The Asociación Los Ñetas was born in the prison system of Puerto Rico in the 1980s. Following different waves of immigration, the group circulated and developed in New York, Guayaquil (Ecuador) and Barcelona (Spain). Los Ñetas have put in place a complex internal legal framework with sets of rules and sanctions. The aim of this article is to understand how Ñeta law and state law interact. The main argument is that the dichotomization between the formal and the informal teaches us little about this interaction because it rests on a narrow definition of what constitutes law. Rather, one should emphasize how the Ñeta law constitutes an ethical framework.