Don Lapre is dead! If you were staying "UP....all night" in the early 1990s, you know exactly who I mean. Maybe not by name, but surely you remember the infomercial:

"By placing tiny classified ads in hundreds of newspapers all across the country...."

In other words, ask people to pay you to tell them the secret of how to get someone to pay you. That secret? Getting people to pay you for the secret, of course.

All these years later, he'd gotten into trouble with his "best vitamins in the world" idea, and was about to enter a $50 million fraud trial. So he killed himself in his jail cell. He claimed he did nothing wrong till the end.

If you still don't remember him, check out one of the original infomercials here:



David Spade did his own version of Don on SNL, too, as I recall.

Oh and look what else I found. Lapre with Alan Thicke pushing his "Incredible Products Store." This guy basically created a physical Internet before the Internet! "Walk into this crazy world at the mall and browse around for the product or services you need!" I wonder if Al Gore saw this and thought "There has to be an easier way!"