Harris Lifschitz, an American who grew rich in Haiti between 1898 and his murder in 1921, serves Casey as a lens on US imperialism. His career shows how foreigners already operating in Haiti before the occupation moved into more profitable ventures once the Americans took control.

It also shows how patchy the occupation's state building was. Centralization went only so far: pockets of local autonomy survived and land titles were kept badly. Lifschitz stripped Haitians of property by pressing cases in Haitian courts, which lay outside US authority, by working the gaps in land administration, and by exploiting the occupation's habit of enforcing laws to the letter.

The case also unsettles any clean division between occupier and occupied. Marines first accused him of corruption they called Haitian; Haitians treated him as empire's instrument. He later borrowed the vocabulary and cross-border networks of the opposition movement, and some activists came to portray him as a martyr.