Learning the secret of eternal life.
Ciro Orsini has a charming gap in his teeth, which makes it possible to recognise him in the celebrity photos covering the walls of his Knightsbridge institution. Ciro’s Pomodoro is a pizza joint that’s been running for 46 years on Beauchamp Place. In every photo, shoulder to shoulder with the rich and famous, sometimes old and leather tan, baring his sleeves of tattoos, sometimes young, blushing and rosy, it is always the very same Ciro, smiling, baring that little gap.
Most nights, Ciro graces the dark corners of this underground pizzeria, roving from booth to booth like a lost Guns N’ Roses roadie, or some sort of high priest: he wears a massive crucifix over his bare chest, silver chains, leather cuffs with spikes, dangly earrings sagging the soft flesh of his earlobe. The weight of all that bling appears to weigh him down, though his slow and staggered gait might have more to do with his age – he is 75 years old.
The celebrity snapshots suggest that Ciro has, for some decades now, been adjacent to fame (Sylvester Stallone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp) and power (Reagan, Clinton, Pope Francis, Boris Johnson), remaining just far enough outside the rank of celebrity to venerate it. During our conversation, he is constantly name-dropping his famous friends. Most are before my time, but I recognise a few – Jerry Springer (Ciro named a parma ham pizza on Pomodoro’s menu after him), Putin’s best buddy Steven Seagal, writer Paulo Coelho, the late actor Pat Morita. ‘You know Mr Miyagi, Pat Morita?’ he asks me. Yes, I say, doing a little wax-on, wax-off hand motion. Ciro tells me they were friends for 25 years: ‘I have his ashes in my house.’ With glittery-pink painted nails, Ciro pries off one of his bracelets for me to inspect. He tells me the heavy silver bangle was a posthumous gift from his good friend Patrick Swayze. ‘Five years after he died, through the spiritual world he sent me this’, he says. Since losing his father in the eighties, Ciro has been in contact with people on the other side, including his own previous incarnations – in past lives, he has been ‘in China for sure’, a Japanese warrior and in ‘many sweat lodges’ as White Cloud, his Cherokee spiritual guide.
It was around the time of Ciro’s enlightenment that he opened a Pomodoro in L.A., where he met Jill Weatherwax, a small-town girl from Michigan chasing a dream of stardom out West. She was of middling talent – a perfect match for Ciro, who crowned her ‘Miss Hollywood’ in a kangaroo beauty pageant he staged, gave her gigs at Pomodoro and signed her to a contract with his own record label.
Ciro loved Jill, and lavished her with gifts when they were together in LA – according to her sister, he spent $15,000 on Jill’s teeth. When Detective Al Murietta found her body in an abandoned lot on the outskirts of Fresno, California, riddled with 29 stab wounds, he remarked to the investigative journalist Tom O’Neill that her teeth ‘were beautiful. Straight. White. Clean.’ She didn’t look like she belonged in a muddy clearing riddled with crack vials and used condoms, Murietta remarked – ‘and that’s probably what got her killed.’
Jill’s murder remains unsolved, and Ciro was never a suspect. ‘She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he says, opening his wallet, where he keeps an old photo of Jill. He points to another photograph of her on the wall above us – an unknown beside many more familiar faces who achieved the fame she sought.
‘She’s still around.’ Ciro rolls up his sleeve to show me a tattoo of a heart with a cross through it, ‘JW’ inscribed in one corner – ‘Jill Ann Weatherwax, my angel,’ he says to himself. ‘She comes back a lot through my medium,’ the same medium who has also put him in touch with his past lives. The spiritual communion with Jill gives him solace: ‘I don’t fear death because you don’t die.’
These are bold words from a pizzeria owner (though I can’t accuse him of totally disregarding health when it comes to his cuisine – the Ciro’s Pomodoro menu has a page advising patrons on how to order according to their blood type). But on the side, Ciro is building up his ‘wellness centre’, the House of Orsini. Its goal is finding a way around death.
