Outside these hotspots, routine reports of smuggling aircraft occurred across the length of the southern and northern borders. Moonshiners also employed airplanes for internal transport and first person accounts testify to complex domestic networks of aerial transport. Taken as a whole, these reports suggest that even in the early years of Prohibition that upwards of one hundred aircraft were engaged in criminal transport and that by the end, five times that number is not an unreasonable estimate.21 Between June 30, 1932 and June 30, 1933, federal authorities seized thirty-five aircraft for smuggling. Given the reports of crashes of smuggling aircraft and a ten percent loss rate, the

five hundred aircraft estimate appears justifiable. Given that the Coast Guard established that there were only 550 aircraft in airline service at the time, the implications are staggering.22 Even if the loss rate was twice as high, over two hundred aircraft would have been in use at one time. These are astounding figures, if they could be supported by better evidence, as the net profits of this activity would almost certainly be in excess of all legitimate commercial aeronautical activity combined at that time. Regardless of the exact quantification, it is obvious that the scholarly histories of American interwar aviation have grossly underestimated the significance of illicit activity. For instance, Al Capone's Chicago air operations alone (run by his brother Ralph) claimed to own twenty aircraft of their own, which does not even account for the huge number of independent rings allied to Capone, or operating in competition with him, who had their own air fleets.23 Blaise "King Canada" Diesbourg, aka "King of the Airplanes," was a French Canadian who handled the Canadian-side logistics for Al Capone's bootlegging operations over the Great Lakes. Diesbourg realized that the airplane overcame many problems of using boats, which could be interdicted on the rivers and lakes and which were frozen in place for much of the year.