Just before 7 each morning, an old man from Corleone, Sicily, gets out of bed in his prison cell, lights a small gas stove and makes coffee. As he waits for his espresso, he flips through an Italian sports newspaper. He used to be a ferocious Sicilian Mafia boss. His name is Toto Riina and he has been in jail since 1993.
About 55 kilometres away, in a cell near Turin, a fellow Corleonese waits for the guards to bring him warm milk. He sits on the bed and reads the Bible, his only book. His name is Bernardo Provenzano and he was arrested 18 months ago. Until that time, he was the undisputed head of the Mafia, the successor to his friend, Mr. Riina.
Neither man is permitted to talk to anyone. They are frisked several times a day and are under constant surveillance. But the two men, both over 70, still make the police nervous.
State prosecutors in Palermo say two postcards enclosed in envelopes arrived at the men's cells in late September. Each had the same message: La pace e finita - peacetime is over.
It appears that Mr. Provenzano's arrest started a battle to capture the Mafia throne. There were two known candidates for the position and each has been on Italy's most-wanted list for more than 20 years. One is Matteo Messina Denaro, who is reputed to be a merciless killer and wants to be known as a Latin lover. The other is Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who is the boss of the Tommaso Natale Mafia family from Palermo.
Mr. Lo Piccolo is the most determined of the two and is willing to use any means necessary to become the ultimate boss, prosecutors say. They say his plan is to eliminate the entire Corleone clan, which supports Mr. Denaro.
In the province of Palermo, Mr. Lo Piccolo's authority goes largely unchallenged. Under him, the Mafia has been more aggressive. Mafiosi are demanding that more store owners pay the pizzo - protection money, collected monthly and typically equivalent to 2 per cent of sales - and are not hesitating to use violence.
In this highly charged atmosphere, the words whispered by Mr. Provenzano to an investigator when he was arrested - "You don't know what you've done" - are proving chillingly ominous. He knew that, in his absence, a power vacuum would form and the beaten-down clans would try to rise to power. In the last big Mafia war, in the late 1980s, the Corleone clan killed 2,000 people, most of them members of the rival Palermo families.
When Mr. Provenzano ruled, things were different. The Mafia did not like publicity and violence was always the last option. Compromise, deals with businessmen and friendliness with politicians were the order of the day.
But the situation in Sicily seems to have spun out of control. "There have been signs of a potential new war between the families in Sicily," Maurizio De Lucia, Palermo's public prosecutor, said in an interview. "At the moment, the situation remains confused, chaotic. The last homicides are ambitious homicides. Lo Piccolo killed real bosses. This is a dangerous sign."
Nicolo Ingarao, one of the most powerful bosses in Palermo and an ally of the Corleone clan, was shot to death in June in broad daylight as he left a police station where he was required to report each day as a condition of house arrest.
Lirio Abbate, a journalist with the national ANSA press agency who wrote a book about the men who helped to hide Mr. Provenzano from the authorities, has received so many death threats that he has been given a police escort. A bomb has been found underneath his car three times.
Andrea Vecchio, a businessman from Catania, on Sicily's east coast, lives with a police escort because the Mafia set fire to his construction site four times for refusing to pay the pizzo. Engineer Antonio Maiorana and his son, Stefano, disappeared without trace two months ago. Investigators believe that they were kidnapped by Mr. Lo Piccolo's men after disobeying orders. Recently, two members of the Catania Mafia family were killed.
Francesco Forgione, president of the National Anti-Mafia Commission, says that "there is an internal clash between clans that at this point can only be resolved militarily."
Giuseppe DeLillo, an Italian senator and former member of the anti-Mafia squad, thinks that Mr. Lo Piccolo will stop at nothing to gain power. "We are facing phenomena that are very serious and very difficult to interpret," he said. "The only certainty is that there is a significant rise in Mafia violence. The situation is very confusing. At the moment, the Palermo families are without a doubt the strongest and Lo Piccolo is the head of them. He is a very dangerous man. If he can manage to eliminate Ingarao with absolutely no problem, then it means he is also very powerful."
The war could extend even to the prisons. Two family bosses, Leoluca Bagarella and Nitto Santapaolo, appear to want to stop Mr. Lo Piccolo. Mr. Bagarella, Mr. Riina's brother-in-law, is from Corleone and Mr. Santapaolo is from Catania.
Mr. Bagarella was arrested in 1995 and convicted of multiple murders, including that of two top anti-Mafia agents, Boris Giuliano and Giuseppe Russo.
Mr. Santapaolo was arrested in 1993 and convicted of ordering the killing of journalist Giuseppe Fava in 1984.
When in prison, Mr. Bagarella and Mr. Santapaolo swapped cells, and after the transfer, the penitentiary police noticed that each of the men had left his wedding ring hanging on a nail in the cell's wall. This was not seen as a coincidence.
Both men were very attached to their wedding rings and to their wives, both of whom met with untimely deaths. Mr. Bagarella's wife committed suicide and Mr. Santapaola's wife was killed in an ambush by a rival clan.
The authorities think that the incident could signify a new Mafia accord that involves the entire prison network and possibly some outsiders - an agreement between the Corleone and Catania clans to co-operate with one another.
Mr. Dellilo, the senator, said that "there are surely bosses who command from prison."
When the war will go to the next level is anyone's guess. Sicilians are prepared for bloodshed.
When Mr. Ingarao was killed, a group of people screamed and cried as they crowded around his body. As the two assassins fled, a woman yelled: "You will end up the same way."
Lorenzo Tondo is a freelance writer and Eric Reguly is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in Rome.