At this point, we're missing the 3 ruffians and that portion of the story. Did this part come from James the Just or was it just made up or something else? Hard to say. In storytelling the rule of 3 is common, so 3 attempts with eventual success could easily be independent. ...or not.
The following are from The Enclyclopedia of Freemasonry by Albert Mackey
ASSASSINS OF THE THIRD DEGREE There is in Freemasonry a legend of certain unworthy Craftsmen who entered into a conspiracy to extort from a distinguished Brother a secret of which he was the possessor. The legend is altogether symbolic, and when its symbolism is truly comprehended, becomes a surpassingly beautiful. By those who look at it as having the pretension of an historical fact, it is sometimes treated with indifference, and sometimes considered an absurdity. But it is not thus that the legends and symbols of Freemasonry must be read, if we would learn their true spirit. To behold the goddess in all her glorious beauty, the veil that conceals her statue must be withdrawn. Masonic writers who have sought to interpret the symbolism of the legend of the conspiracy of the three assassins, have not agreed always in the interpretation, although they have finally arrived at the same result, namely, that it has a spiritual signification. Those who trace Speculative Freemasonry to the ancient solar worship, of whom Ragon may be considered as the exponent, find in this legend a symbol of the conspiracy of the three winter months to destroy the life-giving heat of the sun. Those who, like the disciples of the Rite of Strict Observance, trace Freemasonry to a Templar origin, a explain the legend as referring to the conspiracy of the three renegade knights who falsely accused the Order, and thus aided King Philip and Pope Clement to abolish Templarism, and to slay its Grand Master. Hutchinson and Oliver, who labored to give a Christian interpretation to all the symbols of Freemasonry, referred the legend to the crucifixion of the Messiah, the type of which is, of course, the slaying of Abel by his brother Cain. Others, of whom the Chevalier Ramsay has been set forth as the leader, sought to give it a political significance; and, making Charles I the type of the Builder, symbolized Cromwell and his adherents as the conspirators. The Masonic scholars whose aim has been to identify the modern system of Freemasonry with the Ancient Mysteries, and especially with the Egyptian, which they supposed to be the germ of all the others, interpret the conspirators as the symbol of the Evil Principle, or Typhon, slaying the Good Principle, or Osiris; or, when they refer to the Zoroastic Mysteries of Persia, as Ahriman contending against Ormuzd. Lastly, in the Philosophic Degrees, the myth is interpreted as signifying the war of Falsehood, Ignorance, and Superstition against Truth. Of the supposed names of the three Assassins, there is hardly any end of variations, for they materially differ in all the principal rites. Thus, we have Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum in the York and American Rites. In the Adonhiramite system we have Romvel, Gravelot, and Abiram. Romvel has been claimed as a corruption of Cromwell. In the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite we find the names given in the old rituals as Jubelum Akirop, sometimes Abiram, Jubelo Romvel, and Jubela Gravelot. Schterke and Oterfut are in some of the German rituals, while other Scottish rituals have Abiram, Romvel, and Hobhen. In all these names there is manifest corruption, and the patience of many Masonic scholars has been well-nigh exhausted in seeking for some plausible and satisfactory derivation.
GUIBBS The names given to the Assassins of the Third Degree by some of the inventors of the advanced Degrees, are of so singular a form as to have almost irresistibly led to the conclusion that these names were bestowed by the adherents of the house of Stuart upon some of their enemies as marks of infamy. Such, for instance, is Romsel, the name of one of the Assassins in certain Scottish Degrees, which is probably a corruption of Cromwell. Jubelum Guibbs, another name of one of these traitors, has much puzzled the Masonic etymologists. Brother Mackey believed that he had found its origin in the name of the Rev. Adam Gib, who was an antiburgher clergyman of Edinburgh. When that city was taken possession of by the young Pretender, Charles Edward in 1745, the clergy generally fled. But Gib removed only three miles from the city, where, collecting his loyal congregation, he hurled anathema's for five successive Sundays against the Pretender, and boldly prayed for the downfall of the rebellion. He subsequently joined the loyal army, and at Falkirk took a rebel prisoner. So active was Gib in his opposition to the cause of the house of Stuart, and so obnoxious had he become, that several attempts were made by the rebels to take his life. On Charles Edward's return to France, he erected in 1747 his Primordial Chapter at Arras; and in the composition of the advanced Degrees there practiced, it is very probable that he bestowed the name of his old enemy Gib on the most atrocious of the Assassins who figure in the legend of Third Degree. The letter u was doubtless inserted to prevent the French, in pronouncing the name, from falling into the soft sound of the G and called the word Jib. The additional b and s were the natural and customary results of a French attempt to spell a foreign proper name (see Arras, Primoraial Chapter of ). An old handbook in French, Thuileur des Trentetrois Degrees use l'Ecossisme, published in l815 at Paris, mentions on page 79 that some had derived the word Jabulum from Zabulon, a Hebrew word meaning habitation.
