Crocodile’s Bounty at over 1.9 billion Berries (1,965,000,000)

The freeze ended, and that is the first thing to understand. Crocodile did not wait for the Levely to lose his title: it was stripped from him in Arabasta on the day of his arrest, and he was sent to Level 6 of Impel Down, where the world's worst criminals are kept. The sum parked for some twenty years was released long before the Warlords were abolished; the amount the story shows next, close to two billion, carries no date. The figure reads best as the settling of an account the title had suspended.

The account is long. Arabasta, obviously; then the breakout from Impel Down alongside Luffy, from a man who, in his first prison, had watched his former agents escape without him, cigar in mouth; then Marineford, where he faced Whitebeard, traded blows with Dracule Mihawk and advised the World's Strongest Swordsman to watch himself, and pulled Luffy and Jinbe clear of Sakazuki's magma. Two years later, at Karai Bari Island, he and Daz Bonez sank the entire fleet sent to arrest Buggy, and Buggy's men took it as proof that the rumour was true and he really was their captain's henchman.

He cultivates that misunderstanding. Cross Guild, which he founded with Mihawk, faces the world from behind a straw president, and the two men who actually run it style themselves officers so the attention lands elsewhere. The world obliged: it made Buggy an Emperor and priced him above Crocodile himself.

One hold has nonetheless been taken on Crocodile, and it is not measured in blows. Emporio Ivankov, who knew him as a rookie, holds something from his past that Crocodile does not want revealed, and used it in Impel Down to make sure he would not betray the escape. Even before the Warlords were abolished, Vegapunk had already cloned him as one of the Seraphim built to replace them.