‘Modern Jesse James story.’ Chiefs fans help unmask ChiefsAholic in new documentary
.jpg "Kansas City Chiefs fans helped tell the story of convicted bank robber Xaviar Babudar, aka superfan ChiefsAholic, seen here. A new documentary, “ChiefsAholic: A Wolf in Chiefs Clothing,” premieres Tuesday on Amazon’s Prime.")
A film crew watched the Super Bowl last year in an Oklahoma hotel room with ChiefsAholic, the most infamous Kansas City Chiefs fan to ever pump up the crowd at Arrowhead Stadium.
He wore a Patrick Mahomes T-shirt, a Chiefs cap — and an ankle monitor.
He was out of jail on bond, arrested two months earlier for robbing the Tulsa Teachers Credit Union in Bixby, Oklahoma.
Thanks to sports bets he made, Xaviar Babudar won more than $100,000 off the Super Bowl and Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes being named MVP by the Associated Press.
He told Des Moines filmmaker Dylan Sires he needed the money to secure a future for his homeless mother and brother.
“The magnitude of what’s at stake this weekend for my family in general, that’s just got me anxious, it’s got me nervous, because I don’t personally care what happens to me,” Babudar told Sires a few days before the game.
“It’s just, my family, what that money will do for them for the future. We need it to happen.”
And if the Chiefs lose, Sires asked him?
“They’re not going to lose. And that’s the end of the discussion. I’m not even going to talk about that,” Babudar said.
Sires spent about two years working on “ChiefsAholic: A Wolf in Chiefs Clothing,” a true-crime documentary that premieres Tuesday on Amazon Prime.
With help from Chiefs fans, and rare footage of Babudar himself, Sires unmasks the criminal behind the famous wolf mask. The NFL superfan pleaded guilty in February to three charges in connection with a string of robberies or attempted robberies of nearly a dozen banks and credit unions across seven states in 2022 and 2023.
“The fans were crucial,” Sires said. “They’re telling the story of the facade Xaviar presented to everyone at the games and on social media.”
“Fans threw theirselves at his feet, literally,” Chiefs fan Shaggy Shane (@shaggyshaneKC) told Sires. “I kid you not. He was Nirvana of 1991. He was that.”
Babudar, who is 30, was sentenced to 17 years and six months in federal prison without parole on the same day in September the Chiefs kicked off the season in their home opener at GEHA Field at Arrowhead.
The court also ordered Babudar to pay $532,675 in restitution to the victimized financial institutions. Some of the stolen money was recovered, but most was not.
“While parading as a social media celebrity, the defendant secretly engaged in a violent crime spree of armed robberies and attempted robberies across seven states,” U.S. Attorney Teresa Moore said on the day of sentencing.
“Babudar’s robbery spree bankrolled the expensive tickets and travel across the country to attend Kansas City Chiefs games while he cultivated a large fan base online.
“However, the bank and credit union employees whom he terrorized at gunpoint suffered the brunt of his true nature. He tried to flee from justice, but law enforcement caught up with him and now he will spend a significant portion of his life in prison.”
Celebrity became notoriety when police in Bixby pinned Babudar face-down on the pavement after capturing him six-and-a-half minutes after he robbed the credit union there. Police body cam footage is included in the documentary.
When officer Leo Sanchez saw that Babudar had a Chiefs tattoo, “I asked him, ‘Are you a Kansas City Chiefs fan,’ and he chuckled,” Sanchez says in the film. “And I’m like, ‘I’m a Raiders fan. A Raiders fan just arrested you.’ He chuckled some more but then he got real serious.”
Sires filmed Babudar just weeks before he cut off his ankle monitor and ran, kicking off a manhunt involving the FBI, U.S. marshals, local law enforcement and Michael Lloyd, the heart-on-his-sleeve Oklahoma bail bondsman who put up $80,000 to bail Babudar out of jail.
The documentary shows the moment Lloyd called Sires to tell him Babudar was in the wind.
Lloyd: “Xaviar’s torn off his leg monitor.”
Sires: “You gotta be kidding me. He’s (bleeping) running, man.”
“The first thought was oh (bleep), this doc could be cooked and he could never be seen again,” Sires told The Star. “I personally thought Xaviar went to Mexico. That’s what I thought was a real possibility. I was surprised when he was caught in Sacramento.”
