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The weekend brought tragic news, as David Hans "the Sultan of Sleaze" Schmidt—a modern day adventurer who braved dense refuse-bin jungles and abandoned U-Store-It crypts in search of priceless, celebrity-smut treasures—was found dead in his Arizona home of an apparent suicide, where he sat under house arrest waiting sentencing for attempting to extort Tom Cruise for $1 million. The LAT reviews some of Schmidt's greatest hits:

· Explicit photographs he said were found in the Dumpster at Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx's Las Vegas home.

· Hilton's sex diaries, which along with other personal items had been discovered in a Los Angeles-area storage locker. (A Hilton spokesman said at the time that the items were illegally obtained.)

· A homemade sex tape starring Colin Farrell and former Playboy playmate Nicole Narain.

· A sex tape involving Fred Durst, lead singer of Limp Bizkit.

· Nude pictures of Amber Frey, the key prosecution witness in the Scott Peterson double-murder trial.

· Nude photos of rescued U.S. Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch. (The photos were offered up to Larry Flynt for publication in his Hustler magazine, but he ultimately declined to publish them.)

To that we'd add the Marcia Cross nudie-pic bonanza found in the garbage outside her home, and, of course, Screeched, the infamous Dustin Diamond sex tape, in which the full extent of the Saved by the Bell star's telephone-pole-scaled endowment was laid bare for a largely disinterested public. With Schmidt gone, we shudder to think how many celebrity fellatory adventures recorded for posterity will remain unbrokered, their timeless supplications to "touch my balls and my ass" never heard by a sex-tape hungry public.