A New York court on Wednesday sentenced Michail Chkhikvishvili, a Georgian national known as “Commander Butcher,” to 15 years in prison. According to the U.S. Justice Department, Chkhikvishvili planned a mass attack in Brooklyn in which a person dressed as Santa Claus would hand out poisoned candy to Jewish children and children from other minority groups.
Chkhikvishvili, whom prosecutors described as a leader of the neo-Nazi Maniac Murder Cult - an international racially motivated violent extremist group, pleaded guilty to soliciting hate crimes and distributing instructions for making bombs. He was arrested in Moldova in July 2024 while trying to travel from Georgia to Ukraine, extradited to the United States in May 2025 and pleaded guilty in November.
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Michail Chkhikvishvili with a picture of Hitler and a Nazi flag
(Photo: From court documents)
According to prosecutors, the group operated on Telegram and other encrypted platforms, spread neo-Nazi propaganda and recruited followers to carry out assaults, arson attacks, bombings and murders targeting Jews, racial minorities, LGBTQ people, homeless people and groups it deemed “undesirable.”
Prosecutors said Chkhikvishvili was not merely a propagandist, but a leading figure in the organization who published a manifesto titled “Hater’s Handbook,” which was distributed to Maniac Murder Cult members and others and encouraged school shootings and mass attacks, and instructed recruits to film attacks to prove they had been carried out and use the videos to recruit additional followers.
The New York plot was developed with an undercover FBI agent who posed as a potential recruit. The plan initially involved an attack on New Year’s Eve in which a person dressed as Santa Claus would hand out poisoned candy to children from minority groups. Later, in January 2024, Chkhikvishvili directed the plan toward Brooklyn’s Jewish community, Jewish schools and Jewish children.
According to prosecutors, he sent the agent instructions for making deadly poisons and gases, including extracting ricin from castor beans, asked how many “doses per person” had already been prepared and suggested carrying out the attack on a Jewish holiday or near Jewish schools “full of children.” In one message, he wrote that the target was “dead Jewish children.”
The prosecution memo also alleged that Chkhikvishvili had boasted in earlier correspondence of harming an elderly, ill Jewish patient in Brooklyn, though prosecutors said they were not claiming his actions caused the man’s death. Prosecutors also linked the group’s propaganda to violent incidents outside New York, including a January 2025 shooting at a high school in Nashville in which one student was killed and another was wounded, and the stabbing of five people outside a mosque in Turkey in August 2024.
According to prosecutors, a search of Chkhikvishvili’s phone also found extensive neo-Nazi propaganda and child sexual abuse material.
“The intentions of this violent extremist were clear: to harm and kill as many Jewish people and members of racial groups as possible,” New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.