Greg Bovino, a former Border Patrol commander, transitions from a polite high schooler to a controversial figure accused of fascist imagery and brutal tactics. Despite early warnings from acquaintances and unverified internet rumors, his career escalated under Trump's election, leading to Operation Return to Cinder and mass raids in Los Angeles and Chicago involving tear gas and alleged brutality. Critics highlight his political maneuvering between liberals and immigrants, while the ACLU sues over illegal detention methods. Ultimately, Bovino's reinstatement and continued aggressive operations suggest a systemic tolerance for violence that challenges current immigration enforcement ethics. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Colonel's Dream Titles00:01:32
Cool zone media welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is about bad people.
And it turns out there's a lot of those in the world.
Only more of them every year, it feels like.
To commiserate with me about that point, my guest today, Jack O'Brien, Dr. Jack O'Brien, Mr. Colonel Jack O'Brien, President Jack O'Brien, Pod Dad.
All of the titles.
Esquire.
Esquire.
What other titles are there?
Do we have titles for like...
I don't know.
I like the Colonel.
The Honorable Colonel.
Because that's one that when they give it to you, you can just start calling yourself that.
Like we just did an episode about Elvis.
That's the dream.
His colonel.
His dream was just like, just like somebody called him that one time.
I think he helped someone get a career permit in New Orleans.
And they were like, we'll make you honorable colonels.
And he was like, started signing his name on legal documents.
Oh, yeah.
If I ever, if I was ever made a Kentucky colonel or whatever other kind of, anytime, the second I get made a colonel, I am never introducing myself any other way.
I like to think, so when we went to the RNC and DNC, they had this display of president's shoes.
I like to think if there was like a podcast version of it, it would just be Jack's Jordans.
My Jordans.
Honorable Colonels and Legal Docs00:15:26
Yeah.
I have some behind me right there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what I think.
That's very nice of you, Sophie.
I don't think I can take credit for all podcasts.
You know what's not nice of me, Jack?
Jack, I'm done.
It's telling you the life story of Greg Bovino.
No.
I really like the Robert.
Can you share the working title that you did?
Because it's a great working title.
I don't know.
You see, I went back and forth on it because I feel like it's too obvious.
I just called him America's Kirkland brand Gestapo Chief.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love it.
I like it.
I like that a lot.
There's a thing because he gets angry that people compare ICE to the Gestapo.
And he's not with ICE.
He's Border Patrol, but they're all Gestapo-esque.
And people get angry about them.
And there's like three different kinds of people here.
There's like normal people who are like, yeah, it seems like some Gestapo kind of thing.
There's like closet Nazis in the Trump administration being like, first off, it's Gestapo.
And second, you're using the wrong font to make that accusation.
And then there's guys like me who tries to switch between the two.
Yeah.
Just because I've read too many books and watched too many documentaries about the Gestapo.
Wow.
We're doing it.
I swear to God.
I'm not being sus.
Shocked to hear that about you, Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
Yeah.
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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We always say that.
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Listen to the girlfriends.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Mary stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm England.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
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This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, Jack, what do you know about Greg?
Gregory?
It's about time we had a Greg commit like crimes against humanity in this country.
Great.
Yeah.
Correct.
It was about, it was not about time, but I feel like it hasn't happened before.
I think, you know, diversity of first name is really important.
So I was also welcoming when Greg showed up on the scene.
Finally.
Finally, some Greg representation in the crimes.
I host a daily news show called The Daily Zeitgeist with my children.
Oh shit, Greg.
I thought as a man, you were a man who needed no introduction, but clearly that's irresponsible.
Well, no, but I mean, due to that show, I do have some experience covering the latest happenings, but we do that show twice a day.
And therefore, I don't, I didn't have a lot of time to dig into his backstory to really see what makes this guy tick.
I have a feeling I was just like kind of using context clues and making educated guesses about what makes him tick.
Yeah, I don't know that much other than that.
He his rapid rise and precipitous dismissal.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's actually happened once before in his career.
