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The figures born on this date span nearly a century of criminal history and several continents, yet they cluster around recognizable archetypes of organized violence and predatory crime. Frank Scalice, a senior figure in the American Mafia's Mangano family during the mid-twentieth century, and Kaneyoshi Kuwata, a high-ranking officer in Japan's Yamaguchi-gumi, represent the institutional side of criminality — men whose careers were embedded in hierarchies with rules, rituals, and long records of violence. Set against them are serial offenders operating alone: Brian Dugan, whose attacks in the Chicago suburbs in the early 1980s drew decades of legal proceedings, and the Russian killers Valery Voronov and Alexander Greba, each ultimately identified by the regions where they operated. Georges-Alexandre Sarrejani, executed in France in 1934 as the last person put to death in Aix-en-Provence, offers an older European counterpoint to the rest.

September 23, 1958 - Valery Voronov

Operating in a small town in the Leningrad Oblast over the span of seven years, Voronov carried out a sustained pattern of attacks on women that left at least three dead and four wounded before authorities intervened. His case is notable not only for the duration of the crimes but for the legal outcome — found not guilty by reason of insanity, he avoided criminal conviction and has remained confined to psychiatric detention rather than prison. The rural setting of Lyuban, far from major urban centers, likely shaped both the pace of the investigation and the community's prolonged exposure to the attacks.

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September 23, 1893 - Frank Scalice

Scalice operated at the upper levels of what would become one of New York's most enduring organized crime organizations, serving both as boss and later as consigliere during the consolidation era of American organized crime. His career spanned decades of internal power struggles within the five families, and his end — shot while shopping in the Bronx — reflected the violent internal enforcement that characterized the world he helped build.

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September 23, 1738 - Moses Brown

Moses Brown presents a genuinely unusual case for this site: a man who became a committed abolitionist and helped secure anti-slave trade legislation, yet whose industrial investments helped build the American textile economy that depended on enslaved labor in the South. The tension between his principles and his economic legacy is the central fact of his life. He lived nearly a century, long enough to see both the movement he supported gain ground and the industrial system he helped create deepen its entanglement with slavery.

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September 23, 1878 - Georges-Alexandre Sarrejani

Sarret's case drew lasting attention less for the murders themselves than for the method of concealment — the use of sulphuric acid to destroy the bodies of his victims, a procedure clinical enough in its execution to suggest premeditation well beyond ordinary criminal impulse. His trial became one of the more discussed criminal proceedings in interwar France, and his guillotining at Aix-en-Provence would prove to be the last carried out in that city.

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September 23, 1956 - Brian Dugan

Dugan's case is a stark illustration of how wrongful convictions can run parallel to the actual perpetrator's freedom — two men were sentenced to death for a crime he committed, and it took more than a decade of appeals, recanted testimony, and DNA evidence to unravel. His informal confession in 1985 was not enough to prevent those convictions from standing, and the Nicarico murder remained entangled in prosecutorial and legal controversy long after the facts pointed clearly elsewhere.

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September 23, 1980 - Alexander Greba

His crimes unfolded across a rural Russian landscape he had retreated into since adolescence, targeting elderly victims in the months following his release from an earlier murder conviction. The pattern — isolation, opportunistic violence, withdrawal back into the forest — reflected a life structured almost entirely around flight from society. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005, he carried out his final murders within the span of a single week.

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September 23, 1939 - Kaneyoshi Kuwata

A senior figure within Japan's most powerful organized crime syndicate, Kuwata rose through the Yamaguchi-gumi's ranks to hold one of its highest operational positions, serving both as wakagashira and as personal secretary to its kumicho. His trajectory illustrates how institutional hierarchy within major yakuza organizations could sustain criminal activity across decades, culminating in a 1997 Tokyo assassination in which evidence linked directly to his subordinates.

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