A neo-Nazi leader who wrote a manifesto called the “Haters Handbook” pleaded guilty in Brooklyn Monday to spearheading a bizarre murder plot to dress as Santa and give poison candy to minority children on New Year’s Eve.
Michael Chkhikvishvili, 22, a citizen of Georgia, ran the Russian and Ukrainian “Maniac Murder Cult” hate group and went by the nickname “Commander Butcher.” He was busted last year for trying to solicit someone who turned out to be an undercover agent into taking part in murder, bombing and arson plots.
On Monday, he pleaded guilty to soliciting violent felonies and distributing bomb-making information. He could get 14 to 17½ years in prison, based on federal guidelines, when he’s sentenced March 9.
The suspect’s group, which goes by the initials MKY, “adheres to a neo-Nazi accelerationist ideology and promotes violence and violent acts against racial minorities, the Jewish community and other groups it deems ‘undesirables,’” according to a criminal complaint.
“I used internet platforms to communicate with another person … to try to persuade him to commit violent hate crimes,” he told Brooklyn Federal Court Magistrate Judge Vera Scanlon. “I distributed information about making bombs over the internet … I acted intentionally and take full responsibility for my actions, and I’d like to apologize to these communities.”
The FBI agent started chatting with Chkhikvishvili last September on encrypted internet channels, after posing as a prospective MKY member, the complaint says.
He described the Santa scheme as “a bigger action than Breivik without getting caught” — believed to be a reference to a reference to Anders Behring Breivik, a neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in a 2011 bombing and mass shooting spree in Norway, the feds say.
He suggested that if the undercover couldn’t pull off the attack on New Year’s Eve, as planned, it could happen on “some Jewish holiday” at “Jewish schools full of kids. … Dead Jewish kids,” according to the complaint.
“The defendant has admitted his vile actions, including recruiting others to commit acts of violence against Jewish and racial minority children. His incitement of hate crimes resulted in real-world violence,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said Monday.
Prosecutors say he inspired a January 2025 school shooting inside Antioch High School in Nashville, where the attacker posted audio online, claiming he was taking action on behalf of Maniac Murder Cult and at least one other group.
In August 2024, an attacker wearing a tactical vest with Nazi symbols stabbed five people outside of a mosque in Eskisehir, Turkey, distributing a link to the Haters Handbook beforehand. He explicitly referenced Chkhikvishvili in his manifesto, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Chkhikvishvili “engaged in extensive communications over Telegram” with another neo-Nazi leader, Nicholas Welker, who used to head the Feuerkrieg Division, or FKD. Welker, who went by the nickname “King ov Wrath,” was sentenced to 44 months in prison last year for posting graphic death threats online against a Brooklyn journalist.
