The father and son who have a Bodega Bay neighborhood on edge

Bodega Harbour is where people dream of retiring.

It’s a friendly community of about 750 houses, most of them on loops and cul-de-sacs nestled around a well-regarded, 18-hole golf course.

The neighborhood is bright and sunny, if windswept, with views to the Pacific Ocean and Bodega Bay. Homes there generally list in the range of $1.5 million to $2 million.

And because most of the houses in Bodega Harbour are weekend getaways, it’s a quiet place.

But that serenity has been shattered in recent weeks by the increasingly confrontational behavior of two men, a father and his adult son.

Neighbors unnerved

Thomas Pochari Jr., 64, has posted the names and addresses of neighbors online, linking them to his antisemitic and bombastic rhetoric on four websites he runs.

His son, Christophe Pochari, 23, has taken things a step further, directly threatening one of their targets, a local contractor, which landed him in the Sonoma County jail, where he remains.

The situation has unnerved neighbors and led to stepped-up private security patrols in the area.

“He gets in people’s faces in the neighborhood,” said Edward Witts, who lives in Bodega Harbour. “That’s the really invasive part of it. But in our law system, what can we do about it?”

Witts is one of the people who has been targeted on social media by Thomas Pochari, including having some of his personal information shared.

Long stood out in neighborhood

Neighbors say Thomas Pochari has long stood out in Bodega Harbour. He and his wife, Catherine, sued the Bodega Harbour Homeowners Association and its manager, Kemper Sports Management (the company also manages the Links at Bodega Harbour golf course), over a construction dispute in 2016 — a case that resulted in a judgment ordering the Pocharis to pay the defendants a total of $58,000.

More important to neighbors, Thomas Pochari has never been reluctant to share his feelings toward Jews.

He maintains four websites, each devoted to a different topic — world news, economics, brain function and risk analysis. Much of his content crosses over from site to site. (The Press Democrat is not naming the sites.)

The lineup of guests Pochari has interviewed for audio recordings in recent months is impressive. They include Marvin G. Weinbaum, director for Afghanistan and Pakistan Studies at the Middle East Institute; José Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat who was the first director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons; and Frank G. Wisner II, who was briefly U.S. Secretary of State in 1993.

The caliber of those guests is jarring when viewed next to some of Pochari’s essays on the same websites, screeds with titles like “Ashkenazi Jewish Criminality, Buffoonery, and Foolishness.”

Weinbaum, for one, said he had no idea of Pochari’s wider views when he taped the segment.

“My interview had been limited to subjects with which I have written and spoken many times,” Weinbaum said in an email to The Press Democrat.

“His questions were not out of the ordinary. Still, what you've indicated and some other things that I've learned about Pochari convince me that I should not again agree to an interview.”

Many of Pochari’s recent tweets are even more aggressive than his blog posts.

April 27: “The United States govt is totally criminal. … This criminality is not European, not Aryan. It is Ashkenazi Jew. The Germans in the early 20th century tried to destroy the criminality. Difficult job.”

May 9: “Removing Ashkenazi Jew criminality will be violent, obviously.”

May 13: “No longer will criminal Jews be deciding policy. It’s over this garbage. Anglo-Saxon America is rising again, after being degraded by Jews.”

There are many others. Remarkably, Pochari tagged the FBI and CIA on many of the posts. He also has made disparaging comments about Filipinos and “low-IQ mestizos.”

Legal troubles, family drama

There have been some consequences along the way.

Pochari was charged with making obscene or threatening phone calls in September 2006, and with attempted grand theft a year after that. Both charges were eventually dismissed, the first one after Pochari agreed to a six-month period of medical observation.

Records related to both cases have been purged by the Sonoma County Superior Court Hall of Justice.

There has been family drama, too.

In 2018, according to complaints filed in Santa Clara Superior Court, Thomas and Christophe began a harassment campaign against their father and grandfather, Thomas Sr. — a retired Air Force brigadier general who was 90 at the time — as well as a cousin, Enku Leka.

One of the complaints said the initial dispute was “based upon Thomas Jr.’s perception that (Leka) is a threat to his inheritance from his father.”

