sold for cash

Gossip about JonBenet's case was like catnip for the tabloids; great article on such ill-gotten gains in the Times--

Between Journalists and Ill-Gotten Information, a Shield of Distance
July 12, 2009
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

"The trick to publishing ill-gotten material is this: Know as little as possible about where it came from, and never, ever be the one who does the ill-getting....

....In 1999, a private investigator in Denver and his wife were charged with illegally obtaining private information on a wide array of people, including the family of JonBenet Ramsey, for sale to the tabloid media. They pleaded guilty to felony charges. (A nephew of that detective later went to prison for illegally obtaining the phone records of Hewlett-Packard officials and journalists, by pretending to be those people — the closest prominent parallel in this country to what Mr. Mulcaire and Mr. Goodman did.)...

But Michael Antonello, general counsel of American Media, the company that publishes The National Enquirer and Star magazine, disagreed. “We pay for information,” he said, but “we have never, to my knowledge, induced someone to violate the law.”....

“Everyone pays,” he said. “We pay cash.”