In a Brooklyn, New York, courthouse, Georgian national Michail Chkhikvishvili entered his plea before the court. On November 15, 2025, Chkhikvishvili, also known as Commander Butcher, admitted to a 2023 plot he attempted to orchestrate in which a co-conspirator, dressed as Santa Claus, would distribute poisoned candy to “minority children” on New Year’s Eve 2023. Communicating over the encrypted chat application Telegram, Chkhikvishvili conspired with others to lace the candy with deadly ricin poison on behalf of his group, the violent Maniac Murder Cult (Маньяки: культ убийства in Russian — often abbreviated as “MKY,” “MKU,” or “MMC”). To help the perpetrator in New York, Chkhikvishvili sent manuals that instructed the would-be attacker on how to create poisons and explosives. A common practice inside the extremist spaces that groups like MKY operate, these guides are meant to instruct and inspire followers to commit acts of violence. After the holidays passed without the plan moving forward, Chkhikvishvili told his man in New York to target the Jewish community, Jewish schools, and Jewish children in Brooklyn with poison. Joking that the attack was going to exceed that of Anders Breivik, a Norwegian mass killer who killed 77 people, many of them children, on July 22, 2011, Chkhikvishvili never saw his plan reach fruition. The person he had been soliciting to commit violence was actually an undercover informant with the FBI. Chkhikvishvili, a citizen of Georgia, was arrested in July 2024 as he traveled through Moldova and then was extradited to the U.S. Chkhikvishvili authored and distributed a book for MKY titled the Hater’s Handbook around 2021. The book began as a basic text document but was updated and “improved” over time. By the third edition, it was filled with illustrations, references to other groups, an alleged biography of MKY’s founder, the imprisoned Yegor Krasnov, and instructions on how to carry out random attacks and violence in the name of a neo-Nazi ideology, spreading terror, and the MKY.
vi graphe: Manuals Of Destruction: Extremist How-To Manuals Teaching Kids How To Extort, Poison, And Kill