The same goes for today's leaders of organised crime, you have be CEO-material in order to manage 'Ndrangheta's ~50 billion euros business [1], it's not enough just to be able to kill some guys on a dark street in Catanzaro anymore.
Here is a insightful blog post from Erik Bernhardsson on Business secrets from terrible people[1] where he writes about management lessons from the Taliban, Theranos, Al-Qaeda and The Black Kings a crack-dealing gang in Chicago.
And here is an interesting article from the Economist on management lessons from Mexico’s drug lords[2]
They built and ran billion dollar international organizations that employed thousands of people and managed to not get killed or arrested for a long time. That's not an east thing to do in my book
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210113-ndrangheta-crime...