Sires interviewed people involved firsthand in telling Babudar’s story. Cops. An undercover detective. His Kansas City defense attorney Matthew Merryman. Social media content creators who conducted their own fruitful investigations when ChiefsAholic first became a headline.
He sat down with bank teller Payton Garcia, one of Babudar’s victims in Bixby and a mother of two who feared she would die that day.
“I remember seeing a guy coming in and he started walking towards me and jumps over the counter. He had a gun pointed at my chest. He told me to take him to the vault. and I just remember panicking at that time because I knew that I didn’t have the codes to get in the vault that day.”
“To me,” Sires said, “Payton Garcia was always the antidote to the sensational aspects of the story. I worked really hard to take the sensationalism out of it.”
As popular as ChiefsAholic had become in Chiefs Kingdom, fans featured in the documentary say they didn’t know him at all. He was a blank space. They didn’t know his real name. They never saw his face; the first time was his mugshot.
“It was like a modern Jesse James story. He was an outlaw,” Shaggy Shane says.
Everything about Babudar “was a mystery,” says Chiefs fan Cat Baskett (@kcglitzn). “This guy, literally nobody knows his name. Yet everybody felt they knew everything about him because his persona was bigger than life.”
“The first time that I met ChiefsAholic he walked up to me ... ‘Hey what’s up. I’m ChiefsAholic. I’m blah blah blah blah.’ I’m just like, ‘Who the (bleep) are you?’” says superfan Daniel Nelson.
“He wasn’t afraid to say, ‘I am a success story, I went to Kansas State, I manage warehouses, I built up my life to where I can go to these road games on the road, every single one, and get the best seat in the house.’ There was a part of me that was jealous,” says Shaggy Shane.
Nelson wanted to ask ChiefsAholic how he could afford all that travel, “but kinda didn’t want to overstep my boundaries because I didn’t know who the (heck) he was.”
Sires and his crew shot footage for the film in the Arrowhead parking lot at the Chiefs’ AFC Championship Game against the Bengals in January 2023 — a month after the Bixby robbery.
They found some fans who still supported ChiefsAholic at that point but refused to say it on camera because people would “hate” them, Sires said. “We also found people who said this guy’s a piece of (bleep), he’s a criminal.
“What we found, there was a wide-ranging slew of opinions about this guy ... ranging from he’s a piece of dirt to yeah his story is heartbreaking. And I can see both sides of it.”
Sires said he found out a lot more about Babudar than he could squeeze into a two-hour film.
“He was also a good baccarat player,” he said.
Living in Target parking lots
Sires first learned about ChiefsAholic when a friend in Kansas City sent him a “well-researched video about ChiefsAholic” by lifelong Chiefs fan Cole DeRuse, who covers all things Chiefs on the YouTube channel, “How Bout Those Chiefs.”
The story whetted his filmmaker’s appetite for a mystery “and I wanted to know what was going on,” Sires said.
He wanted to talk to Babudar himself and it was as easy as sending him an email at the Tulsa County Jail after Babudar was arrested for the Bixby hold-up.
“After a couple of days he reached out and we set up a call,” said Sires. “I assumed due to his social media history that this guy’s going to get out at some point, considering his lifestyle.”
Sires told him, “I don’t want to make a film that makes people sympathetic about you. The reason why I want to shoot this film, I want people to understand you. Because I thought at the time there was more to the story.”
Sires and his camera went with Lloyd to the jail when Babudar bailed out after the Bixby robbery. “He was very polite and disarming. When I met him he was very courteous, nice. Like I said, disarming,” he said.
He rode with them, filmed Babudar talking about how jail made him appreciate the simple things in life and watched him reunite with his mother, Carla Babudar.
“I didn’t know how Xaviar was going to react with the cameras. I thought alright, this could be the end. He could see the cameras and say get away from me,” Sires said.
“I fully expected that to happen. But at the same time, I made a bet that he was slightly narcissistic and that could be good for me.”
He was struck by Babudar’s size. He’s bulky and tall, 6-foot and 250 pounds.
“So it’s like, when you see this big a** wolf run up on you he’s literally the big bad wolf,” Chiefs fan Phil Del-Blocker (@officialchiefsordie) says in the film.
Sires could easily imagine the terror of a bank teller watching a man as big as an NFL player, holding a weapon, jumping over the counter.
