D'Aquila rose to lead what would eventually become one of New York's most enduring crime families, operating at a foundational moment in American organized crime when the structures of power were still being contested through violence and shifting alliances. His tenure as capo dei capi placed him at the center of the brutal internecine struggles among Italian-American criminal networks in the 1910s and 1920s, a period when the New York underworld was consolidating into the Five Families that would define it for decades. The gang war he initiated against the Morello and Masseria factions ultimately undid him, illustrating how quickly authority in that world could reverse.

What made Watts particularly difficult to stop was the combination of his mobility across states, his lack of a consistent method, and the limited forensic tools available to investigators in the 1970s — factors that allowed him to operate for nearly a decade before his arrest. The true scope of his crimes remains unresolved, with official confessions accounting for only a fraction of what law enforcement suspects, making the final count a subject of ongoing uncertainty.

Debono built a commercial empire along the White Nile through the ivory trade, employing hundreds of men and becoming one of the first Europeans to chart the Sobat River and the reaches beyond Gondokoro — genuine geographic contributions that ran alongside serious accusations of complicity in the slave trade. Samuel Baker's damning assessment of his men's conduct in the region, combined with the Khartoum consul's formal charges, suggests that his exploratory reach depended heavily on methods that devastated the communities he passed through. Though the charges were ultimately dropped, the weight of contemporary testimony kept his legacy from settling cleanly on either side of the ledger.