Word to the wise: Trying to extort money from Tom Cruise is risky business.

David Hans Schmidt, a 47-year-old man notorious around TInseltown for attempting to hock compromised celebrity photos and videos for big money, has agreed to plead guilty in a plot to try and extort more than $1 million from Cruise in exchange for wedding photos pilfered from the actor. (View the court documents here, here and here.)

In exchange for his guilty plea to one count of sending communications for purposes of extortion, Schmidt faces up to two years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.

His attorney, Nancy Kardon, filed his plea agreement last Friday. No word if the Phoenix native, who's free on a $100,000 bond, will actually turn up in a Los Angeles court to enter his plea in person.

Meanwhile, Schmidt's codefendant, Marc Lewis Gittleman, 33, filed his own plea agreement under seal on the same day, which will see him cop to one count of conspiracy to commit extortion, potentially netting him up to five years in the big house.

Prosecutors say Gittleman, an L.A.-based data recovery technician, obtained more than 700 pictures of Cruise's highly publicized nuptials to Katie Holmes last year from the official photographer for the event, who needed help retrieving data from a crashed computer. While recovering the photos, Gittleman also took the time to copy them onto his own hard drive.

He then contacted Schmidt, who has developed something of a reputation in Tinseltown for attempting to force celebs into shelling out gobs of money for unwanted photos and footage of themselves to keep them from going public. 

According to authorities, Schmidt emailed Cruise's camp, demanding $1.2 million to $1.3 million for the wedding pics or else he'd go to the tabs and auction them off to the highest bidder. To prove they were the genuine article, he attached 13 photos to his message.

The Mission: Impossible star's reps subsequently set up a sting in which the would-be extortionist met on July 24 with an undercover FBI agent—who promptly took him into custody, along with Gittleman.

Schmidt has claimed in the past to have negotiated deals for such purloined items as Paris Hilton's diaries as well as various stills of the scantily clad hotel heiress, a purportedly racy sex video from Saved By the Bell alum Dustin Diamond and footage of disgraced Olympic skater Tonya Harding's wedding night.

Attorneys for both Schmidt and Gittleman were unavailable for comment.

Cruise himself, when he's not fending off money-hungry hucksters, has been busy defending his latest film, Valkyrie, for which he's drawn controversy for portraying Count Claus Shenck Graf von Stauffenberg, the brave Nazi colonel who tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Initially, the German Defense Ministry opposed granting the Bryan Singer-directed World War II thriller permission to shoot at historic military sites, because Cruise is an avowed Scientologist and Germany has long identified the group as a cult instead of a religion.

But government officials later backtracked and said the ban had nothing to do with the A-lister's religion but rather previous poor experiences with film companies shooting at those locations. Eventually, they approved the production to film at all the areas save the site where Stauffenberg was executed, out of respect for the deceased.

Members of the German press as well as one of Stauffenberg's sons have publicly questioned whether Cruise is the right man to play one of the few military figures within the Third Reich to actively resist Hitler's ambitions.

In an interview with the German entertainment magazine Bunte, Cruise shot back, asking his critics to wait and "see the movie" before passing judgment on it.

"I want to think positive and concentrate on the film," the 45-year-old couch-jumper told the weekly. I bear a great responsibility to the Germans and to a man like Stauffenberg, who has such a deep significance.  And I feel a responsibility to the man himself."

After noting that Valkyrie is less a war film than a "thriller that takes place in wartime," the ever-exuberant Cruise then lavished praise on the colonel.

"He rejected Hitler," he added. "He came from an old military tradition and was ashamed of what had happened in Germany under Hitler. He was prepared to risk everything, including his own life. What a decision! What courage! What a love for your own country!"

Speaking of country, Cruise also said he's enjoyed his experience working in Germany, particularly since it gives him and his family time to stroll Berlin's Tiergarten park at night and feel completely safe.

In some related Cruise news, Lions for Lambs—the first flick that the actor-turned-mogul is coproducing with partner Paula Wagner under their new deal heading MGM's revived United Artists label—will have its world premiere Nov. 1 as the opening-night movie at this year's Los Angeles International Film Festival. 

In Lions, Cruise plays a charismatic senator whose actions play a key role in the fate of two young army rangers in the battlefield of Afghanistan post-9/11. The film costars Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.