Which we chat about a little bit.
Yeah, not Greg.
Again, you can't.
You go back to the other crimes against humanity this country has committed.
You can't imagine like a Greg having some significant role in the displacement of the Native Americans, right?
Or like you can't imagine Greg like not an old it's like, yeah, it's I have trouble imagine.
I can imagine a Gregory.
I can imagine like a Gregory something arthur being involved in one of this nation's great crimes.
I can see that name signed on to like the order to intern people, but not a Greg.
You know, like there weren't Gregs until very recently.
I feel like certainly not in a position where they could do crimes against humanity.
Like Greg.
Greg.
It's like kind of got like a Gen X like quality to it, where it's just like, yeah, you can just call me Greg.
Would it be better or worse if he was a Craig?
Like, would we believe him more or less?
Because I feel like Greg, I do believe Greg doing crimes against humanity more than Craig.
Firmly, Greg is worse.
Craig is a trustworthy name, you know?
Greg, there's a little something sketchy about it.
Yeah, when did Gregs first start showing up?
Just not Gregory's, but Greg's.
Greg's in his.
It had to have been like the 70s.
Like cousin Greg's succession.
There you go.
That's the birth of the bad Greg.
Greg is a young person's name.
Further point.
But literally in that show, he decides he wants to be taken seriously and he's like, asks people to call him Gregory, but he says it like, ah, Gregory.
Emphasis on the wrong syllable.
Yeah.
The wrong syllable.
Yeah, I recently met a 70-something year-old man named Corey.
Oh, that's upsetting.
Are you the first Corey?
Yeah, you are first.
Did you say that?
And I did ask him that, and he didn't think it was funny.
I think it's funny.
Corey is such a young person's name.
Yeah.
Yeah, Greg.
Well, we've all tried to avoid hearing more because it's going to be so upsetting.
I will be over on my end Googling historical Gregs.
The first Greg history, so I sat down to write this episode the week Mr. Bavino lost his special job dressing like a Nazi while overseeing Border Patrol operations alongside ICE in Minneapolis.
He'd made the news several times for his statements in the wake of the murders of Renee Goode and Alex Predty.
And during the first year of the Trump administration, had generally turned himself into the physical embodiment of the regime's violence towards Americans.
It's too early to say what the future holds for Greg, but given that he just took a turn as sin eater for the Trump administration, I think it's time we look into who this guy is and where he came from.
And in short, he's not quite the guy I expected.
There's very little in Bavino's early life and even in most of his career with the Border Patrol that would have led one to predict he'd have turned into this.
I'm not saying you'd have expected him to be like a great guy, but that like the fact that he wound up in at this moment in history doing this thing is like a little surprising.
Most of his former, yeah, he's not, he doesn't seem like he was built for this his whole life.
And you don't get a lot of quotes from his people who used to know him being like, oh yeah, that makes sense for old Greg, you know?
Yeah.
Most of his people.
More of just like, they don't really remember him type of thing.
No, more of like, uh-huh, that guy?
That guy's doing that, huh?
It's the general reaction.
It's again, like if this guy in your school who wasn't super bad at anything, but wasn't very good at anything and never really stood out at anything, winds up on the news dragging Americans out of their home and tear gassing them in the street for no reason.
You're like, is he dressed like a Nazi?
Is that Greg?
What the fuck?
Whereas like Stephen Miller is the LeBron James of Nazis, like where everybody in high school was like, this guy is going to be going to be a Nazi on the world.
Did you just say the LeBron James of Nazis?
I think it's a good comparison.
Let me remember that he was a standout Nazi from the very earliest ages.
Wait, that he was the chosen.
He was the chosen girl.
If you knew LeBron or Stephen Miller in sixth grade, you knew what they were growing up to do.
Right.
This guy's got to be the best basketball player ever, and this guy's going to be a fucking Nazi.
Wow.
Wow, guys.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I'm spelling money with that chick.
Not really.
No.
There's maybe one piece of evidence, but it's not good.
