How do the concrete materiality of infrastructures, and the gossamer web of legal and institutional arrangements in which they are enmeshed, shape infrastructure’s role in processes of capital accumulation? Scholars like Timothy Mitchell have recently contended that the physical durability of infrastructure is central to its role in capitalization over time. Yet as Mitchell and other scholars have long argued, the concrete materiality of infrastructures can derail the projects that they concretize. Moreover, the value that infrastructures embody is also contingent on much less concrete – but no less real – processes like real estate speculation and legal-institutional arrangements such as insurance. Therefore, while infrastructures often serve as sites of investment for long-term capital accumulation, and are sustained in this role by insurance policies designed to mitigate against risks to accumulation, infrastructures’ material qualities and legal-institutional entanglements can also render their value precarious and threaten capital’s ability to maintain and realize that value. This paper closely examines an insurance dispute over the Beirut Holiday Inn adjudicated at the Southern District Court of New York following that hotel’s destruction in the Lebanese civil war. Real estate projects like the Holiday Inn played key roles in the diversification strategies of oil-exporting states like Kuwait and mashriqi capitalists like ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Qattan, serving as sites for the reinvestment of oil wealth to provide stable long-term returns that were ostensibly guaranteed by their material durability and legal-institutional arrangements such as commercial real estate insurance policies. Such projects therefore served as important components of investment strategies for oil-derived capital, as investments in real estate constituted a hedge against oil price fluctuations and the anticipated depletion of oil reserves. Yet the materiality of the Holiday Inn also produced unintended crises for capital accumulation, pulling it into parallel military and legal battles. The hotel’s physical durability and scale – qualities that were central to its utility as a long-term investment – also rendered it strategically critical to warring militias at the opening of the Lebanese civil war in 1975-6. The Holiday Inn’s physical destruction, and the attempt to recover its value, produced a transnational legal controversy on which its value depended. Thus while the Lebanese civil war spurred capital flight from the built environment of Beirut, this capital was nonetheless entombed in the physical form of infrastructures like the Holiday Inn and entangled in the transnational webs spun by U.S.-based insurance companies and the U.S. legal system.