A diehard Kansas City Chiefs fan who was known on social media and at games as “ChiefsAholic” was sentenced Thursday to 17½ years in federal prison and ordered to pay a half-million dollars in restitution for pulling off a string of bank robberies across the central U.S. and attempting to rob banks in Apple Valley and Savage.

Xaviar Michael Babudar, 30, of Overland Park, Kan., robbed or tried to rob 11 banks and credit unions across seven states — netting nearly $848,000 — during a sixteen-month period starting in March 2022, according to federal prosecutors. In all but a few of the robberies, Babudar brandished what appeared to be a firearm.

Babudar’s robbery spree enabled him to purchase expensive tickets to Chiefs games and cultivate a large online following as “ChiefsAholic,” a knockoff of the Chiefs’ official mascot K.C. Wolf.

“This ChiefsAholic persona was the way he chose to present himself to the world,” prosecutors wrote last week in a sentencing memorandum. “But to the many bank and credit union employees he victimized between 2022 and 2023, Babudar put on a different mask — usually a ski or paintball mask coupled with goggles — which was also meant to conceal his true identity.”

Babudar robbed three banks in Iowa and one each in Nebraska, Oklahoma and Tennessee between March 2, 2022, and his first arrest on Dec 16, 2022. He then laundered the robbery proceeds through area casinos and bank accounts, according to a criminal complaint filed under seal in the U.S. District Court in Kansas City in May 2023.

Babudar’s two attempted robberies in the Twin Cities came within two hours on Nov. 29, 2022.

Federal prosecutors say these surveillance photos show Xaviar Michael Babudar, then 28, of Overland Park, Kansas, trying to rob Royal Credit Union at 14295 Cedar Ave. in Apple Valley on Nov. 29, 2022. (Courtesy of U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of Missouri)

He first entered Wings Financial Credit Union at 14411 Minnesota 13 in Savage just after noon and demanded that employees open the vault. Upon seeing it only held small bills, he left the bank without taking anything.

About an hour and half later, Babudar tried to rob the Royal Credit Union at 14295 Cedar Ave. in Apple Valley. He again discovered only small bills in the vault and left with nothing.

Babudar was charged in Tulsa County, Okla., in a December 2022 heist at the Tulsa Teachers Federal Credit Union, where he made off with $139,500. FBI investigators reviewed bank records, casino transaction records and financial documents and discovered that he had purchased and redeemed more than $1 million in chips from casinos in Missouri, Kansas and Illinois between April and December of 2022, the criminal complaint said.

Despite objections from Tulsa prosecutors, Babudar was released from custody on an $80,000 bond in February 2023, according to the sentencing memorandum. Four days later, the Chiefs won Super Bowl LVII, a game in which Babudar won $100,000 from two bets he placed in June 2022 in the midst of his robbery spree.

Babudar then removed his ankle monitor and fled prosecution. He evaded detection over the next few months, robbing a bank in Sparks, Nev., on June 8, 2023, and a U.S. Bank branch in El Dorado Hills, Calif., on July 3, 2023. The FBI caught up with him four days later, arresting him in Lincoln, Calif.

‘Guy in the wolf suit’

According to an ESPN.com report in February 2023, Babudar was one of the most popular Chiefs fans on game days. He was known as “the guy in the wolf suit, often shown on TV, who’d run around tailgates in head-to-toe gray fur, claws and a mask, firing up fans.”

The criminal complaint noted that Babudar “enjoyed a robust social media presence as a Kansas City Chiefs superfan.” However, in late December, fans began to notice that his popular Twitter account — @ChiefsAholic — went silent, before one found his mugshot from the Oklahoma jail, the ESPN.com report said.

As part of a February plea agreement, Babudar pleaded guilty to one count each of bank robbery, money laundering and transporting stolen property across state lines.

His sentence includes three years of supervised release following prison. He was ordered to pay $532,675 in restitution to the banks and forfeit to the government property involved in his money laundering, including an autographed painting of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes that was recovered by the FBI.

His sentencing came on the same day the defending Super Bowl Champion Chiefs were to kick off the NFL season with a home game against the Baltimore Ravens at Arrowhead Stadium.

