separate murder cases. So how is NBC handling it?

Well, Jim Pittman (real name), bodyguard for convicted murderer/BBC leader Joe Hunt, will be known in the program as Frank Booker. Pittman is about to be retried in the celebrated Ron Levin murder case (the first trial resulted in a hung jury) and is up on kidnap/murder charges in a separate case in Northern California.

Given the circumstance, no one is sure about the ramifications of portraying Pittman in the four-hour “fact-based drama”--and apparently nobody wants to find out.

But, said an insider, “(Actor Stan) Shaw is black and Pittman is black, so a connection might be drawn.”

It is a “touchy” situation, acknowledged NBC legal eagle Colleen Hanlon.

The real names of the central players will be used, with Judd Nelson starring as Hunt and Ron Silver as Levin, the Bev Hills con man Hunt was convicted of killing. The jury found that Hunt committed the murder as part of a plan to regain money lost to Levin in a commodities swindle.

However, nom de plumes, Hanlon said, will be used for other members of the BBC and virtually everybody else--but “that was done more to protect the families from unwanted publicity” rather than for legal reasons.

The project, based on an upcoming book from Los Angeles Magazine writer Sue Horton called “The Deadly Pied Piper of Beverly Hills,” is expected to finish filming by mid-September and is scheduled to air in November. It will cover the BBC from 1983, when it was formed, through the conclusion of Hunt’s trial in July.