His fortune was built on human trafficking before it was consolidated into one of nineteenth-century Spain's most prominent commercial empires — a trajectory that illustrates how wealth derived from the slave trade was routinely laundered into respectability through legitimate enterprise. The Marquess of Comillas became a figure of considerable influence in Spanish business and society, his earlier dealings largely obscured by the scale of what came after.

His victims were elderly pensioners living alone in rural settlements, targeted for whatever small sums or food could be found in their homes — sometimes just rubles and a piece of sausage. Operating across the Moscow Oblast and Vladimir Oblast over roughly a year, Pischikov killed with little apparent calculation beyond opportunity, presenting to neighbors and acquaintances as shy and unremarkable while concealing his crimes behind a fabricated work routine. The mundane scale of what he took made the violence all the more stark. Decades later, additional confessions extended the known toll.

What made Landru particularly effective was his methodology: systematic, patient, and coldly administrative, operating a marriage fraud scheme on an industrial scale during a war that had left France with an enormous surplus of grieving women and depleted families. His personal notebook, in which he categorized hundreds of women by their financial prospects, has come to stand as one of the more unsettling documents of the era — evidence less of passion or rage than of routine. The confirmed victims numbered eleven, but the seventy-two women who simply vanished from the record leave the full accounting permanently open.

One of the few women to lead a major Mexican drug trafficking organization, she rose through the Tijuana Cartel not through violence but through financial acumen — managing money laundering operations and maintaining the international supply relationships that kept the cartel viable even as its male leadership was systematically arrested or killed. Her longevity in the role reflects both operational skill and an ability to adapt as the organization contracted around her. "Enedina Arellano Félix de Toledo (born April 12, 1961) is a Mexican drug lord who, alongside her brothers, founded the Tijuana Cartel and played a role as a logistical accountant for the criminal organization... She first started working behind the scenes as a money launderer for the Tijuana Cartel but then ended up leading the cartel after the arrest of her brother Eduardo Arellano Félix in 2008." — Wikipedia

His rubber enterprise in the upper Amazon became the mechanism for what is now recognized as the Putumayo genocide, in which Indigenous populations were systematically worked to death. The exposure came largely through outside investigators — journalist Walter Hardenburg and diplomat Roger Casement among them — rather than through any accountability from within Peru. Arana himself remained active in public life for decades afterward, serving as a senator and framing the collapse of his company as a failure of British management.

As Romania's wartime leader, Antonescu directed his country's participation in the Eastern Front alongside Nazi Germany and oversaw a regime responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Roma — making Romania second only to Germany itself in the scale of Holocaust perpetration under a collaborating state. His authority rested on a combination of military prestige, institutional maneuvering, and the brutal suppression of rivals including the Iron Guard, whose own violence he had initially tolerated and then crushed. He was tried and executed by the postwar Romanian government in 1946.