As a leading member of the anti-junta resistance and of the armed branch of the Panhellenic Liberation Movement, Valirakis was wanted by the Greek military regime for three years for bombings and was finally apprehended in 1971 and jailed by the Special Investigative Section (ETA) of the Greek Military Police (ESA).
He remained on the loose in Athens for fifteen days before fleeing his safe house for Patras, where he hopped on the roof of a train that was heading to Yugoslavia.
But when he got there, the regime of Enver Hoxha thought that he was a spy for the Greek junta, and initially sentenced him to three years hard labour at a camp near Fier.
[3] After the fall of the junta, he was elected to parliament the first time for Andreas Papandreou's Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in 1977.
On 1 February 2009, Sifis Valirakis was detained for several hours by American authorities immediately after his arrival at the airport in New York, because of the revocation of the visa for which he had applied.
[4] That restriction brought to the fore Valirakis' old hostility against the United States government, which in the decade of the 1980s had theorized him to be the "founder" of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November.