Fenley’s story – this chapter, at any rate – begins in 2019. After separating from his wife, with whom he has two kids, Fenley had moved in with his father, a sculptor, and uncle in Los Angeles, working on a start-up he’d founded called Crossies, which stores and digitizes physical media collections and offers them for streaming on the cloud. Two weeks after his arrival, his uncle received an eviction notice, and Fenley and his father began to look for somewhere new.

Fenley had run a a makerspace workshop called “Provolt” in Utah until the landlord had raised the rent. “There was a 65,000 square foot jail that I’d wanted wanted to move the makerspace into in Provo, and that that whole thing hadn’t worked out,” he told me on the phone. (The city only wanted to sell the asbestos-riddled jail, which it described as “grim,” to owners who would demolish it; Fenley had wanted to rehabilitate the building.) The jail’s size became his minimum lower bound.

“I didn’t care where it was in the country. And I wanted to find the cheapest possible price,” he said.” So Fenley hopped on the commercial real-estate listing site Loopnet and searched, as he later described to The Capital Times of Madison, Wis., “for properties over 65,000 square feet and sorted by price.” At the top of the list was the former home of the steel company Varco Pruden – a 17-acre property with a warehouse and office complex in Pine Bluff that had been vacant and decaying for 15 years. The property was listed at $375,000; Fenley initially assumed the price was a typo.

For most of the next year, Fenley, living on the property and subsisting on ramen, was engaged in battle on multiple fronts: Against the city of Pine Bluff, against the scrappers stealing from his property, and against angry Murfie customers who wanted to know where their CDs were. (Still packed into the shipping containers sitting outside the Varco Pruden warehouse, as it happened.) But in the summer of 2021, he came into a windfall: He was able to sell nearly $900,000 worth of stock in a company to whom he’d sold a patent. A certain kind of person might use that money to extricate themselves from what had become a clearly stressful and likely unsustainable real-estate situation in Pine Bluff. Fenley, instead, used it to buy more property.

What is it with freaks having too much money and deciding to buy entire towns lol.