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In a famous passage at the beginning of ‘A Case of Identity’, Holmes imagines surveying the inner workings of the households of London from the air: If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. (Adventures, 30) Besides the clear reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this passage alludes to a French reinterpretation of an ancient myth which, as Anthea Trodd and others have shown, fascinated Victorian writers: Alain-René Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (1707) takes the figure of Asmodeus from Hebrew myth and turns him into a satirical figure who leads ‘a favoured human companion on a roof-top excursion of Madrid, and lifts the roofs of the houses to expose the secret crimes habitually being enacted beneath’.

Beginning with the theme of increasing federal jurisdiction of law enforcement, the chapter deals with the recurring theme of overcrowded dockets and the frustrations of some judges. A number of Middle Florida district judges and chief justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist were among those to speak out against the increasing federalization of crime. Drug prosecutions continued to consume much docket space and some of the most high-profile cases of the 1990s are documented. The federal forfeiture program and how it operated in the Middle District is discussed. Next the chapter turns to the use of the RICO statue to prosecute drug dealers and an extensive coverage of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang’s prosecution is included. Next the chapter turns to fraud prosecutions in the federal courts, including the Columbia/HCA Medicare Fraud, William and Chantal McCorkle, and Pastor Henry Lyons of the National Baptist Convention U.S.A. Next the chapter turns to prosecuting polluters and protecting endangered species under federal law. A number of important polluter cases and an important case to protect nesting sea turtles are discussed. Finally the chapter turns to the kidnapping case of baby Sabrina Aisenberg, and the prosecution and subsequent acquittal of her parents.

Violence was enslavers’ great economizer. This chapter follows Solomon Northup’s ordeal from his kidnapping in Washington, D.C., in 1841 through the mechanical market through which he was processed, sold, and transported up Louisiana’s Red River at the start of a thirteen year odyssey of captivity and forced labor. Theophilus Freeman orchestrated the firm that bought, transported, and sold him, and its architecture reveals a fragmented market. Kidnapping was part of Freeman’s business strategy, and the firm treated the social costs of slaving as externalities. Freeman’s enterprise seized competitive advantages by buying railroad and sea passage and by employing agents in a loose organizational structure that contrasts with Franklin and Armfield’s vertical organization. As market relations became more mechanical they hinged more on exchange than on confidence and trust.

This chapter examines how the journey across Mexico has become a site of intense violence and profit making in what may be conceptualized as an industry. Through migrant testimonies, it traces how Central American migrants’ bodies, labor and lives are transformed into commodities within economies of smuggling, extortion, and kidnapping. The commodification of migrants also coincides with the transformation of local spaces into new sites of profit and insecurity.

This chapter explains how global economic forces drove the catastrophic collapse of the Gulf’s two leading industries in the 1920s and 1930s and how this collapse affected the lives of enslaved Africans in the Gulf. The more developed economies of Japan and the United States replaced the Gulf’s exotic exports with products of their own, and in only a few years the Gulf’s date and pearl industries declined sharply and, with the help of the Great Depression, ultimately collapsed. With the Gulf economy in tatters, African labor declined in importance, and many slaves were cast out of their masters’ homes to fend for themselves, while the bonds between former masters and former slaves often remained strong.

This chapter examines 128 cases of enslaved people suing for their freedom (lawsuits that recognized or altered the personal status of an individual held in a state of slavery). Enslaved people in the Natchez district exploited narrow escape hatches within the legal system in order to orchestrate a change in personal status and claim freedom for themselves and their families—often successfully—despite legal restrictions to manumission that increased over time. If they could prove that defendants illegally held them as slaves, they won their lawsuits more often than not. Enslaved litigants sued for their freedom on a number of grounds, from the enforcement of promises of freedom made in their late masters' wills to accusations of kidnapping to safeguarding self-purchase contracts. They employed their knowledge of the law and legal processes and harnessed their considerable community networks—both local and distant—in order to gain their liberty. Enslaved litigants used every available opening in the law when pressing for freedom and transformed abstract privileges and obligations into social and legal realities. By claiming their rights to themselves and their labor, moreover, enslaved people induced the Mississippi and Louisiana courts to act against the economic interests of a slaveholders' republic.