Cutolo built the Nuova Camorra Organizzata largely from within prison, recruiting inmates and establishing a hierarchy that at its height rivaled the power of the Sicilian Mafia in southern Italy. His nicknames — the Gospel, the Prince, the Professor, the Monk — reflect the quasi-religious and intellectual authority he cultivated, which was central to how he commanded loyalty. The NCO's rise and the brutal turf wars it triggered reshaped organized crime in Campania during the 1970s and 1980s.

Operating under a messianic identity in rural Chile, he built the kind of authority over a small group that made the unthinkable achievable — culminating in the ritual killing of his own infant son to forestall an apocalypse that never came. The case drew national attention less for its scale than for what it revealed about the conditions under which isolated communities can be shaped around a single figure's compulsions. He died by suicide in Peru as authorities closed in, leaving behind a case that Chilean investigators described as without modern precedent in the country.

Operating over a concentrated period in 2011, Podshivalov carried out a series of killings in Perm that would leave him regarded as among the most significant criminal cases in the city's history. The crimes drew enough attention to produce a lasting nickname — The Zakamsky Maniac — though investigators have never fully established what drove them. The absence of a clear motive has kept the case a subject of ongoing interest for those studying violent crime in post-Soviet Russia.

Vergueiro occupies an ambiguous place in Brazilian labor history: celebrated in his time as a reformer for replacing enslaved workers with European immigrants, he nonetheless built his fortune on slave trading and coffee production sustained by coerced labor. The sharecropping system he introduced at Fazenda Ibicaba proved exploitative enough to spark a major immigrant worker uprising in 1856, exposing how the transition away from slavery could be engineered to preserve the economic subordination of laborers rather than end it.

Operating over roughly a year in the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk, Ryzhkov targeted women and a teenage girl in a concentrated series of sexual assaults and killings that ended only with his arrest shortly after his final crime. The case is notable for both the vulnerability of his victims and the relative speed of his apprehension, which came before the violence could extend further.

What distinguished Lacenaire from other criminals of his era was his deliberate cultivation of a public persona — using his trial and subsequent imprisonment to position himself as a literary figure and social rebel rather than simply a killer. The murders he committed were brutal and calculated, yet it was his articulate self-justification, his poetry, and his memoirs that secured his place in French cultural memory. His influence reached writers of the stature of Balzac and Dostoevsky, making him a rare case in which a convicted murderer shaped the literary imagination of a generation.