Man guilty in Jackson case living it up

LOS ANGELES – A businessman sentenced to home detention for conspiring to videotape Michael Jackson illegally is doing his time at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Marina del Rey.

Jeffrey Borer, sentenced in October for conspiring to sell a videotape of Jackson in 2003 when the pop singer faced child molestation charges, has been paying his debt to society with access to a harbor-side pool and restaurant, two tennis courts and a spa.

Lloyd Kirschbaum, Borer’s attorney in an ongoing civil case, said Borer is detained at the hotel for six months at his own expense because his Marina del Rey house is infested with mold, to which his wife is allergic. “It’s all squared away with the probation department,” Kirschbaum said.

Borer, owner of the Santa Monica charter jet company XtraJet, and Arvell Jett Reeves, owner of a Chino aircraft maintenance firm, installed video cameras in one of Borer’s Gulfstream jets. The cameras were used to videotape Jackson and his lawyer, Mark Geragos, on a flight from Las Vegas to Santa Barbara in the midst of Jackson’s molestation trial. Jackson was later acquitted.

The videotapes came to light when Fox News reported in 2003 that a private party had offered to sell them to the network. Borer, 62, pleaded guilty in March to the federal charges.

Federal probation officials declined to comment on Borer’s detention. But Daniel N. Shallman, the federal prosecutor in Borer’s case, called the hotel stay “outrageous.”

“When someone is sentenced to electronic monitoring, normally the presumption is he’s not going to be holed up in a four-star hotel,” said Shallman, now a lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers.