The Liminal Casino: On Phantom Investments, Timezone Crimes, and Refrigerator Soundscapes

Geographic loopholes, spatial crimes, international borders, and ambient links

IMAGE: An “unsurveyed area,” as seen on a 1929 USGS map of the Hunter, Texas, region.

LOOPHOLES, ENCLAVES, ZONES

I’m a sucker for stories of territorial loopholes, where, for whatever reason, a piece of land is left outside a given legal regime or otherwise skipped over by the powers that be. A canonical example of this would be the strangely self-overlapping villages of Baarle-Hartog—about which I’ve written elsewhere—where tiny splotches of the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively, are marbled through and around one another, such that certain buildings have an international border passing straight through them, where a door on one side of a building is in one country while its back windows are in another, and so on.

Another example comes from where New York State meets Québec. Some houses there all but straddle the border, meaning that, at least theoretically, the people who live there can smuggle goods internationally without leaving home. (Indeed, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police apparently now “keeps an eye on real estate transactions and activities in the area,” for that very reason.)

An arguably even more fantastic example of a territorial loophole comes to us from the American West. (I first saw this one back in 2012, I believe by way of Bruce Schneier’s blog) According to legal theorist Brian C. Kalt, “there is a 50-square-mile swath of Idaho in which one might be able to commit felonies with impunity.”

This particular zone of legal exception, Kalt writes, “sits at the perimeter of Yellowstone National Park. The problem with Yellowstone is that it does not quite fit in Wyoming: Nine percent of the park overflows into Montana (about 260 square miles’ worth) and Idaho (about 50 square miles). The park was established in 1872, well before the three states were added to the Union in 1889 and 1890. When the states were admitted, each ceded exclusive jurisdiction of its portion of Yellowstone to the federal government. Yellowstone is a federal enclave, in other words, and the states cannot enforce state law there.” Further, although Yellowstone technically straddles three states, the entire park is considered part of the jurisdiction of Wyoming, which “makes the District of Wyoming the only district court that includes land in multiple states.”

Kalt’s hypothetical perfect crime proceeds from what I might call spatio-Constitutional reasoning: “Say that you are in the Idaho portion of Yellowstone, and you decide to spice up your vacation by going on a crime spree. You make some moonshine, you poach some wildlife, you strangle some people and steal their picnic baskets. You are arrested, arraigned in the park, and bound over for trial in Cheyenne, Wyoming before a jury drawn from the Cheyenne area. But Article III, Section 2 plainly requires that the trial be held in Idaho, the state in which the crime was committed. Perhaps if you fuss convincingly enough about it, the case would be sent to Idaho. But the Sixth Amendment then requires that the jury be from the state (Idaho) and the district (Wyoming) in which the crime was committed. In other words, the jury would have to be drawn from the Idaho portion of Yellowstone National Park, which, according to the 2000 Census, has a population of precisely zero.”

Unable to face a jury of peers, in other words, you would find yourself in the midst of a kind of a combined spatial and legal crisis. (The complete Kalt essay goes into much greater detail—apologies for the ultra-short summary.)

This “Yellowstone loophole,” as Kalt calls it, itself came to mind recently due to another legal paper called, “Is West Virginia Constitutional?” (Huge thanks to Tim Hwang for the heads up.) That paper does, indeed, ask if the very existence of West Virginia is a violation of the U.S. Constitution: “When the Commonwealth of Virginia announced it was seceding from the Union, the northwestern corner of Virginia formed a rump government-in-exile, declared itself the lawful government of Virginia, and gave ‘Virginia’s’ consent to the creation of a new State of West Virginia consisting of essentially the same northwestern corner of old Virginia. Congress and the Lincoln administration recognized the northwestern rump as the legitimate government of Virginia, and voted to admit West Virginia as a State.” The question, then, is “whether West Virginia is legitimately a State of the Union or is instead an illegal, breakaway province of Virginia.” (If, like me, you do not have academic library access, you can read the whole paper here.)

One more example crossed my desk a while back, this time on a much smaller-scale. (Originally spotted via Rachel Monroe.) “There was a man,” we read, “Ernest Lewis, on the borderland between Kansas and the Indian Territory who claimed that he had discovered a strip of land that belonged to neither State nor Territory. On it he put up a great gambling establishment, sixty feet long and ten feet nine inches wide… Lewis insists that he will go on forever, unmolested by the law.” Sadly for Lewis, things did not end well for his liminal casino.

