A neo-Nazi leader who plotted to kill children he described as “racial minorities and traitors” by having someone dressed as Santa Claus hand out poisoned candy in New York City was sentenced on Wednesday to 15 years in federal prison.
The man, Michail Chkhikvishvili, 22, a Georgian citizen known as Commander Butcher, was the leader of Maniac Murder Cult, an international extremist group that encouraged people to commit acts of hate and violence, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Mr. Chkhikvishvili inspired a school shooting in Nashville last year, the stabbing of five people near a mosque in Turkey in 2024 and the murder of a 74-year-old woman in Romania in 2022. He insisted that his followers record their attacks to prove they were successful and to promote Maniac Murder Cult online, prosecutors said.
In the case of the shooting in Nashville, in which a 17-year-old student at Antioch High School fatally shot another student and then killed himself, the attacker mentioned Mr. Chkhikvishvili by name in his writings, prosecutors said.
Since 2021, Mr. Chkhikvishvili had updated and published successive editions of the “Hater’s Handbook,” which encouraged people to carry out school shootings and gave them suggestions on how to commit mass murder, including by targeting crowded outdoor events, prosecutors said.
The poisoned candy plot emerged in late 2023 when Mr. Chkhikvishvili sent an undercover F.B.I. agent, whom he believed to be a potential Maniac Murder Cult recruit, “step-by-step instructions” on how to carry out the attack, prosecutors wrote in court documents.
Mr. Chkhikvishvili suggested lacing candy with ricin, a poison, and having someone dressed as Santa hand it out on New Year’s Eve in New York to children he described as “racial minorities and traitors,” prosecutors wrote.
On Jan. 9, 2024, Mr. Chkhikvishvili suggested that the undercover agent give poisoned candy to the “Jewish community” on “some Jewish holiday” at “Jewish schools full of kids,” prosecutors wrote.
Mr. Chkhikvishvili was charged in the Eastern District of New York with soliciting hate crimes and acts of mass violence and was arrested on July 6, 2024, in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, while traveling from Georgia to Ukraine, prosecutors said.
He was extradited to the United States in May 2025 and pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Brooklyn in November to to one count of soliciting violent felonies and one count of distributing instructions to make explosive devices and poisons.
Mr. Chkhikvishvili’s lawyer, Zachary S. Taylor, had asked Judge Carol Bagley Amon to sentence his client to five years, writing in court documents that he now “renounces Nazism, antisemitism, racism and violence,” and “wants nothing more than to be normal himself, to live a normal life.”
“The first cracks in the bands of hatred that surrounded his heart appeared during his 11 months of solitary confinement in Moldova’s notorious Prison No. 13,” Mr. Taylor wrote. There, he added, Mr. Chkhikvishvili “began to read the Bible and books on philosophy and history” and inmates “from diverse backgrounds treated him with kindness, sending him food and messages of encouragement.”
In a letter to Judge Amon, Mr. Chkhikvishvili wrote that he was “very sorry for my conduct” and that he wanted to apologize to “Jews, Blacks and basically all people that I was targeting.”
“I acknowledge that my actions have brought harm by spreading hatred and violence and I’m truly sorry for that,” he wrote.
Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Mr. Chkhikvishvili to 17 and a half years in prison, writing in court documents that he “does not regret his actions; he simply regrets having been caught for them.”
“The defendant is a hate-mongering menace who intended to hurt and kill children in the Jewish community and in other minority communities in New York City,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Thanks to our incredible law enforcement partners, he did not succeed and will now face justice for his cowardly acts.”
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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