The younger Pocharis “harassed Thomas Sr. by incessant telephone calls, letters, postcards, and unwarranted calls to Adult Protective Services as well as law enforcement” and “directed defamatory material about Enku to her employer and to Thomas Sr.’s friends and family,” the complaint read.

Thomas Pochari Sr. and Leka both obtained restraining orders against Thomas Jr. and Christophe, which remain in effect.

Mostly, the Pocharis have kept below the radar. And they might have continued to do so, unnoticed by many neighbors and actively ignored by others, were it not for a couple of developments.

One involved Christophe, the younger of two Pochari sons.

On the morning of May 2, Christophe Pochari was walking along the beach in Bodega Bay when he looked up to see a figure in a heavy black coat standing on the bluffs. Pochari became convinced it was an assassin attempting to shoot him with a high-powered rifle. This description was offered by Thomas Pochari Jr. on his Twitter feed.

Christophe, according to a Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office incident report, responded by going to the Bodega Harbour home of a construction company owner, Michael Barnard, who had crew members working in the vicinity of where Christophe spotted the mysterious figure.

Christophe damaged Barnard’s metal front door by striking it with a large flashlight.

When a Sheriff’s deputy responded to the scene, Pochari attempted to flee. The deputy apprehended and arrested him.

Pochari bailed out of jail, but was in trouble again within two days.

Between May 2 and May 4, according to a Sonoma County Superior Court criminal complaint, he threatened Barnard via email, voicemail and YouTube.

Christophe informed the business owner he had been walking by his house in the early morning hours, and sent him photos of someone holding airsoft guns — replica toys that shoot plastic or resin BBs — while “describing his ability to take a shot at the victim’s home,” according to a subsequent Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office news release.

When deputies arrived at the Pochari residence, according to the May 25 news release from the Sheriff’s Office, Christophe ran toward them wearing a ballistic helmet and carrying two objects. He was armed with a billy club and a large sheathed knife as he approached.

Pochari was taken into custody without further incident.

Deputies searched the Pocharis’ house and found two ballistic vests (without their inserts) a second ballistic helmet and drawings of assault rifles. They booked Christophe into Sonoma County jail on four felony counts — three for making criminal threats, one for vandalism — and one misdemeanor obstruction count.

His bail was set at $500,000. He remains in detention, according to Thursday’s jail roster.

The first incident report, after the damage to Barnard’s door, said the younger Pochari “appears to suffer from paranoia.” A doctor was scheduled to examine him and will have a month to file a report, which will be introduced to Superior Court Judge Laura Passaglia on July 11.

Those incidents coincided with Thomas Pochari Jr.’s increasingly disturbing internet messaging. In Twitter posts and in notes that crawl across the top of his websites, he has taken to saying that he secretly controls important global functions.

“The biggest problem we face now is the indebtedness of the United States but I am confident that can be managed now that I am running the U.S. government,” one of the crawls read lately.

The claims often fold in his antisemitism, and after May 2, were used to explain the forces that have aligned against him and Christophe.

More disconcerting for Thomas Pochari’s Bodega Harbour neighbors, he has posted some of their names, addresses and Google street views of their homes on Twitter, alleging some of them are agents of Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency.

That included a reference to a protective order, issued by Passaglia, prohibiting Christophe from coming within 100 feet of various addresses in Bodega Harbour. Thomas Pochari included a photo of all the names and addresses in his post.

Strangely, Twitter removed one the tweets as violating its rules on posting private information, but not the others.

The Press Democrat reached six of the people who had their personal information posted. Most were unwilling to speak on the record, citing fears of retaliation and a reluctance to bring attention to the Pocharis’ hate speech.

Witts was the only person willing to lend his name.

“(Thomas Pochari) mentions I called him antisemitic,” Witts said. “I actually never did. I had two or three encounters with him. All three times, he approached me.”

Concerned residents of Bodega Harbour say they are sleeping better knowing Christophe Pochari is in jail. Meanwhile, building inspectors from Permit Sonoma followed Sheriff’s deputies into the Pocharis’ house last week and “red-tagged” it, citing structural and electrical code violations.

Thomas and Catherine Pochari had to move out, at least temporarily.

In a tweet Monday, Thomas said they are currently living in a Santa Rosa Airbnb.

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.