Operating in the chaotic post-Soviet property market of the early 1990s, Murylev exploited the sudden privatization of housing to target victims whose apartments he could seize and sell after their deaths. His crimes placed him among the earliest known practitioners of a distinctly Russian criminal phenomenon — the so-called "black realtor" — in which the collapse of Soviet-era protections left vulnerable people exposed to predators who murdered for real estate. Eight people were killed within the span of roughly a year.

Campagna spent more than thirty years as a trusted enforcer and racketeer within the Chicago Outfit, rising from bodyguard to Al Capone to a principal figure in some of the organization's most lucrative criminal enterprises. His reach extended from Chicago's labor unions to Hollywood's film industry, where the Outfit extracted roughly a million dollars in extortion payments from major studios. Even a federal conviction and prison sentence did little to interrupt his standing — his early parole, reportedly secured through bribery, drew a formal Justice Department challenge that ultimately failed.

Her position as a nurse gave her both access and cover, allowing her to poison patients over years before suspicion mounted enough to prompt investigation. When she finally confessed, she claimed far more victims than the twelve proven in court — a figure that, if accurate, would place her among the most prolific killers in American history. The trust inherent in caregiving made her actions particularly difficult to detect and, once revealed, particularly difficult to comprehend.

Operating across a four-year span in Krasnoyarsk, Vasilyev carried out seventeen killings driven by what investigators characterized as homicidal mania rather than any material motive — a pattern that placed him among the more prolific serial offenders in post-Soviet Russia. The legal outcome drew scrutiny: a sentence later reduced on appeal left many to note the disconnect between the scale of the crimes and the punishment ultimately handed down.

A senior architect of Soviet covert operations, Sudoplatov operated at the intersection of intelligence, assassination, and strategic deception across three decades of Soviet power. His portfolio ranged from directing the operation that killed Leon Trotsky in 1940 to managing the espionage network that funneled atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project to Moscow. The breadth of his work — spanning targeted killings, wartime deception, and nuclear intelligence — makes him a singular figure in the institutional history of Soviet state violence.