A French-born drifter who reinvented himself across multiple countries, Dubois left a trail of robberies and killings through South America before settling into a pattern of targeted murders in Chile — strangers lured or ambushed, their valuables taken. His victims were largely merchants and businessmen, and the class dynamics of Valparaíso at the time were enough for contemporaries to recast him as a figure of popular justice, a legend that outlasted his execution and persists in Chilean folk memory to this day.

Britain's most prolific executioner of the twentieth century, Pierrepoint carried out his work with a professional detachment that became something of a public fixation — his name appearing in newspapers alongside the names of those he dispatched. Among those he executed were convicted Nazi war criminals hanged in the aftermath of World War II, alongside some of the most notorious killers tried in British courts during the postwar decades. Late in life he expressed doubt about whether capital punishment served as a deterrent, a reflection from the man who had administered it more than any other in his era.

A former police officer who leveraged institutional knowledge and a talent for coalition-building to assume control of a federation of armed groups across Port-au-Prince, Chérizier represents a particular kind of post-state power in a country where central authority had already badly eroded. His orchestration of the largest jailbreak in Haitian history and the coordinated assaults of early 2024 were less random violence than a calculated campaign to force political outcomes — and they worked, contributing directly to the resignation of acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

A career built on bank and train robbery across the frontier West, his significance lies partly in what he passed on — Harvey Logan, whom he mentored, would go on to become one of the most violent members of the Wild Bunch. Curry's own trajectory, from regional outlaw to a founding presence in Cassidy's gang, reflects how criminal networks of the era were built through personal allegiance as much as opportunity.

His rule over Buenos Aires Province depended heavily on the apparatus of state terrorism, wielded through a political police force that targeted unitarians, intellectuals, and perceived enemies of his federalist order. The combination of personal wealth, military backing, and populist symbolism allowed him to consolidate power in ways that outlasted his formal terms in office. His campaigns against indigenous peoples on the frontier added a further dimension of organized violence to a regime already defined by coercion.