Up until the early nineteen nineties criminological research on the crimes of the powerful tended to be separated into two distinct sub-disciplinary genres: corporate crime and state crime (Kramer 1992: 214). For Ronald Kramer and Ray Michalowski this was a matter of concern. They believed that by dividing the research on the crimes of the powerful into these two separate criminological strands, scholars were obscuring the fact that states and corporations are “functionally interdependent”, consequently it is rare for the deviant actions of one to occur without some assistance (whether by commission or omission) from the other (Kramer et al 2002: 270; see also Aulette and Michalowski 1993: 173; Green and Ward 2004: 28; Whyte 2003: 579-80).