His case sits at an unusual intersection of white-collar crime and homicide — a skilled forger and check fraudster whose financial schemes gave him the tools to obscure his killings, making victims appear alive through fabricated records long after their deaths. The FBI's use of him as a paid informant during the period he was actively murdering raises unresolved questions about institutional oversight and the costs of that arrangement. Investigators have linked him to as many as twenty-five deaths in total, though only four convictions were secured.

His reign began with a constitution and ended with its suspension — a pattern that defined the decades that followed. Ruling as an autocrat for thirty years, Abdul Hamid II presided over the systematic massacre of Armenians and Assyrians in the 1890s, events that drew international condemnation and prefigured the catastrophes of the following century. His use of pan-Islamic ideology and a vast network of spies and informants allowed him to maintain control over a weakening empire even as its territorial losses mounted.

As Japan's Foreign Minister across three separate terms, Arita shaped the ideological language through which Imperial Japan justified its military expansion across Asia and the Pacific. The phrase he coined — Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere — gave a veneer of regional solidarity and anti-colonialism to a project of conquest, functioning as some of the most consequential political framing of the twentieth century.