Brother of arsonist anti-Semite who failed to burn down rabbis' homes and a Jewish-owned business will face his own charges now that he's been shipped back from Sweden

Alexander Giannakakis, whose Nazi brother was the main suspect in a string of arson fires aimed at Jews in 2019, but who died before he could be arrested, has been returned from Sweden to face charges he tried to hide evidence of his brother's crimes and involvement in other local white-supremacist efforts, the US Attorney's office reports.

Giannakakis, 37, formerly of Quincy, landed at Logan on Friday and had his first appearance today in US District Court on charges of making false statements in a matter involving domestic terrorism, falsifying, concealing and covering up a material fact in a matter involving domestic terrorism, concealing records in a federal investigation, tampering with documents and objects and tampering with an official proceeding. He agreed to remain in custody until at least his arraignment on Feb. 13, according to court records.

Giannakakis's brother, whom the feds have not named since he was never formally charged on account of having slipped into a coma and died after the last of the fires, set fire to orthodox rabbis' homes at Chabad centers in Arlington - twice - and Needham and tried to torch a "Jewish-affiliated business" in Chelsea, the FBI says.

In the 2020 indictment against Giannakakis, a grand jury charged Giannakakis with trying to hide his brother's Nazism and violent tendencies from investigators, in part by lying to them, in part by gathering up some of the evidence and then returning to Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been working as a security contractor for the US embassy, following his brother's death.

Swedish officials detained him at the request of the US, then locked him up after finding him guilty of possession of an illegal gun and other weapons. As he neared the end of his two-year sentence in December, the Swedish Supreme Court approved his extradition to Boston, the US Attorney's office reports.

According to the indictment against him, after fleeing to Stockholm, Giannakis returned to Quincy, via New York's JFK Airport. FBI agents, alerted to his return, interviewed him in Quincy, and he agreed to open a family locker at a local self-storage place, where they found nothing incriminating. But what he didn't tell authorities but that they knew, was that the brothers had access to 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, the indictment says.

Innocent, etc.