A Georgian man who plotted for Jewish children in New York to be fed poisoned candy on New Year’s Eve by a man dressed as Santa Claus pleaded guilty on Monday to soliciting hate crimes.
The man, Michail Chkhikvishvili, was known as Commander Butcher and inspired violence around the world as a leader of the Maniac Murder Cult, a Russian and Ukrainian neo-Nazi group, prosecutors said. On Monday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, he pleaded guilty to soliciting violent felonies and distributing information about an explosive device.
Prosecutors will seek a sentence of up to 18 years for Mr. Chkhikvishvili, Nick Moscow, a federal prosecutor, said in court.
Mr. Chkhikvishvili’s group, prosecutors said, has promoted violence against members of racial and ethnic minority groups. It has inspired brutal crimes, including a school shooting in Tennessee, a mass stabbing in Turkey and the murder of an older woman in Romania.
“His incitement of hate crimes resulted in real-world violence,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
Mr. Chkhikvishvili helped publish and distribute the “Hater’s Handbook.” It called on the group’s followers to commit mass murder and offered instructions on how to do so.
One of his proposed plots in 2023 included having a man dressed as Santa Claus feed candy laced with ricin to Jewish children on New Year’s Eve, prosecutors said.
He told an undercover F.B.I. agent, who he thought was a co-conspirator, that “ricin would be most simple” to taint the candy.
The cult’s ideological underpinnings are Satanism and Nazism, according to researchers at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. The cult developed a “scoring system” in which members are rewarded for brutal acts.
Mr. Chkhikvishvili was indicted in July 2024 and extradited from Moldova to New York in May. He wanted the proposed attack in New York to be “a bigger action than Breivik,” a reference to Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in 2011, prosecutors said.
Mr. Chkhikvishvili’s plea comes as the U.S. government has focused on left-wing violence, even as violence associated with right-wing extremism remains elevated around the world.
Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio named four groups with “revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies” as terrorist organizations. President Trump in September labeled the loosely organized entity antifa a domestic terror organization.
Amy Collins, a former federal prosecutor who has written about the threats posed by white nationalist groups, said organizations like the Maniac Murder Cult, which often do not have a clear leader, were difficult to prosecute because of their amorphous nature.
“A lot of it takes place online,” Ms. Collins said.
Mr. Chkhikvishvili, 23, on Monday spoke about experiencing depression and anxiety as a teenager. While incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, he said he had been working out and going to church.
He apologized to “those communities” he had targeted.
“I’m going to do better with my life,” he said.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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