Svengali Defence is a legal tactic that portrays the defendant as a pawn in the scheme of a greater, and more influential, criminal mastermind

...and so, all those war crimes, tens of millions bombed and tortured and starved, here, on his 100th birthday, but many more spring chickens have learned Kissinger's Rasputin-Machiavelli Ways

But few can rival the feral reputation that history has hung around the neck of Grigory Rasputin, the evil-smelling Siberian peasant, hypnotist and confidant to Russian royalty.