RUFFIANS The traitors of the Third Degree are called Assassins in Continental Freemasonry and in the advanced Degrees. The English and American Freemasons have adopted in their instructions the more homely appellation of Ruffians. The fabricators of the high Degrees adopted a variety of names for these Assassins (see Assassins of the Third Degree), but the original names are preserved in the instruetions of the York and American Rites. There is no question that has so much perplexed Masonic antiquaries as the true derivation and meaning of these three names. In their present form, they are confessedly uncouth and without apparent signification.. Yet it is certain that we can trace them in that form to the earliest appearance of the legend of the Third Degree, and it is equally certain that at the time of their adoption some meaning must have been attached to them. Brother Maekey was convinced that this must have been a very simple one, and one that would have been easily comprehended by the whole of the Craft, who were in the constant use of them. Attempts, it is true, have been made to find the root of these three names in some recondite reference to the Hebrew names of God. But there is in Doctor Mackey's opinion, no valid authority for any such derivation. In the first place, the character and conduct of the supposed possessors of these names preclude the idea of any congruity and appropriateness between them and any of the divine names. And again, the literary condition of the Craft at the time of the invention of the names equally precludes the probability that any names would have been fabricated of a recondite signification, and which could not have been readily understood and appreciated by the ordinary class of Freemasons who were to use them. The names must naturally have been of a construction that would convey a familiar idea would be suitable to the incidents in which they were to be employed, and would be congruous with the character of the individuals upon whom they were to be bestowed. Now all these requisites meet in a word which was entirely familiar to the Craft at the time when these names were probably invented. The Ghiblim are spoken of by Anderson, meaning Ghiblim, as stonecutters or Masons; and the early amounts show us very clearly that the Fraternity in that day considered Giblim as the name of a Mason; not only of a Mason generally, but especially of that class of Masons who, as Drummond says, "put the finishing hand to King Solomon's Temple"—that is to say the Fellow Crafts. Anderson also places the Ghiblim among the Fellow Crafts; and so, very naturally, the early Freemasons, not imbued with any amount of Hebrew learning, and not making a distinction between the singular and ph1ral forms of that language, soon got to calling a Fellow Craft a Giblim. The steps of corruption between Giblim arid Jilbelum were not very gradual; nor can anyone doubt that such corruptions of spelling and pronunciation were common among these illiterate Freemasons, when he reads the Old Manuscripts, and finds such verbal distortions as Nembroch for Nimrod, Eaglet for Euclid, and Aymon for Hiram. Thus, the first corruption was from Giblim to Gibalim, which brought the word to three syllables, making it thus nearer to its eventual change. Then we find in the early works another transformation into Chibbelum. The French Freemasons also took the work of corruption in hand, and from Giblim they manufactured Jiblime and Jibulum and Habmlum. Some of these Freneh corruptions eame back to English Freemasonry about the time of the fabrication of the advanced l)egrees, and even the French words were distorted. Thus in the Iceland Manuscript, the English Freemasons made out of Pytagore, the French for Pythagoras, the unknown name Peter Gower, which is said so much to have puzzled John Locke. So we may through these mingled English and French corruptions trace the genealogy of the word Jubelum; thus, Ghiblim, Giblim, Gibalim, Chibbelum, Jiblime, Jibelum, Jabelum, rind, finally, Jubelum. It meant simply a Fellow Craft, and was appropriately given as a common name to a particular Fellow Graft who vas distinguished for his treachery. In other words, he was designated, not by a special and distinctive name, but by the title of his condition and rank at the Temple. He was the Fellow Craft, who was at the head of a eonspiraey. As for the names of the other two Ruffians, they were readily constructed out of that of the greatest one by a simple change of the termination of the word from am to a in one, and from uoz to o in the other, thus preserving, by a similarity of names, the idea of their relationship, for the old works said that they were Brothers who had come together out of Tyre. This derivation to Doctor Mackey seems to be easy, natural, and comprehensible. The change from Giblim, or rather from Gibalim to Jubelum, is one that is far less extraordinary than that which one half of the Masonic words have undergone in their transformation from their original to their present form (see Ritual).
