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. He organized five airfields with which to operate, including the use of underground and undetectable storage cisterns. By the time Diesbourg had negotiated his arrangements with Capone, who had his own fleet of "'planes, old bombers - each had a pit on it about long enough to hold twenty-five cases of whiskey.'"24

The Experience of Aerial Smuggling Slats Rodgers as the most unrepentant of the bootleg aviator memoirists, provides the most insightful, if not entertaining, window into the experience of bootlegging - at least to the extent that such memoirs can be considered reliable. His career began before federal Prohibition when he smuggled liquor into "dry" Oklahoma from "wet" Texas on trains and then in cars. Profits allowed the former aviator to buy a Lincoln Standard biplane. Why did Rodgers shift from terrestrial smuggling to an aerial form? He regarded the airplane as a ticket to "big time" smuggling. While others were already efficiently bridging the border with liquor smuggling, the internal infrastructure in Texas in 1919 was "not anything but … little chunks of paving with miles and miles of mud and sand and maybe a little gravel in between. Driving was hell.