His rubber enterprise in the upper Amazon became the mechanism for what is now recognized as the Putumayo genocide, in which Indigenous populations were systematically worked to death. The exposure came largely through outside investigators — journalist Walter Hardenburg and diplomat Roger Casement among them — rather than through any accountability from within Peru. Arana himself remained active in public life for decades afterward, serving as a senator and framing the collapse of his company as a failure of British management.

His victims were elderly pensioners living alone in rural settlements, targeted for whatever small sums or food could be found in their homes — sometimes just rubles and a piece of sausage. Operating across the Moscow Oblast and Vladimir Oblast over roughly a year, Pischikov killed with little apparent calculation beyond opportunity, presenting to neighbors and acquaintances as shy and unremarkable while concealing his crimes behind a fabricated work routine. The mundane scale of what he took made the violence all the more stark. Decades later, additional confessions extended the known toll.

What made Landru particularly effective was his methodology: systematic, patient, and coldly administrative, operating a marriage fraud scheme on an industrial scale during a war that had left France with an enormous surplus of grieving women and depleted families. His personal notebook, in which he categorized hundreds of women by their financial prospects, has come to stand as one of the more unsettling documents of the era — evidence less of passion or rage than of routine. The confirmed victims numbered eleven, but the seventy-two women who simply vanished from the record leave the full accounting permanently open.

His fortune was built on human trafficking before it was consolidated into one of nineteenth-century Spain's most prominent commercial empires — a trajectory that illustrates how wealth derived from the slave trade was routinely laundered into respectability through legitimate enterprise. The Marquess of Comillas became a figure of considerable influence in Spanish business and society, his earlier dealings largely obscured by the scale of what came after.

His career traced a path from decorated military officer to self-appointed dictator, with the 4th of August Regime suspending parliamentary rule, suppressing political opposition, and instituting a nationalist, anti-communist order that drew comparisons to contemporaneous fascist governments across Europe. The ideology he constructed — Metaxism — borrowed the aesthetics and apparatus of authoritarian modernism while resting on royal backing rather than mass mobilization, giving his rule a particular character historians still debate. His most consequential single act came near the end: refusing Italy's 1940 ultimatum and committing a country he governed by force to a war fought, at least nominally, for the freedoms he had spent years dismantling at home.