Michail Chkhikvishvili, the 21-year-old leader of an Eastern European neo-Nazi extremist group known as the Maniacs Murder Cult, has been indicted on charges of soliciting hate crimes and acts of mass violence.
Federal prosecutors allege Chkhikvishvili, who also goes by the alias “Commander Butcher,” devised a chilling plot to target children with poisoned candy during the holiday season.
According to the indictment, Chkhikvishvili planned to have an associate dress as Santa Claus and distribute poisoned candy to Jewish children and racial minorities in New York City on New Year’s Eve.
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The scheme was part of a larger effort to spread terror and violence, with Chkhikvishvili also promoting bombings, arson, and attacks on homeless individuals.
The plot was uncovered after Chkhikvishvili attempted to recruit an undercover law enforcement officer into his group.
Since approximately September 2021, Chkhikvishvili has distributed a “Hater’s Handbook” manifesto to MKY members and others.
The handbook discusses MKY’s principles and encourages members to engage in acts of mass violence in furtherance of those principles. In the handbook, Chkhikvishvili states that he has “murdered for the white race” and encourages and instructs others to commit acts of mass violence and “ethnic cleansing.”
For example, among other things, the handbook encourages its readers to commit school shootings and to use children to perpetrate suicide bombings and other mass killings targeting racial minorities.
The document describes methods and strategies for committing mass “terror attacks,” including, for example, using vehicles to target “large outdoor festivals, conventions, celebrations and parades” and “pedestrian congested streets.” It specifically encourages committing attacks within the United States.
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Sometime after April 2022, Chkhikvishvili traveled to Brooklyn and stayed with his grandmother while he was there. He traveled to the United States again in June 2022 and provided border authorities with his paternal grandmother’s address in Brooklyn as his address of record in the United States.
Beginning at least as early as July 2022, Chkhikvishvili repeatedly encouraged others, primarily via encrypted mobile messaging platforms, to commit violent hate crimes and other acts of violence on behalf of MKY. This included conspiring to solicit violent acts with a leader of a separate violent extremist neo-Nazi group and soliciting acts of mass violence in New York from an individual who claimed to be a prospective MKY recruit but who, unbeknownst to Chkhikvishvili, was actually an undercover FBI employee (the UC).
In a September 2023 conversation, the UC messaged Chkhikvishvili about whether there was an application process to join MKY. The defendant responded, “Well yes we ask people for brutal beating, arson/explosion or murder vids on camera.” He further stated that “[p]oisoning and arson are best options for murder,” and suggested also considering a larger “mass murder” within the United States. Chkhikvishvili advised the UC that the victims of these acts should be “low race targets.”
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Beginning in approximately November 2023, Chkhikvishvili solicited the UC to commit violent crimes, such as bombings and arsons, for the purpose of harming racial minorities, Jewish individuals and others. Chkhikvishvili provided detailed plans and materials such as bomb-making instructions and guidance on making Molotov cocktails to facilitate his desire for the UC to carry out these crimes.
In November 2023, Chkhikvishvili began planning a mass casualty attack in New York City to take place on New Year’s Eve. The scheme involved an individual dressing up as Santa Claus and handing out candy laced with poison to racial minorities and children at Jewish schools in Brooklyn. Chkhikvishvili drafted step-by-step instructions to carry out the scheme and shared with the UC detailed manuals on creating and mixing lethal poisons and gases.
He also instructed the UC on methods of making ricin-based poisons in powder and liquid form, including by extracting ricin from castor beans. Some of the materials transmitted by Chkhikvishvili have been linked to radical Islamist jihadist groups and designated foreign terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
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Chkhikvishvili intended that the planned attack would be a “bigger action than Breivik,” referring to Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in a bombing and mass shooting in Norway in 2011. Meanwhile, he told others of his plan and claimed to have previously committed other hate crimes while living in Brooklyn, New York, in 2022.
Chkhikvishvili boasted to others that he was “glad I have murdered,” and that he would “murder more” but “make others murder first.”
He was arrested in Moldova and extradited to the United States to face charges.
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