“When you see his physical presence and how much power he has when he’s jumping up and down, he would be a very scary person to get robbed by,” Sires said. “Especially given the violent nature, sticking the gun into people’s chests. Some people had bruises where he put the gun. It left markings on their skin.”
The contradiction: His voice is high-pitched, “goofy,” Sires called it. And he wore braces. (During filming Babudar would make Sires turn off the camera so he could pick food out of his braces.)
The biggest surprise for Sires was to see firsthand that Babudar really was homeless, as his lawyer Merryman has described in court documents. Merryman portrayed Babudar as a sympathetic victim of chronic homelessness since age 8 when his father abandoned him, his mother and brother.
“Xaviar was shattered and lost within his emotions but eventually he began to understand how this abandonment was affecting his mother,” Merryman wrote. “The abandonment brought with it unforeseeable financial traumas that would result in Xaviar and his family losing their family home and living in poverty and homelessness over the next decades.”
Sires didn’t buy that.
But after Babudar fled he filmed Lloyd’s hunt for the fugitive — in Oklahoma and the Kansas City area — which included following Babudar’s mother and brother in case Babudar tried to meet up with them. “The family was really homeless. It wasn’t a joke,” Sires said.
“Just seeing the family and following the bail bondsman, seeing that was shocking. They really lived out of their cars. They lived in parking lots, outside convenience stores and Targets.
“I just thought he was lying. I thought for sure he had a home. At one point we asked Carla (the mom) if we could interview her. Just in my brain I thought they live in an apartment and they have a big Chiefs shrine.
“I was completely wrong. It just shocked me because you have this guy posting all this stuff online, going to every single Chiefs game and living a lifestyle most people would dream of.”
When Babudar was watching the Super Bowl in that hotel room he knew “that he was going to jail for the Bixby bank robbery. The cops had him dead to rights,” Sires said.
“And he had told us he was taking financial care of his mother and brother who lived out of their car. And because he was gong to prison, he needed these bets to hit in order to give them money so they could survive for the next 10 to 20 years.
“So when he won the game, he thought ‘I did it.’
ChiefsAholic goes missing
Sires wanted to do a sit-down interview with Babudar to talk about his family history, his education, how he came to be living out of a car. But Babudar avoided it and in the end Sires spent about 10 hours with him for the two-hour documentary.
“He kept leading us on, saying he was going to do it. I think at one point we had rented out a space in Tulsa to do a sit-down. We set it up. He just ghosted us. And then it was just me sending him a text: Can we do an interview?
“He wrote me back: ‘I have a lot of things on my plate, I’m going to be out on bond for a while.’
As far as Sires could tell, Babudar was living in that hotel room where they filmed him watching the Super Bowl. With so much money riding on those bets, he was a wreck watching the game and exploded into superfan hysteria when the Chiefs won.
So what’s the total payout of your bets, Sires asked him.
“Payout, $155,000 for my family. Not knowing what the future holds, for them to have that money is a blessing,” Babudar said.
“It’s been just an absolutely crazy couple of months, dude. To where I was a week ago to where I am now. There’s still a lot of things to figure out. Let’s be real about that. But this just makes it a whole (heck) of a lot better. Let’s just be honest about that.”
Babudar celebrated by tweeting.
He had disappeared from social media altogether after his arrest in Bixby. But Chiefs Kingdom didn’t know about his arrest yet.
His followers knew he planned to drive to Houston for the Chiefs-Texans game on Dec. 18. When two days passed with no tweets or Instagram posts, not even one of his regular game-day hype videos, they panicked.
“It was abnormal for him. The guy’s an absolute attention whore,” says Christian Folsom (@Folsomsfacts).
Fans began tweeting at ChiefsAholic. Some tried to call and text him, not knowing he was sitting in the Bixby jail.
“Where ya at?”
“Hope all is well my man!”
“I found it just odd so many people were so concerned about somebody that they didn’t even know,” fan Cat Baskett says in the film.
Concern morphed into shock when Babudar’s whereabouts came to light.
“The reports started coming out on social media and then it’s like holy (bleep),” says fellow Chiefs fan Johnny B-Side (@jbside13).
“I knew he’d become famous. Was this the way I felt he would do that? No,” fan Lexi Farmer told Sires.
