Synagogue Arsonist’s Brother Hid Nazi Merch, Fled to Sweden, FBI Says
A series of 2019 Boston-area synagogue arsons was likely the work of a Hitler fan who wrote about the need to “kill all Jews,” FBI investigators say. There’s just one problem: the suspect is now dead and his brother, who spoke to investigators while the suspect was in a coma, is accused of concealing his sibling’s anti-Semitism and fleeing to Sweden with the suspect’s belongings.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts on Wednesday announced charges against 34-year-old Alexander Giannakakis. He’s accused of obstructing an investigation into the arson spree by allegedly lying to investigators about a storage unit where his brother kept Nazi gear, and absconding to Europe with evidence in the case. He was arrested on Wednesday in a suburb of Stockholm and is facing extradition back to the U.S.
Giannakakis’s phone was out of service when The Daily Beast attempted to contact him.
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Giannakakis, a former student at the University of Pennsylvania, was working as a security contractor at the U.S. embassy in Sweden in 2019 when a series of arsons broke out near the family’s home in Quincy, Massachusetts. Although none of the fires resulted in serious damage or injury, they rattled the area’s Jewish community, especially after investigators revealed that the arsonist had used an accelerant to speed the blaze.
Security footage from the time revealed a hooded suspect roaming the area with what appeared to be a gas canister. That suspect, investigators now allege, was Giannakakis’s younger brother, who is unnamed in the indictment.
Feds eventually ID’ed the younger man as a suspect after his fourth alleged arson, when a bystander spooked him into leaving his gas can behind. Fingerprints on the canister matched those of Giannakakis’s younger brother, according to Giannakakis’ charging documents.
But by January 2020, when investigators connected the man to the arsons, he was in a coma. So law enforcement interviewed the young man’s mother, who admitted that her son had anti-Semitic views, and that he might have been a member of an extremist group. She turned over “documents that included one handwritten page that purported to be the cover page to a charter for a group that the [Joint Terrorism Task Force] agents believed consisted of individuals who might use violence against Jews to further the group’s racially-motivated, violent extremist ideology,” the indictment reads.
But some of the suspect’s belongings were missing when investigators continued to dig into the case the following month. Feds now accuse Giannakakis of taking his younger brother’s cellphone, laptop, notebooks, and mail, and bringing them to Sweden in early 2020.
It wasn’t Giannakakis’s only attempt to hide his brother’s belongings, prosecutors allege. When investigators began searching the family property, they asked Giannakakis whether his brother kept belongings anywhere besides the family home. Giannakakis said no but, when asked specifically about a storage facility, led agents to it. There, he opened a storage unit, where investigators found nothing of interest.
However, Giannakakis neglected to tell investigators the family had a second unit on the same floor. Inside that storage unit were a t-shirt and notebook with a swastika logo and a bottle of cyanide, prosecutors allege. (A search of the suspect’s room also surfaced fire accelerant as well as writings with swastikas, Nazi slogans, and writings in which the suspect called the killing of all Jews “simply essential.”)
Two days after the FBI search of the first unit, Giannakakis allegedly removed the cyanide and his brother’s backpack from the secret storage unit and flew to Sweden, where he has remained since March 2020.
Giannakakis’s brother, the suspect in the arsons, died without waking from the coma that he had entered in Nov. 2019. Giannakakis now faces charges of making false statements in a domestic terrorism investigation, falsifying information in a domestic terrorism investigation, concealing records in a federal investigation, tampering with documents and objects, and tampering with an official proceeding.
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