But these examples, creatively combined, deliberately mismatched, or literarily remixed, suggest some very interesting ideas, and not just for hypothetical real-world crimes that, due to their spatial nature, might escape prosecution. These examples are also amazingly suggestive for fictional storylines—murder mysteries, heist films, smuggling stories, and more—where location plays an outsize role in the unfolding of the narrative. A house whose long-forgotten storm cellar crosses a state or county line; a piece of land whose legal recognition or current ownership is in violation of the Constitution; and, of course, the team of criminals aware of these specific spatial details, plotting their actions accordingly.

PHANTOM LANDS

It seems at least tangentially relevant here to link to a recent Substack essay about a land-sale scheme in a non-existent country allegedly carved out of Honduras. A man named Gregor MacGregor began selling land to British investors in a fake country he called Poyais. “The problem with selling thousands of acres of a country’s prime colonial land and selling commissions in its army,” Ned Donovan writes, “is eventually they will want to see it.”

But overseas visits by curious investors soon revealed MacGregor’s deception: “As the truth emerged and it became clear the Poyais bonds would never be redeemed, the London market went into chaos, now known as the Panic of 1825. 12 major banks in Britain closed and in total 70 collapsed thanks to MacGregor’s fantasy and a general over eagerness for South American government bonds.” Could the entire world economy by brought to its knees by phantom real-estate transactions? (Investors tied to China’s Evergrande might like to know…)

BANKRUPT THE WORLD

Back in 2011, meanwhile, Lapham’s Quarterly told the story of “an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s” who came up with a financial instrument that could yet “bankrupt the world” through nothing more than compound interest.

As Paul Collins writes, “in the 1930s, [Hartwicke College] in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, ‘could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure,’” were the trust ever to be paid out. (Originally spotted via Josh Calder.)

I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about here, but I would love to see a financial scheme that somehow takes advantage of time zone differences between U.S. states and counties, or even the International Date Line between sovereign nations, where an incipient time change or a temporarily rogue location—like a small town in Indiana stuck voting on which timezone to join, or a tiny Pacific island with its temporal alignment as of yet undecided—gives investors one magical hour, or one magical day, in which interest rates and/or other transactions can have explosive financial effects.

The basic premise has already happened. The next step would be to design legally dubious financial instruments for use in temporally undefined locations—a kind of trust for the island of the day before, so to speak, paraphrasing Umberto Eco, in a financial thriller set along the international date line. (Perhaps recall Tobias Hill’s 2003 novel The Cryptographer, with its so-called “Dateline Virus,” a time-triggered computer infection: “The first to fall victim are those on the international dateline, before the contamination spreads steadily westward as the earth spins into it,” as the London Review of Books explains.)

FRIGO-FORENSICS

Over on his newsletter, This Week In Sound, Marc Weidenbaum highlights one of my own favorite details from my wife’s superb new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (previously discussed here). In Frostbite, author Nicola Twilley explains that the constant electrical hum of domestic refrigerators is now sometimes used in the UK to help solve crimes, as variations in the humming sound can be correlated to specific times of day and even particular parts of the country.

To quote the same part of the book as Marc’s excellent newsletter: “This low hum actually vibrates around sixty hertz, due to minute fluctuations in the grid as utility companies respond to changes in demand. The result is an ever-shifting symphony of frequency vibrations that London's Metropolitan Police began to record in 2005 for use in audio forensics. Because the hum is so omnipresent, inserting itself into most recordings, law enforcement can match the particular sixty-hertz fingerprint of UK-made recordings to its archive to arrive at an exact time stamp. Every time you open the fridge door (which the average household does 107 times per day, according to research conducted by LG), triggering its compressor to kick on, you're helping create that particular second's unique audio fingerprint.” Refrigeration sounds heard in the back of a recorded phone call, for example, can be used to locate when and where that call was originally made.

LORD HAVE MERCY

For this week’s music links, as with the previous two posts, I’ll keep things in an ambient register. This time, check out the gorgeous, profound melancholy of “Lord Have Mercy” by Prime Vertical (2022) or the quietly devastating neo-Classical notes of “Portrait IV” by Primitive Motion (2023).

If you’re still looking for more, why not check out a couple of my own tracks, such as “Aurora” or “Mass,” both released under the name Monarchs and taken from my 2021 EP, “A Loop in Space is Structure.”

Thanks for reading/listening!

NOTE: This post includes Bookshop.org affiliate links, meaning that I might receive a small percentage of any resulting sales.