On the House of Orsini website, menu tabs read ‘Resurrection Center’ and ‘Immortality’. It’s an unnavigable trough of password-protected links and copy that reads as though it’s been run back and forth through Google Translate (‘Why? Will VIPs in the world choose the Orsini cell bank? Cell banking required to protect genes’), but I can get the gist from the manic text: ‘overcoming death’, ‘escape death’ and ‘Death is just a technical problem.’
‘Literally, I can go back ten years in age,’ Ciro says. I tell him that this is not possible. ‘We’re already doing it,’ he counters. ‘I’m 75. It doesn’t bother me at all. In ten years, I’m 65.’
One of House of Orsini’s co-founders (there are 12) is its CEO James Ryan, whose son, Jimmy, has been in intensive care in a Japanese hospital for almost 15 years. Video footage on YouTube shows Jimmy hooked up to tubes, his skeleton more and more deformed as the years go on, his ribcage collapsing into his heart and lungs.
‘They’ve been doing a lot of research on him,’ Ciro says, but the hospital only permits what he calls ‘normal medicine’. ‘That’s why we cannot help them with Jimmy. That’s why we’re doing so much research.’
Ryan has accused the Japanese government of suffocating Jimmy with a plastic bag, inducing him into a state of carbon dioxide narcosis ‘in order to pierce the eyes of my 11-year-old son with a long needle to collect adrenochrome’. And while Japan’s labs aren’t particularly renowned for their honesty – its stem cell research industry was marred by a 2014 Theranos-style scientific misconduct scandal – I can’t help but sense the blinding emotional pain of a father watching his son suffer a degenerative disease, looking for somewhere to lay blame.
His account has echoes of the centuries-old conspiracy – that the rich and powerful have formed a secret cabal of paedophiles pumped up on the stolen youth of tortured children, harvesting adrenochrome from their blood to alchemise a drug somewhere between ecstasy and the holy grail of immortality. It’s the idea behind QAnon and ‘Pizzagate’, the conspiracy accusing Hillary Clinton and the US Democratic Party of holding child abuse rituals in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.
Ciro has been a victim of online conspiracies linking him to that devil-worshipping, sex-soliciting, murderous elite. He’s their ideal nemesis – an eccentric with blood ties to the Vatican (according to the Pomodoro website, he’s related to five popes, 18 saints and 40 cardinals), he has vast circles of celebrity contacts, he is the chairman of a company striving to invent immortality, he owns a basement pizza restaurant – and, according to local legend, he runs a brothel upstairs.
Ciro laughs when I ask if the rumour is true. ‘No, no, no. I shut that down when I took over the building in 2008. It used to be called Chelsea Girls – an escort agency,’ run by a Yugoslavian man who’d owned the lease since the early 70s. ‘In those days, foreigners or whatever would go out to meet girls. It was easy for them to come down here for dinner and then go back out, and nobody knew what was going on.’ Now, he tells me, a beauty salon has opened upstairs.
He calls over Gino, his nephew. Gino is tall, hawkish in demeanour, and stands guard at the door like one of Ciro’s consiglieri. Earlier, when I introduced myself as a journalist, he eyed me with suspicion; now, approaching the table, he has a hardened look on his face that I can’t quite read. I briefly panic. I wonder if he’s been called over because blaspheming against the family business, ergo the famiglia itself, tends to call for punishment of the highest order.
But Ciro has simply forgotten the name of a Canadian singer who, when Ciro gave him his Pomodoro business card, asked, ‘The restaurant with the girls upstairs?’
We’re all smiling over the singer’s faux pas, but the topic feels awkward and I’m only laughing because I don’t know what more to say. I change the subject and ask if Gino will take over Pomodoro.
‘I’m going to the Resurrection Centre,’ Ciro reminds me. ‘What do you mean taking over? I’m just starting.’
I tell Ciro that I feel sorry about dredging up the past – Jill especially, whose death clearly still troubles Ciro. But he seems to be in good spirits. As I’m leaving, he says to me, ‘It was very funny, how you asked that question about the brothel.’ I explain that it’s just my job to ask. ‘You’re very good at your job.’ He places one weathered hand on my cheek: ‘It helps that you’re so pretty.’