Related Articles

‘Defund police’ or reimagine safety? Kamala Harris’ record on a historic American issue

Courtroom clash in Trump’s election interference case as the judge ponders the path ahead

Prominent Minnesota attorney sentenced for striking I-35 worker

Suspect in Georgia high school shooting denied making online threats last year

South St. Paul man sentenced to jail for pointing pellet gun at officers, prompting one to fire off a shot

Revisit the 1988 “Beetlejuice” if you haven’t lately. It’s stranger, jankier, funnier and try-anything-er than you may recall. As the freelance bio-exorcist Betelgeuse, aka Beetlejuice, Michael Keaton delivered wondrous combinations of subtle vocal throwaways and outlandish visual invention as both participant and heckler in his own paranormal comedy. Director Tim Burton, hot off “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” reportedly considered casting Sammy Davis Jr. in the role, among others. But it was kismet for Keaton, and for Winona Ryder as the grieving, healing Lydia Deetz, as well as a crack supporting ensemble seemingly assembled in some sort of dream.

There’s a lot more Keaton in the 36-years-later reboot “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which pays off in terms of a great and versatile star’s screen time. But holy cats, is this movie disappointing! I mean really not good enough! Some people, Burton fans many of them, slag off Burton projects like the live-action “Dumbo” or the feature “Dark Shadows.”  While many disagree, given the wide but generally admiring critical response to “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” in its world premiere last week at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, this one, for me, ranks right down there with “Dumbo.” It is not enough to make a swole version of the first “Beetlejuice,” at somewhere around 14 times the original’s $15 million product budget. With the effects upgrades and joyless bombast taking over, did the comedy ever have a chance?

Now the mother of teenage Astrid (Jenna Ortega), ghost-friendly Lydia hosts a successful reality/talk show produced by her smarmy fiancee (Justin Theroux). The show is a haunted-house affair, featuring standoffs between supernatural and super-normal inhabitants of the same domiciles, with Lydia acting as “psychic mediator.” The tragic death of Lydia’s father leaves Astrid bereft and also skeptical: If mom’s TV shtick is genuine, why can’t she make afterlife contact with Astrid’s grandfather?

When Beetlejuice enters the story, he’s still smitten with Lydia. Beyond that, his ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), determined to exact revenge on her dirty dog of a former husband, goes about sucking the souls out of humans who get in her way. There’s more to the screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, including Astrid meeting a sweet fellow outsider (Arthur Conti), and Willem Dafoe’s deceased but lively detective — an actor who played a detective when he was alive, so why stop now?

Burton’s design teams remain among the finest commercial film creatives working, and there are some visual ideas and images in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” that hit that elusive sweet spot between the macabre and the wittily macabre only a Burton movie can manage. When Keaton sails into a flashback reverie about how he and Delores met and then broke up, it’s depicted in the operatically intense style of an Italian gallo horror melodrama. Elsewhere we get bits of the cramped “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” German Expressionism in the scenic design, which is amusing. More clinically impressive than amusing: the sight of Bellucci’s formerly dismembered Delores reattaching her own limbs with a staple gun.

Related Articles

10 movies for fall 2024: Our film picks and questions about everything from ‘Wicked I’ to ‘Joker II’

TV for fall 2024: Our top 20 shows coming down the pike, including a hospital comedy from creator of ‘Superstore’

‘The Deliverance’ review: Lee Daniels’ supernatural thriller doesn’t deliver

Though retired from TV, Randy Shaver is still on the high school football beat

‘Pachinko’ returns with Season 2, a more muted but necessary chapter in the series

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone. The legendarily gifted Catherine O’Hara returns as Lydia’s stepmother Delia, as haughty as ever. But we keep waiting for the jokes to land — to do their job, in other words. Without a fresh take on familiar material, director Burton makes do with his own detours and let’s-try-this-for-a-while segments, including a torturous musical sequence backed by the song “MacArthur Park” that goes on approximately forever. Then there’s a “Soul Train” riff, which feels way, way off, taste-wise and big-ending-dance-party wise.

It can’t hold a candle, in other words, to the happy ending of the first “Beetlejuice,” which found human and otherworld cohabitants of the same old house on the hill living in peace and harmony, with Harry Belafonte’s rendition of the Calypso classic “Jump in the Line” providing the backbeat. I’m sure this sequel will do well enough. But it’s a helluva comedown, and seeing “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” in a huge opening-night crowd at the Venice festival, I didn’t hear much in the way of actual laughter, proving that a couple of hundred million can buy you almost anything. Almost.

“Beetle Beetlejuice” — 1.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use)

Running time: 1:44

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Sept. 5

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Related Articles

10 movies for fall 2024: Our film picks and questions about everything from ‘Wicked I’ to ‘Joker II’

Column: In ‘Blink Twice,’ director Zoë Kravitz was after cinematic sense of trouble in paradise

Fall movie preview: ‘Gladiator II,’ ‘Wicked’ and much more

Hollywood is slowly getting back to work, but the days of peak TV aren’t coming back

‘Sugarcane’ delves into horrific past at Indigenous boarding school

Gretchen McKay | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)

PITTSBURGH — No one likes to say goodbye to summer, but there’s no denying a new school year can be pretty exciting.

