Flemmi's career illustrates how law enforcement relationships could be exploited to sustain, rather than curtail, organized crime. As a top FBI informant while simultaneously operating within the Winter Hill Gang, he occupied a position that granted him unusual protection over decades of criminal activity. The resulting scandal — an informant shielded while committing serious crimes — became one of the more damaging episodes in the FBI's modern history.

A Shakespeare scholar and literary translator by training, Koljević presents one of the more striking contrasts the Bosnian War produced — an academic whose political role placed him at the center of ethnic cleansing operations later adjudicated by an international tribunal. His posthumous designation as a participant in a joint criminal enterprise reflects the scale of coordinated displacement carried out against Bosniak and Bosnian Croat civilians during his tenure in Republika Srpska's leadership.

His inclusion here reflects the brutality with which he imposed transformation on Russia — forced modernization backed by autocratic violence, mass conscription, and the suppression of dissent, including the torture and execution of those who resisted, among them his own son. The scale of his ambition reshaped an empire, but the human cost of his methods was enormous. "Peter I ... better known as Peter the Great ... led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernized, and based on the radical Enlightenment ... after his victory in the Great Northern War, Russia annexed a significant portion of the eastern Baltic coastline and was officially raised from a tsardom to an empire."