His crimes unfolded across a single year, concentrated in the impoverished outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where he targeted boys who were vulnerable to small offers of money or promises of help. What distinguished his case was the ideological framework he constructed around the killings — drawn from religious broadcasts he had followed for years — which shaped both his victim selection and his self-justification. He confessed immediately upon arrest and described his crimes in detail, providing investigators with accounts of fourteen murders committed between April and December 1991.

A successful Bordeaux merchant who built his commercial network through Protestant exile connections, Laffon de Ladebat expanded into the transatlantic slave trade from 1764, adding human trafficking to an already prosperous colonial trade operation. His career illustrates how merchant capital in the French Atlantic world frequently moved from wine and goods into the slave trade as the economic logic of the West Indies colonies took hold.

Sekine operated through the mundane cover of a dog-breeding business, using the trust of ordinary commercial transactions to target and kill at least four clients over the span of a few months. The crimes were committed in partnership with his common-law wife, and the case drew significant attention in Japan both for the calculated exploitation of that trust and for the swift succession of killings within a single year.

Few figures better illustrate the post-Soviet criminal diaspora than Ivankov, who carried the vor v zakone tradition across continents, ultimately embedding Russian organized crime within American underworld networks during the 1990s. His alleged ties to state intelligence added a layer of institutional ambiguity that complicated law enforcement efforts on both sides of the Atlantic.

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.