When Lenny Bruce overdosed the cops let photographers into his bathroom two-at-a-time to take pictures of the dead comedian with the needle still in his arm. After Elvis met his maker on the back of a peanut-and-banana sandwich an enterprising photographer (I still don't know who but if anyone knows I'd love to find out his or her name) made a quick $150,000 by selling a picture of The King in His Coffin to the National Enquirer. When John Lennon bought it a point-and-shoot camera in the hands of an unsuspecting hospital orderly made someone enough money from domestic and foreign sales to afford that co-op on the Upper West Side. Even those fun-loving French papparrazzi made an attempt to bag that photo of the dead Princess... They were just a little early is all.

So why is it that no one even tried to get some pictures of John Jr? I can accept the extreme difficulty of doing the deep sea dive in a restricted area to see if they really were "sleeping with the fishes" but throughout our latest National Tragedy all we've seen is pictures of grieving relatives, curious on-lookers and piles of dead and dying flowers piled up against a Tribeca apartment building. Isn't anyone sneaky enough to bluff their way into the morgue these days? Doesn't anyone carry that extra $5-10,000 to make a few pay-offs to the right people? Sales of the Lennon photo would seem to indicate that it'd be a better investment than an Internet IPO.

So all you young people out there just starting out consider the incredible amounts of money to be made with just one good dead-person picture. It'll take a little effort, a few smarts and balls the size of watermelons (sorry ladies, but if I said it any other way it just wouldn't look right...) but for an evening's work you'll make enough money to spend the next two years doing those deeply moody and extremely sensitive pictures of Third World starvation, so that'd be worth it. Right?

And never forget that Weegee spent his nights cruising The Big Apple searching out crime scenes and corpses. He made a living at it and is now considered a respected artist with retrospective museum shows in all the major cities...