The story goes that around 1412 three Spanish knights, Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso, who belonged to a secret society in Toledo, escaped from Spain after having avenged with blood the honour of a sister raped by an arrogant nobleman. They boarded a ship and reached Favignana, off the coast of Trapani, a perfect island to hide on given its many grottoes. They remained there for twenty-nine years, hidden in the bowels of the earth, but over this long period of time they applied themselves to defining the codes that were to be kept secret from the eyes of the uninitiated and which would become the ‘tablets of the law’ of a secret society similar to Garduña, the secret criminal organization that they had had to leave hastily and which was particularly active in Spain starting in the fifteenth century. The three knights thus established the rules for future mafia generations and, when they left their caves, began their mission of proselytizing. Osso, the laziest one, stopped in Sicily and founded the Mafia; Mastrosso crossed the Strait of Messina, went to Calabria and established the ’Ndrangheta; Carcagnosso, the most enterprising, reached the capital of the Kingdom, Naples, after an adventurous journey and there he instituted the Camorra.

It’s only a legend, of course, a fable easy to grasp and remember, deliberately devised to pass the time during long days in prison. Moreover, it is in the prisons that the picciotti, mafia foot-soldiers, telling stories about knights and conquests, could continue their proselytizing and find new disciples, following the tradition of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso. Being a knight involved identifying with an ideology, obeying a code of rules founded on courage, loyalty, keeping one’s word and a sense of belonging. A set of values that can be summed up in a single word, still used and abused today: honour. The knight was first and foremost a man of honour.

It may seem paradoxical that the mafias in Italy, the country par excellence when it comes to not having rules, have more rules than international mafias. Italy produces a disciplined mafia. Criminal organizations should not be viewed as confused structures, where different interests roam the marketplace like gangsters in search of loot and money. Unfortunately it is not so simple, in fact in the areas of drug trafficking, of investment, where the only objective is gain, the Italian mafias display a distinctive trait: the reliability of the organization.