In the mid-twenties, he found that bootlegging offered greater reward than airmail flying and was less hazardous. He operated out of the Lincoln School of Aviation in Nebraska which used flight instruction and barnstorming as cover for operations that ran beer and whiskey from both Canada and Mexico to customers in Omaha and Lincoln. The activity was highly organized and the operation was well supported with ample infrastructure including warning systems of Dry agents in the area along with safe houses and safe landing sites. Haskell noted that none of the pilots in the operation were ever caught. Hassell was also an active coconspirator with Musick, while he was running the Detroit to Cleveland leg of Aeromarine's operations. 28 In 1933, Bert Acosta, a famed record-setting aviator with ties to notables such as Richard Byrd and Clarence Chamberlain, authored an extensive five-part series for the Brooklyn Daily

Eagle on the culture of aerial smuggling. Much of Acosta's writings reflected persistent tropes over the prior decade and a half of Prohibition-centered smuggling. However, this was possibly the only attempt at a comprehensive narrative of illicit aerial activity in America up to that time. Though filled with unsupportable generalizations, Acosta's writing appears to have considerable impact on the popular culture of aerial smuggling.29 He reinforced a moral hierarchy in which bootleggers were mostly just misguided or down-on-their-luck pilots just looking to survive in difficult times, but in which alien smugglers were a morally bankrupt class of aviators. Narcotic smugglers were the lowest form of adventurer - the ultimate sell out. Narcotics were popularly seen as so far outside the norm that they were not suitable as a topic for pulp action films under Hays motion picture production code. Instead, alien smuggling became the go-to topic for depicting air-minded villains. Acosta's account reinforced a favored unsubstantiated trope of the aeronautical underworld as depicted by Hollywood - the trap door for jettisoning passengers upon aerial interception.30 No newspaper or official accounts are in evidence that support Acosta's claims for the existence of such modifications, though some bootlegging airplanes were rumored to have this capability.