A federal court in Brooklyn has sentenced 22-year-old Georgian national Michail Chkhikvishvili, known among radicals by the moniker “Commander Butcher,” to 15 years in prison.
He was convicted of soliciting hate crimes and mass casualty attacks, including a conspiracy to poison Jewish children in New York City.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Chkhikvishvili was a leader of the international extremist neo-Nazi group “Maniac Murder Cult” (MWM), which promotes white supremacist ideology. Last November, he pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting acts of violence and distributing instructions for manufacturing explosives and the lethal toxin ricin.
“The defendant is being sentenced to prison not for his twisted views, but for his concrete calls to action,” stated U.S. District Judge Carol Bagley Amon during the sentencing hearing.
Investigators established that Chkhikvishvili arrived in Brooklyn in June 2022. In November 2023, he began planning a mass casualty attack in New York. By January 2024, this scheme evolved into a detailed plot to target Jewish schools and children in Brooklyn on New Year’s Eve.
The plan involved recruiting an accomplice to dress as Santa Claus and distribute candy laced with poisons and toxins to children. Chkhikvishvili personally drafted step-by-step instructions for the plan and provided them to an undercover FBI employee. His targets also included individuals he referred to as “racial minorities and traitors.”
To recruit and radicalize followers, the group leader actively used Telegram and other online platforms to distribute his manifesto, titled the “Hater’s Handbook.” Prosecutors stated that his incitement led to at least two actual attacks outside New York: a stabbing near a mosque in the Turkish city of Eskişehir in 2024 and a shooting at a middle school in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2025.
Michail Chkhikvishvili was detained in July 2024 in Chișinău, Moldova, on an Interpol warrant, and was subsequently extradited to the United States.