After chilling by the pool, sleeping in late and traveling with family on vacation, it’s fun for kids to be back with their friends. And what parent or caregiver doesn’t like the predictability of returning to weekday routines?

That said, getting back to a dependable daily schedule can take some time for mom or dad, who often are rushing home from work to prepare dinner, help with homework or get kids to and from practices.

One easy out is takeout. Nobody is going to judge you for grabbing a supermarket rotisserie chicken or bag of drive-thru burgers and fries. All five of my kids ate Sir Pizza — every single Friday — from kindergarten through high school, and it’s a must-have dish whenever they’re in town for a visit.

Yet, a homemade dinner is almost always cheaper than feeding the family with fast food — even with today’s high grocery prices. And it’s often just as quick, if not faster.

Plus, it just makes your house smell great. And if you get the kids to pitch in, kudos to you for helping them learn important life skills and encouraging family bonding.

The four simple, economical recipes that follow take 30 minutes or less to prepare. That leaves you free to finish up the week with Pizza Night on Friday.

Canned pineapple, soy sauce, and a drizzle of honey create a lip-smacking sweet-and-sour sauce in this simple pork dish. (Gretchen McKay/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS)

Easy Sweet and Sour Pork

PG tested

Who doesn’t like a tasty stir-fry? This one hangs its hat on boneless pork tenderloin, a tender cut that is easy to find in any grocery store. If you’re feeling adventurous and it’s on sale, substitute fresh chopped pineapple for canned. Serve over white or brown rice or noodles.

2 cloves garlic, halved
1 1/2 -inch piece root ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
2 tablespoons tomato puree
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
4 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon honey
15-ounce can pineapple chunks in juice, drained, juice reserved
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 red onion, chopped
1 pork tenderloin (about 1 pound 2 ounces) thinly sliced
2 red, yellow or orange bell peppers, deseeded and chopped

Make sauce: Put the garlic and ginger in a mini chopper or blender with the tomato puree, rice vinegar, soy sauce, honey and pineapple chunks with their juice, and blend until smooth.

Put sesame oil in a saute pan over high heat and stir-fry the onion until tender, about 2 minutes.

Add pork slices and peppers. Reduce heat to medium. Stir-fry for 10 minutes.

Add sauce from the mini chopper or blender to pan and simmer for 15 minutes. Serve with noodles, rice or side dish of your choice.

Serves 4.

— “Easy Meals Every Day: Healthy Dinners for the Whole Family” by Pip Payne (Hamlyn, $26.99)

Tuck ground beef and cheese into a flour tortilla for an easy cheeseburger quesadilla. Pickles and secret sauce optional. (Gretchen McKay/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS)

Cheeseburger Quesadillas

PG tested

Quesadillas can be customized to any taste or flavor combination. Here, the hand-held comfort food is made with all your favorite cheeseburger fixings folded inside a flour tortilla — ground beef, cheddar, onion and dill pickles. They’re served with a mayonnaise-based “special sauce.”

For the special sauce

1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons ketchup
2 tablespoons minced dill pickles
1 teaspoon yellow mustard
1 tablespoon minced white onion or shallot
2 teaspoons white vinegar

For burger

1 pound ground beef (80/20 blend)
8 8-inch flour tortillas
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
1 small white onion, chopped
Dill pickle chips and/or pickled jalapeño peppers
Shredded lettuce, for garnish

Prepare sauce: In small bowl, stir together mayonnaise, ketchup, minced pickles, mustard, onion, vinegar and salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Cook beef until browned and cooked through, about 6-8 minutes, in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Drain well.

Wipe out skillet with a paper towel, then lightly coat with nonstick spray. Bring pan back to medium heat. Working with one tortilla at a time, add to skillet.

Fill 1 tortilla with 1/2 cup cheddar cheese, 1/4 of the cooked beef, chopped onion, dill pickle slices and pickled jalapeño, if using.

Top with a second tortilla and cook until cheese is melted and tortilla is golden brown on one side, about 2 minutes.

Using a spatula, flip quesadilla and continue cooking on other side until all the cheese is melted and the second side is golden brown.

Transfer to a plate and cover with foil to keep warm.

Repeat with remaining tortillas, cheddar, beef, onions and pickles. Cut each quesadilla into four pieces and stack on each of the four plates.

