Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn on Tuesday unsealed a sweeping felony indictment against the 20-year-old they say is the head of a violent Eastern European skinhead gang implicated in a number of assaults and attacks abroad, some of them fatal. The gang, Maniac Murder Cult (or MKY), is connected to the com/764 pedophilia network, with at least one killing in Romania directly connected to MKY.
Michail Chkhikvishvili, otherwise known as “Commander Butcher,” “Michael,” and “Mishka,” was arrested on an Interpol warrant on July 6 in Chișinău, Moldova for allegedly conspiring to solicit attacks on homeless people, Jews, and other racial minorities in New York City; distributing explosives-making instructions; and making violent threats in online conversations with an undercover FBI employee. One plot prosecutors say he concocted with the undercover fed involved poisoning Jewish children by handing out tainted candy while dressed as Santa Claus on New Year’s Eve, 2023.
Chkhikvishvili, who remains in custody in Moldova—which has previously collaborated with the US on the extradition of non-citizens—has yet to be extradited to the United States and make his first appearance in court. He has not yet been assigned an attorney. If convicted, he faces a potential sentence of decades in an American prison.
The feds allege that Chkhikvishvili tried to incite the undercover agent into additional attacks with either edged weapons or molotov cocktails, and claimed that the planned attack would be a “bigger action than Breivik,” referring to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian Neo-Nazi mass murdered who killed 77 people in 2011.
According to the FBI, 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.” Much like other accelerationist militants like the Atomwaffen Division and The Base, MKY seeks to destabilize society through violence and terrorism. It was founded in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro by Yegor Krasnov and is accused of many homicides and assaults in both Russia and Ukraine. In their Telegram channels, MKY members lionized in-person violence and distributed how-to guides on committing violent assaults and shootings, causing maximum harm to victims, and how perpetrators could cover their tracks. Committing and documenting such an attack is the criteria for admittance to MKY.
Courtesy of Department of Justice
There are extensive ties between MKY and 764. That alliance was developed by Butcher himself, particularly through contact with two 764 members who went by the handles of “Xor” and “Kush,” both of whom remain unidentified. “Tobbz,” a troubled young German who killed an elderly woman and stabbed a man in 2022, had also joined MKU, according to reporting by Der Spiegel and Recorder.
The United States Attorney’s office for New York’s Eastern District is also prosecuting two related cases: the child abuse and CSAM distribution case against 764 member Angel Almeida, whose Fall 2021 arrest was the feds’ first glimpse into the world of com, 764, and MKY; and the case against Nicholas Welker, the alleged former head of the Neo-Nazi Feuerkrieg Division, who was convicted in April for threatening a Brooklyn-based journalist. According to court records, Welker and Chkhikvishvili were in contact from July 2022 to March 2023, when Welker was arrested and charged.
Chkhikvishvili, a Georgian national, was present in the United States in 2022, according to an affidavit by FBI special agent Erica Dobin of the New York City Joint Terrorism Task Force. US authorities say he visited his girlfriend in California in March and April of that year, information the FBI learned after interviewing the young woman about her virulent Neo-Nazi social media posts. Shortly thereafter, Chkhikvishvili traveled to Brooklyn, where he stayed with his grandparents and worked in a rehab facility taking care of an elderly Orthodox Jewish patient. “I’m working in rehab center privately in Jewish family,” he messaged another Neo-Nazi in July 2022. “I get paid to torture dying jew, I think I almost killed him today.” Chkhikvishvili sent multiple images of the patient to his fellow extremist. The patient died later that year, though the government does not allege Chkhikvishvili caused his death.
It is unclear when Chkhikvishvili left the United States. Federal prosecutors give his place of residence as Tbilisi, Georgia, even though he was arrested in a Balkan country on the opposite side of the Black Sea.
In allegedly urging the undercover fed to commit acts of violence and record them, Chkhikvishvili repeatedly emphasized the lethal level of violence MKY members employed in their attacks, prosecutors say. “We murder they larp,” he allegedly wrote to another extremist while comparing MKY to another Neo-Nazi group, referring to “live action role play.” Even while allegedly planning the mass poisoning scheme with the undercover FBI agent, prosecutors say Chkhikvishvili did not shy away from the potential “heat” the undercover agent warned would bring on MKY: “That’s what we exactly want,” he wrote in reply.
