Man gets three and a half years for trying to mislead investigators looking into his anti-Semitic arsonist brother

A federal judge today sentenced a man whose brother torched the homes of Jewish rabbis and a Jewish business in Arlington, Needham and Chelsea in 2019 to three years in federal prison for trying to mislead investigators looking into the fires and his brother's murderous hatred of Jews.

Alexander Giannakakis of Quincy pleaded guilty last November to concealing records in a federal investigation, tampering with documents and objects and tampering with an official proceeding.

According to the indictment against him, Giannakakis's actions included opening a family locker for investigators at a local self-storage place for investigators, then not telling them about a second locker, just a few doors down - where his brother kept T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas, a notebook with a swastika drawn inside it and a backpack containing a bottle of cyanide. Giannakakis had visited the second locker the night before he let the agents look at the first one.

His brother, James Ramy, was never charged because before the FBI could close in, he had gotten into an argument with his mother, went into his room and shot himself in the head - and then lingered in a hospital for ten months before dying.

In a sentencing recommendation calling for 48 months, assistant US Attorney Jason Casey charged that Giannakakis knew what his brother was up to and actively sought to fend off investigators:

[F]ederal agents told the defendant that they were investigating a series of arsons at Jewish-affiliated institutions committed by his brother; they probed the defendant about his brother's apparent antisemitism (his motive for committing the arsons); and they asked about his brother's affiliation with violent extremist groups. In other words, it is clear the defendant had actual knowledge that the arsons under investigation were hate crimes - crimes motivated by anti-Jewish bias - prior to his obstructive conduct. 

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The defendant's actions not only sidetracked a federal hate crime investigation and wasted incalculable resources, but they also caused the residents of the buildings that were burned  - still reeling from the attempts to destroy their homes, their places of worship, and their businesses - to feel further victimized. A sentence of 48 months appropriately reflects the severity and the gravity of the defendant's crimes, and is sufficient but not greater than necessary to provide just punishment.

Casey urged US District Court Judge Patti Saris to reject Giannakakis's lawyer's request to reduce a key metric in the algorithm used to help determine a sentence because he has no prior criminal record - something that might be true in the US, but he spent two years in a Swedish prison for the "a bag belonging to the defendant that contained a 9mm semi-automatic handgun, several loaded magazines (including one extended magazine that held 34 rounds), a crossbow with arrows, and a bottle of chloroform" that Swedish police found in his possession. Giannakakis, in fact, was extradited from Sweden, where he was living at the time, to face the Massachusetts charges.

Giannakakis's lawyer, Forest O’Neill-Greenberg, however, argued for a sentence of 36 month, writing that his client's actions were driven not by his own adherence to Jew hating, but out of a misguided attempt to protect the memory of his younger brother.

The aftermath of his little brother's suicide attempt marks the most painful and destabilizing period of Alex's life. And it is within the wake of this tragedy, four months after his brother's suicide attempt, while his brother remained hospitalized in a coma, that Alex committed his offense conduct in this matter. As is addressed below, Alex's obstruction offenses were not driven by extremist ideology and hateful bigotry, but were motivated by an impulsive, shortsighted, and desperate attempt to protect his brother's memory, which had been devastated by the tragic suicide attempt and the subsequent discovery by Alex and his family that his brother had previously committed several arsons at local Jewish facilities in Massachusetts. Alex remains deeply remorseful for his choices and actions underlying his obstruction offenses. He takes full responsibility for them and understands the very real harms that have stemmed from his decision to conceal and tamper with records and the investigation related to his brother's 2019 arsons.