In the beginning, there was Bill Clinton. In the end, there was Tom Cruise.

David Hans Schmidt, a notorious peddler of celebrity and skin, who launched his career by helping broker a deal between Playboy and reputed Clinton mistress Gennifer Flowers, and looked to have lost it over a series of wedding-day photos of Cruise and wife Katie Holmes, was found dead Friday in the Phoenix home where he was under house arrest for his alleged role in the Cruise case.

Police termed Schmidt's death an apparent suicide; the man's twin, Doug Schmidt, told the Arizona Republic that his brother hanged himself.

Schmidt was 47, and facing up to two years in prison after agreeing to plead guilty to a charge he tried to extort as much as $1.3 million from Cruise. He was due in federal court in Los Angeles on Oct. 11.

New York Daily News gossip columnist George Rush, who talked to Schmidt frequently in recent weeks, told his paper that Schmidt had been demoralized by his possible upcoming prison stint, and confessed to having put a belt around his neck in the shower in a would-be suicide attempt.

"He loved doing these deals. When he had something in the works, he was pumped up. Full of energy. But he couldn't do it anymore," Rush said in the Daily News. "He was afraid the prosecutors would use it as evidence that he was unrepentant."

On his Website, Schmidt's biography tells the tale of a publicity flack who went from working for an Arizona governor to pushing a wedding-night sex tape starring disgraced Olympic figure-skater Tonya Harding. According to the biography, Schmidt was inspired to pursue scandal, celebrity and sex—preferably, at the same time—in 1992, when he read a Star interview with Flowers.

Hey, if the Star paid Flowers [$125,000] to give a kiss and tell story about her affair, I'll bet Playboy or Penthouse would pay her a million to go nude!," Schmidt thought, per the Website.

In addition to Flowers, the Schmidt biography gives Schmidt credit for helping land the likes of Tiffany, the 1980s pop star, Paula Jones, another alleged Clinton mistress, and Divine Brown, Hugh Grant's onetime front-seat companion, in the finer gentlemen's magazines.

More recently, Schmidt tried to auction off a Paris Hilton diary, along with some revealing photos of the heiress for $20 million, offered free peeks at a purported O.J. Simpson sex tape at badoj.com, and claimed to have dibs on a sex tape starring former Saved by the Bell geek Dustin Diamond.

Schmidt, though, was not without scruples. "All snuff film producers and agents will be reported to federal authorities," Schmidt's Website declared.

In July, it was Schmidt, along with computer-tech Marc Lewis Gittleman, who were arrested by the FBI. Gittleman was accused of lifting more than 700 photos of Cruise and Holmes' 2006 wedding off the computer of the event's official photographer. Schmidt was accused of trying to extort cash from Cruise to keep the photos under wraps.

In the Arizona Republic, Doug Schmidt said his he told his brother that a new line of work was in order "because this one's not working out for you."