一位意大利检察官透露：黑手党通过电视转播的足球赛向身陷囹圄的大佬们源源不断地传送消息。转播球赛时，屏幕下方一般会显示球迷发的短信。黑手党籍此向狱中“享受”最高防卫待遇的同伙发送加密信息，电视台却完全被蒙在鼓里。
An Italian prosecutor has revealed that the Mafia has been sending information to its jailed bosses through a television football show. The show runs fans’ text messages along the bottom of the screen. Unknown to its producers, mobsters used this facility to send coded messages to their associates serving maximum-security sentences.
谈到这些信息看起来是多么寻常时，检控官举了其中一条很简单的短信：“保罗，一切正常。”若想不惹人怀疑，就只能说些很平常的话。但是，正如牛津大学的社会学教授迭戈•甘伯塔（Diego Gambetta）在其书中所说的：这些很平常的秘语极难破译。该书写得曲折动人，引人入胜。
The prosecutor remarked on how ordinary the messages seemed. One read, simply: “Everything’s OK, Paulo.” If they were not to attract suspicion, they could not be anything else. But the apparently banal secret message is desperately difficult to get right, as an intriguing book by Diego Gambetta, an Oxford University sociology professor, makes plain.
破译密语时会有诸多风险：消息接收者可能会错误理解，其他人（比如警方）也可能已成功破译。做生意时沟通不畅合同会泡汤，然而对于罪犯来说，信息一旦发错就可能意味着要蹲大牢，甚至是更糟的结果。
There are many dangers: that the recipient of the message might misunderstand it, or that others, such as the police, might understand it all too well. And whereas a failure of communication in the business world can result in a loss of a contract, for criminals, sending the wrong message could mean years in prison, or worse.
在《黑道帮规：揭秘罪犯沟通之道》(Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate)一书中，甘伯塔教授指出：黑道中人的沟通方式给犯罪以外的领域提供了启发。他们的沟通之道是个“非凡案例，揭下了文明的道德观念与制度的面纱，让我们清晰地看到了最原始状态下的人际交往”。
