WWW [Contra Costa Times] Kimberly Bell, the ex-mistress of Barry Bonds, won’t see any of the hundreds of thousands of dollars she expected to be paid to pose for Playboy. That’s because of a bizarre development that saw the man who brokered the deal put the money in his bank account and then commit suicide.

Bell told the New York Post that David Hans Schmidt kept the money and used it to pay his attorney’s fees. She said Schmidt didn’t attend the photo shoot because he had been arrested, and that the Playboy money had gone into his account the day before he was busted.

“I only met him about a month before the Playboy shoot,” Bell told the Post. “He approached me at a restaurant and started talking and left me a card. I knew nothing about his background. But after going to his office and seeing pictures on the wall of him shaking (Bill) Clinton’s hand and with Shari Belafonte and Katarina Witt, I was taken with that. He made one phone call to Playboy, and that was that.”

Bell told the Post that she talked to Schmidt hours before he hanged himself from a shower rod to avoid two years in jail for his $1 million plot against Tom Cruise involving stolen wedding photos.

And, no, we did not make any of this up.