The victim, a nationally known and wealthy American celebrity, the crime blackmail.

It was late September 2009, and David Letterman gets a threatening letter.

Fork over $2 million, or be exposed as a serial flanderer who had sexual relations with women who worked for him.

The threat to extort cash blew up in the blackmailer's face when Letterman went public on national television,

copying to the sex while exposing the criminal scheme to shake him down.

In so doing, Letterman wrote a playbook that was adopted, at least in part, in recent days when Jeff Bezos,

the super billionaire chief of Amazon, went public with an eerily similar threat by AMI,

the parent company of the National Inquirer, to publish embarrassing photos of his sexual dalliance with his girlfriend,

unless he agreed to the newspaper's demands.

Now federal prosecutors are reportedly examining the National Inquirer's conduct to determine if it too was engaged in blackmail.

We'll look back at the Letterman episode and explore the similarities and the differences with the Bezos National Inquirer dust up on this episode of Buried Treasure.

Because people have got to know whether or not they're President of the crop.

Well, I'm not a crop.

I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostage.

My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

There will be no lies.

We will honor the American people with the truth and nothing else.

I'm Michael Isikov, Chief Investigative correspondent for Yahoo News.

And I'm Dan Clydeman, Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo News.

You know, everybody has been applauding Jeff Bezos for going public with this AMI National Inquirer.

And I'm going to say that I'm going to be a national Inquirer threat to expose more embarrassing pictures of him.

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