Where Rodgers wore his criminality proudly, Bert "Fish" Hassell regarded his smuggling activities as just a short chapter in an expansive and remarkable career as both a commercial pilot and military air commander. In 1967, Ed Bergman, in an article for Private Pilot magazine, interviewed the members of Florida's OX5 Club chapter (an organization of "pioneering" aviators) on their experiences in Prohibition era smuggling on the Bimini to Miami run, he noted that, "While history does not look unkindly on the blockade runners of the Revolutionary War, time and television have shamefully tarnished the image of all who were once involved in the illegal liquor traffic. Mainly for this reason, they confine their reminiscing to such selective gatherings. None as yet have published their memoirs."4 The most significant barrier to scholarly study of American aerial criminality has been the paucity of federal records. Scholars might reasonably assume the existence of an extensive array of records from the numerous federal, state, and local agencies that acted in opposition to smugglers. However, there is a surprising gulf in the historical record. The Bureau of Prohibition that acted as the coordinating entity for Prohibition enforcement bounced from one administrative umbrella to another, which resulted in a scattering of its official records, though this alone does not appear to account for the minimal documentation of enforcement activities.

Aerial Smuggling as Disruptive Discourse Aerial smuggling may have been an unintended consequence of powered flight, but it was most definitely not unanticipated. By 1906, European customs officials had already begun to identify aerial smuggling as a forthcoming problem in tariff avoidance.5 Though heavier-than-air