The commander of a stolen Kzin police vessel renamed The Traitor's Claw, Chuft Captain was also the leader of a band of Kzinti pirates who lured the Shuttlecraft Copernicus to a remote, frozen planet in the Beta Lyrae system on stardate 4187.3 (2269), intending to steal a Slaver stasis box carried aboard the shuttlecraft with the tacit approval of the Kzinti government. Chuft Captain captured the shuttlecraft's crew — Commander Spock and Lieutenants Sulu and Uhura of the U.S.S. Enterprise — and took the stasis box, from which he obtained a potent, intelligent weapon created by the long-extinct Slaver race. Chuft Captain's overconfidence in handling his prisoners, as well as his clumsy experiments with the sentient alien weapon, proved to be his undoing; the device ultimately destroyed Chuft Captain, his ship, and his crew, because it was unwilling allow itself to be misused by the Kzinti.