A career built on bank and train robbery across the frontier West, his significance lies partly in what he passed on — Harvey Logan, whom he mentored, would go on to become one of the most violent members of the Wild Bunch. Curry's own trajectory, from regional outlaw to a founding presence in Cassidy's gang, reflects how criminal networks of the era were built through personal allegiance as much as opportunity.

His music career and his criminal operation ran in parallel — and ultimately, his own recordings became some of the most damning evidence against him at trial. As leader of the Murderous Mad Dogs in Brooklyn's Boerum Hill housing projects, he oversaw a criminal enterprise spanning drug distribution, extortion, and contract killing, while personally committing multiple murders across nearly a decade. The federal RICO conviction and resulting sentences — twelve life terms plus 105 years — reflected both the scale of the organization and the difficulty prosecutors faced in securing earlier convictions, given allegations of witness intimidation.

A French-born drifter who reinvented himself across multiple countries, Dubois left a trail of robberies and killings through South America before settling into a pattern of targeted murders in Chile — strangers lured or ambushed, their valuables taken. His victims were largely merchants and businessmen, and the class dynamics of Valparaíso at the time were enough for contemporaries to recast him as a figure of popular justice, a legend that outlasted his execution and persists in Chilean folk memory to this day.

Britain's most prolific executioner of the twentieth century, Pierrepoint carried out his work with a professional detachment that became something of a public fixation — his name appearing in newspapers alongside the names of those he dispatched. Among those he executed were convicted Nazi war criminals hanged in the aftermath of World War II, alongside some of the most notorious killers tried in British courts during the postwar decades. Late in life he expressed doubt about whether capital punishment served as a deterrent, a reflection from the man who had administered it more than any other in his era.

A former police officer who leveraged institutional knowledge and a talent for coalition-building to assume control of a federation of armed groups across Port-au-Prince, Chérizier represents a particular kind of post-state power in a country where central authority had already badly eroded. His orchestration of the largest jailbreak in Haitian history and the coordinated assaults of early 2024 were less random violence than a calculated campaign to force political outcomes — and they worked, contributing directly to the resignation of acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

A military commander turned war criminal, Praljak was convicted by an international tribunal for crimes committed against Bosniak civilians during the Croat–Bosniak War — offenses that included violations of the laws of war, crimes against humanity, and breaches of the Geneva Conventions. His case is remembered as much for its dramatic conclusion as for the convictions themselves: upon hearing his appeal rejected in open court, he swallowed poison and died within hours. The act was interpreted by many observers as a final, public rejection of accountability rather than an expression of remorse.

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.

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.

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.