A Russian born United States citizen named Harris Lifschitz was found on a road in southern Haiti in June 1921 with his neck cut open, and Casey uses the case files held in the US National Archives to open up how power actually worked before and during the occupation. Lifschitz reached Haiti in 1898 as a soap manufacturer, prospered by lending money and exporting coffee and logwood, and after the 1918 constitution let foreigners own land he pushed roughly a thousand suits through the court at Aquin, stripping peasants of their plots. Facing deportation, he borrowed the vocabulary of the nationalist opposition, tried to manufacture evidence of persecution, wrote to a congressional ally and reached the New York Times as a critic of marine brutality. Casey argues that the occupation state was uneven enough for one private litigant to play courts, marines and State Department officials against each other, and that such private dealings deserve the attention given to corporate concessions.