ChiefsAholic is back
“OK, first tweet in two months. Here we go. Everyone’s waiting for it,” Babudar said aloud as he tweeted after the Chiefs’ Super Bowl win.
Clearly enjoying the moment, he told Sires: “Oh God, this is gonna blow up, dude.”
Responses to his gloating “I’m back” tweet were immediate.
“Oh my god, the legend has returned,” one follower commented.
“You have no idea how much I love Twitter, dude. I can’t stop laughing. It’s so hilarious,” he told Sires.
“He just looked at his texts and laughed for what felt like a half hour,” Sires said. “And I was like you know, you can see the fatal character flaw. Vanity. Hubris. To me it’s what makes him kind of a tragic figure.
“Because at the end, we’re asking is Xaviar’s story a tragedy or comedy? And I err on the side of tragedy. It has these sensational comedic elements. But below the surface you have the survivors of his crimes whose lives are going to be changed forever due to this traumatic event, where they’re thinking they’re going to die violently, shot by a gun.
“But you also have this back story of Xaviar who doesn’t make it through middle school, who lives in a car with his mother.”
It frustrated Garcia, one of those victims, to watch Babudar bail out of jail.
“And when he came back into social media, the video that he had posted, I just remember thinking he absolutely does not care what he did. I felt like he was mocking me,” she says in the film.
“I’m not going to sit here and say nothing. Like I’m not going to let the guy who threatened to kill somebody that I care about just walk. I was going to push back.”
‘He’s done this before’
Employees opened the doors of the credit union in BIxby on Dec. 16, 2022 like any other normal workday. Garcia, a Tulsa native married to her childhood sweetheart, was working behind the counter.
After Babudar, holding what appeared to be a gun, vaulted over that counter and started walking her to the back, toward the vault, “my supervisor heard all the commotion out front and then he put the gun to her head,” she describes in the film.
“He was like, ‘give me all the hundreds. no small bills, hundreds only. He was yelling we better give him what he wanted or he would put a bullet in our heads.
“Of course I’m scared because I don’t want anything to happen to her and then I’m thinking, well, she’s the one with the codes. He’s not going to shoot her. He’s going to shoot me. Oh my God. My kids might not have a mom after today. They might have to grow up without me ... every thought you can imagine was just running through my mind.
Once they got the vault open Babudar “just started grabbing all the hundreds. He seemed like he know where to go and how much time he had. I remember thinking, I wonder if he’s done this before.”
After the robbery, “we were expected to be back at work on Monday and I was not ready to go back yet,” she says. “The robbery was just running through my mind. I was just constantly scared that something else was going to happen and I just decided I couldn’t do it anymore.
“I was scared because I have two kids and we were losing my income. I was just lost. And of course he bailed out. It was just frustrating.”
Equally frustrating: seeing “Save ChiefsAholic” posts on social media.
“I was like what kind of world do we live in where people are just supporting a criminal?” Garcia says.
“Payton’s a little older than my daughters, but I saw in Payton my kids,” her lawyer, Frank Frasier, told Sires.
“And I thought why does this clown get to profit from clicks and likes when there was a real victim here? People need to know it’s not just the guy who tries to get away on a bicycle who just happens to wear that ridiculous wolf suit at Chiefs games.
“There’s a mom here in greater Tulsa who has not worked, she’s not returning to work anytime soon. there’s been the impact on her family. And then there’s the price of just being peaceful in life and going back to normal. Payton needs justice.
“By this time I had heard about Mr. Babudar winning big bets. So I said, you know, maybe if this guy’s got something why don’t we go after it? Why don’t we sue him personally? And Payton said absolutely. Let’s do that. Crime should not pay at all.”
In April an Oklahoma judge ordered Babudar to pay Garcia $10.8 million in punitive damages and for inflicting physical harm and distress.
Frasier told ESPN that collecting the money will be a long shot.
“He’ll never be able to profit from this,” he said. “Say he writes a book in prison, say he does the Lifetime or Hallmark movie … anything he obtains from that will be paid to his creditors.
“The second part overall is this: The judge sent a message that you cannot profit from crime. You cannot profit by greater notoriety, you cannot profit from clicks, getting more views, getting more likes.”
A big-screen movie about ChiefsAholic?
“I’m sure it’s being talked about,” said Sires. “I guarantee it. This story is so insane.”
This story was originally published December 23, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
.jpg)