Arts & Entertainment

Former Cop Pens Domestic Terrorism Thriller Based on His Experiences

James Pera spent 30 years with the San Francisco Police Department and has written a new book called "The Rampage of Ryan O'Hara," inspired by his experiences.

The late ‘60s were a heady time in San Francisco.

Young people from all over the country were flocking to the city, new social movements springing up virtually overnight and homegrown terrorist organizations like Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army preying on police by planting bombs or assassinating officers, judges and others associated with “the establishment.”

Petaluma resident James Pera, now 66, got a front row seat to the rapidly changing cultural and political landscape of the city, after joining the San Francisco Police Department and being stationed in the Haight Ashbury in 1968.

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“People were talking about peace and love, but there were a lot of rapes and murders too,” Pera said. “The neighborhood was going huckly buck at the time.”

The violence reached a nexus when someone planted a bomb at the Park Place police station Perra worked at, killing his sergeant and wounding nine others. Pera was the first to arrive and remembers a scene of utter destruction.

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The Weather Underground, a radical organization that preached a violent overthrow of the government, has been implicated in the incident, but despite a 1999 grand jury investigation, no one has been arrested for the attack and the case remains active.

Now Pera, who served as a paratrooper in the famed 101st Airbone Brigade and later with the First Air Cavalry in Vietnam before he became a cop, has written a thriller inspired by his experiences, titled “The Rampage of Ryan O'Hara."

“I thought, I’ve got a story to tell and if I write a story in a fictitious manner and whet the appetite of people, it will get them interested in things that really did happen,” said Pera, who has lived in Petaluma since 1973.

The self-published novel available on Amazon follows an Army Green Beret named Ryan O’Hara who is traveling around the country after being placed on medical leave for wounds and post-traumatic stress.

His mission? Take out all former members of a Marxist domestic terrorist organization responsible for the murder of his grandfather, a San Francisco Police Sergeant, four decades earlier.

Along the way he encounters a group of disillusioned former intelligence and military operatives who are after some of the same people albeit for different reasons. He allies himself with them and together they carry out their deadly mission in such a manner that suspicion focuses on the office of the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States.

It’s a violent tale of vengeance and delayed justice made necessary by what Pera describes as a failed system that allows treasonous murders to escape punishment.

“Some of my good guys have bad qualities and some of my bad guys have good qualities,” said Pera, who spent 30 years at San Francisco Police Department, most of it on the street. “I just poured it out in a way that I see the human race.”


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