What distinguished this English mystic was not merely the deception involved but its scope and duration — a years-long accumulation of wealth, land, and human loyalty built on spiritual authority he had largely invented. The community he established on Vancouver Island drew educated, propertied followers who surrendered significant fortunes to his cause, and the control he eventually exercised over them extended to forced labor and imprisonment. When legal accountability finally approached, he destroyed the colony rather than face it and fled the country with what his former disciples believed was their gold.

Among the most consequential loose ends in modern Spanish criminal history, Anglés has never been apprehended for his alleged role in one of the country's most disturbing cases — the abduction and killing of three teenage girls in 1992. His disappearance before he could be tried, and the unconfirmed sightings that followed across multiple countries, have left the case unresolved for over three decades. The absence of a final accounting has made him a persistent subject of investigative attention and public memory in Spain.

Khashoggi operated at the intersection of arms commerce and geopolitics for decades, brokering deals between Western defense contractors and Saudi Arabia on a scale that shaped regional military power. His role as a middleman gave him access to heads of state and intelligence communities across multiple continents, and his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair illustrated how such private intermediaries could influence — or circumvent — official foreign policy. The wealth generated by these arrangements funded a lifestyle that itself became a form of soft power, keeping him embedded in circles where influence was traded as freely as weapons contracts.

Onoprienko carried out his killings across rural Ukraine in two separate periods of violence, targeting families in their homes and leaving few survivors to identify him. His ability to operate undetected for years — and across a wide geographic range — reflected both the scale of his crimes and the investigative limitations of the post-Soviet period in which they occurred. The confession of fifty-two murders placed him among the most prolific killers documented in Ukrainian criminal history.