Garnish with shredded lettuce, and serve with special sauce for dipping.

Serves 4.

— Gretchen McKay, Post-Gazette

This one-pan honey-lemon chicken can be served over rice or your favorite pasta. (Gretchen McKay/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS)

Honey Lemon Chicken

PG tested

This fresh and zesty chicken saute takes less than 20 minutes to prepare. It can be served with pasta, rice or any other favorite grain. For added heat, add a tablespoon of sweet chili sauce or a dash or Sriracha.

2 large chicken breasts, sliced in half horizontally
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon sweet or hot paprika
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup chicken stock
4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons honey
1 lemon, sliced into half moons
1 tablespoon chopped parsley, for garnish
Cooked rice, spaghetti or orzo, for serving

Place chicken fillets on a plate or a metal tray. Mix together flour, salt, pepper and paprika. Coat both sides of the chicken with the flour mixture.

Heat oil and butter in a large frying pan or skillet over medium-high heat until butter melts.

Add chicken to the pan and cook for 7-8 minutes, turning once, until both sides are golden brown.

Add garlic, stir for 30 seconds (don’t let it burn), then add the chicken stock, lemon juice, honey and lemon slices.

Bring to a boil and simmer for 5 minutes until the sauce is slightly reduced. (Simmer for a few minutes longer if you want it thicker.)

Sprinkle with fresh parsley and serve with rice or pasta.

— “Quick & Easy: Delicious 30-Minute Dinners” by Nicky Corbishley (Kyle Books, $26.99)

This easy skillet eggplant parmesan is made in one pan, with fresh sauce and shredded mozzarella. (Gretchen McKay/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS)

Skillet Eggplant Parmesan

PG tested

This vegetarian dish is so good and so easy! Made in a skillet instead of a casserole dish using canned tomatoes and sandwich bread, it’s both quick and economical.

Look for eggplants that are lightly firm and have shiny skin; they won’t continue ripening after they’ve been picked.

For sauce

2 14.5-ounce cans whole peeled tomatoes, drained, with juice reserved
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt

For eggplant

6 slices high-quality white sandwich bread, torn into quarters
3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 teaspoon salt, divided
1/2 teaspoon pepper, divided
3 large eggs
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
2 globe eggplants (about 12 ounces each), sliced into 1/4 -inch-thick rounds
1 cup vegetable oil
8 ounces shredded mozzarella
1/3 chopped fresh basil, optional

Make sauce: Process tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and salt together in food processor until pureed, about 15 seconds.

Transfer mixture to liquid measuring cup and add reserved tomato juice as needed until sauce measures 2 cups.

Prepare eggplant: Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 425 degrees.

Pulse bread in food processor to fine, even crumbs, about 15 pulses. Transfer crumbs to pie plate and stir in 1/2 cup Parmesan, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Beat eggs in a shallow bowl or plate.

Combine flour and remaining 1/4 teaspoon pepper in large zipper-lock bag.

Related Articles

Easy weeknight recipes: Mark Bittman’s Hot Lava Fudge Cakes

Easy weeknight meals: Brown Butter Potatoes with Lime Tartar Sauce

Five fresh takes on summer classic dishes for these waning days

Peach and granola parfait is breakfast and dessert

Four easy dinners for a new school year

Place eggplant slices in bag of flour, shake bag to coat, then remove eggplant from bag and shake off excess flour. Using tongs, coat floured eggplant with egg mixture, allowing excess to drip off.

Coat all sides of eggplant with bread crumbs, using your fingers to help them adhere. Lay breaded eggplant slices on wire rack set over rimmed baking sheet.

Heat half of the oil in 12-inch, oven-safe, nonstick skillet over medium heat until shimmering.

Add half of breaded eggplant slices and cook until well browned on both sides, about 4 minutes, flipping halfway through cooking.

Transfer eggplant to wire rack and repeat with remaining breaded eggplant, adding oil as needed. (You might not need the entire 1/2 cup oil.)

Pour off oil left in skillet and wipe out skillet with paper towels. Spread 1 cup of tomato sauce over bottom of skillet and layer eggplant slices evenly, overlapping them slightly.

Dollop remaining 1 cup sauce on top of eggplant and sprinkle with remaining 1/4 cup Parmesan and mozzarella.

Transfer skillet to oven and bake until bubbling and cheese is browned, 13-15 minutes. Let cool for 5 minutes, then sprinkle with basil, if using, and serve.

Serves 4.

— adapted from “The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook” (America’s Test Kitchen, $34.99)

©2024 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.