A small version of this occurs in the Mountain West. Some well-maintained rural roads are actually maintained illegally across Federal land by the locals. The Federal government is responsible for maintenance but often doesn't do any for decades and so the roads go into severe disrepair. If you ask permission to repair the road out of your own pocket, you will have to file absurd amounts of paperwork and the Federal government charges you money for the right!
Some of the local illegal road repair crews are well-organized. They descend like a flash mob with heavy equipment when the odds of getting caught are near zero. The Feds are incurious about who is maintaining the roads illegally because it is kind of doing them a favor.
I first learned about this when I naively started jumping through the hoops to get permission to repair a remote road. One of the local ranchers heard about it, pulled me aside, and explained how things worked while admonishing me for ruining my plausible deniability. The whole thing was wild.