AKIROP The name given, in the ritual of the Ancient and Accepted Rite, to one of the ruffians celebrated in the legend of the Third Degree. The word is said in the ritual to signify, an assassin. It might probably be derived from ..., KaRaB. to assault or join battle; but is just as probably a word so corrupted by long oral transmission that its etymology can no longer be traced (see Abiram).
CHAUCER AND FREEMASONRY … Chaucer's Canterbury Tales also establish a link, though a less obvious one, between the poet and the Craft of Masons. The Masons' Company in London, with which Chaucer had official connections, sustained the St. Thomas Hospital there, left it many bequests, and often visited it in livery. Masons' Companies in two, and possibly three, other cities also helped to support local hospitals of their own named for St. Thomas and it is possible that they looked on St. Thomas as their Patron Saint. This Saint Thomas was the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Thomas Becket, who was murdered in his own cathedral in 1170. The fact that three knights, described at the time as "the three ruffians," murdered the fifty-three year old prelate by beating him over the head after demanding that he "give them his word," threatened to bury him in the rubbish, and that his body was buried in a spot between a memorial to John the Baptist on one side and John the Evangelist on the other, the two forming parallel lines, must have held a peculiar interest to men in the Masons' Companies, and may account for their support of St. Thomas Hospitals; and it is possible that Chauser, connected with the Mason Company in London as he was, may from that association have had his interest in Canterbury first aroused, and as a result of which he wrote in rhyme the Canterbury (St. Thomas' church) Tales….
COMPANIONS, THE TWELVE George F. Fort says that "the twelve Companions of Master Hiram correspond unquestionably to the twelve zodiacal signs, or the twelve months of the year. The groundwork of this tradition is a fragment of ancient natural religion, common to both Oriental and European nations; or, more properly, was derived from identical sources. The treacherous Craftsmen of Hiram the Good are the three winter months which slew him. He is the sun surviving during the eleven consecutive months, but subjected to the irresistible power of three ruffians, the winter months ; in the twelfth and last month, that luminary, Hiram, the good, the beauteous, the bright, the sun god, is extinguished" (The Early History and Antiquities of Freemasonry, page 408).
RUFFIANS, NAMES OF THE Theosophical and occultist writers have argued that the combined endings of the three names of the Ruffians form together the mystical, Brahmin AUM, as noted on pace 111; and from this they argue that Freemasonry conceals mysteries from the Far East, etc. Historians have found that Speculative Freemasonry arose in England and developed out of Operative Freemasonry which was for some four or five centuries spread over Britain and Europe; an argument composed of speculations about so slight a fact as the endings of three names is not sufficient to overthrow the massive accumulation of data collected by those historians. Equally disastrous to the theory is the fact that at one time or another the Ruffians have had other names, and have differed in number; also, the a, u, m endings became crystallized in the Ritual after the founding of Speculative Freemasonry. In the old catechism called The Whole Institutions of Freemasons Opened, a short document published in Dublin in 1725, occur these curious sentences: "Your first word is Jachin and Boaz is the answer to it, and Grip at the forefinger joint.—Your 2nd word is Magboe and Boe is the answer to it, and Grip at the Wrist. Your 3rd word is Gibboram, Esimbrel is the answer." The origin of the Ruffians themselves is undiscovered; perhaps when the Ritual came to be enacted, instead of being largely composed of a set of drawn symbols with verbal explanations, they were introduced and given their names; if so, the endings may be nothing more than a form of verbal symmetry. (The subject of the many instances of verbal symmetry in the Work, along with other forms of symmetry such as 3, 5, 7, etc., awaits research; if the research were conducted according to the canons of literary analysis, in addition to historical analysis, it might yield light on the origin of the form of the Work now in use. Symmetry cannot be either coincidental or accidental, but must imply redaction, or editorship, or authorship. Bro. and Prof. David Eugene Smith has suggested that the three names are suspiciously like certain old variations on the Hebrew word for "jubilee.")
You may also find the following of interest:
WHO WERE THE RUFFIANS? by C.Bruce Hunter Published in The Square Magazine Vol 29, March 2003
The Three Ruffians
The Murder of Thomas Becket, 1170 
