NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 The leader of an Eastern European neo-Nazi group who tried to recruit an undercover federal agent to dress as Santa Claus and hand out poisoned candy to Jewish children and racial minorities has pleaded guilty to soliciting hate crimes.<\/p>\n
Federal prosecutors said they would seek a sentence of up to 18 years for Michail Chkhikvishvili, a 22-year-old from the Republic of Georgia who also goes by \u201cCommander Butcher.\u201d He pleaded guilty Monday before a federal judge in Brooklyn to soliciting violent felonies and distributing information about making bombs and ricin.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors described Chkhikvishvili as the leader of the Maniac Murder Cult, an international extremist group that adheres to a \u201cneo-Nazi accelerationist ideology and promotes violence and violent acts against racial minorities, the Jewish community and other groups it deems \u2018undesirables.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
They said the group\u2019s violent solicitations \u2014 promoted through Telegram channels and outlined a manifesto called the \u201cHater\u2019s Handbook\u201d \u2014 appear to have inspired multiple real-life killings, including a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this year that left a 16-year-old student dead.<\/p>\n
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He was arrested in July 2024 in Moldova. He was extradited to the United States in May.<\/p>\n
Since 2022, Chkhikvishvili has traveled on multiple occasions to Brooklyn, where he bragged about beating up an elderly Jewish man and instructed others, primarily through text messages, to commit violent acts on behalf of the Maniac Murder Cult, according to court papers.<\/p>\n
When he was approached by an undercover FBI agent in 2023, Chkhikvishvili recruited the official to a scheme that \u201cinvolved an individual dressing up as Santa Claus and handing out candy laced with poison to racial minorities and children at Jewish schools in Brooklyn,\u201d according to the Justice Department.<\/p>\n
He later suggested narrowing the focus to \u201cdead Jewish kids,\u201d prosecutors said, after noting that \u201cJews are literally everywhere\u201d in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n
Describing his desire to carry out a mass casualty attack, Chkhikvishvili said he saw the United States as \u201cbig potential because accessibility to firearms,\u201d adding that the undercover should consider targeting homeless people because the government wouldn\u2019t care \u201ceven if they die,\u201d according to court papers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 The leader of an Eastern European neo-Nazi group who tried to recruit an undercover…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4207,303,6000,417,10685,1027,8041,4364,9,24,55,54,56,4722,7675,421],"class_list":["post-44006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-children","tag-crime","tag-extradition","tag-general-news","tag-hate-crimes","tag-homicide","tag-law-enforcement","tag-nazism","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-race-and-ethnicity","tag-religion","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}