So most of the evidence is that he's kind of like not the guy you'd expect to have done this.
Now, that said, we don't have a lot about Greg's early life.
Only journalists who have really dug into Bovino's life in a credible way are Dan Mihalopoulos and Lauren Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Sun-Times.
And they did great work.
They did both a podcast and an article looking into his backstory.
Aside from them, there's just one Daily Mail article that talks to his sister.
And so we have a lot from his sister who I don't consider the most credible witness about this guy, right?
So there's just not a ton of detail.
And then there's some sketchier sources on the matter.
So we got some open questions still.
That said, Greg was born on March 27th, 1970 in San Bernardino, California, which I bet you didn't call San Bernardino, baby.
You know, that's good.
I didn't because I don't know.
I cannot differentiate any like any of those LA things to pieces.
That's such a West LA thing to say, too, Jack.
I'm bad at LA stuff, too.
I'm just like, I'm just bad at LA.
I grew up on the East Coast and I'm just like, San San Bernardino.
Inland Empire, Jack.
Inland Empire.
I know about San Bernino from the Frank Zappa song, San Bernino.
And hearing that Greg Bovino was born in San Bernardino makes me also think of the Frank Zappa song, Baby Snakes, because at this point, he's a baby snake, you know?
Yeah.
Those are bad, right?
They can pump a lot of them.
Not really.
But yeah.
Baby snakes.
Sure.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
It's not their fault.
They're just snakes.
But yes, yes, he's born there.
And because he would embark on a career of arresting and facilitating the brutalization of immigrants, a lot has been made of the immigration history of his own family.
And I have some qualms with this because you're mostly bringing this up to be like, you're hurting these people, yet a generation or two ago, your family was in the same situation.
Can't you see why that's fucked up?
And my answer to that is, no, they can't.
They're bad people.
Right?
Like, it's like, at a certain point, are you like, you could, again, people do the same thing with Stephen Miller's background or Trump's.
And it's like, yeah, I mean, they're bad.
They don't care.
They don't care.
They're bad people.
They suck.
Oh, that didn't work, pointing out the hypocrisy of their behavior.
Of their background.
Yeah.
I feel like the three millionth time we do it, it's just going to like break through.
It'll be like a dam.
And they'll be like, yeah.
Too many people believe their moms when they were like, that bully, you know, if that bully knew he was hurting you, he'd feel bad.
And it's like, no, he's a dick.
That's not how they work.
So, yeah, it's, it's also just like, yeah, basically every white person, if you go back two generations, has like an immigration story in this country because it's the United States.
That's kind of how it happened here for most people.
But as you might have guessed from the name, the Bovinos were originally Italian.
In 1909, Michelle Bovino, who is Greg's great-grandfather, left the village of Al Pregliano in the mountains of southern Italy.
His home was wracked with poverty and dominated by organized criminal cartels, much like certain countries our administration doesn't think should be sending us immigrants today.
So it is a pretty direct comparison.
Not a popular source of people back then, right?
No, no, they were not the United States.
Not thrilled that these people are coming over.
So Mikel, who I'm sure was immediately called Michael as soon as he entered, you can't be going by that here, left his wife and kids behind.
So they are staying back in Italy.
And I guess he's sending them back money as he seeks to make a life for himself in the United States.
So he's doing that for years until, and this takes a while, until in May of 1924, there's a panic over immigration in the halls of power in the United States.
And this was, you know, the result of kind of a long simmering pot.
From the early 1800s, most immigration into the U.S. had been Western and Northern Europeans, aka the whitest of the white people.
And we had some issues with some of them, right?
There was some like, oh, a Welshman's here now.
But, like, you know, for the most part, it's like, well, they're all pretty, we're all pretty white, right?
These people, you know, not to say that nobody faced bigotry when they came here, but they're all, you know, this is like the founding stock and the ideas of people by that point in time, by the time you hit the 1800s.
And by the late 1800s and early 1900s, shit's starting to shift.
Immigrants are now coming more from Eastern and Southern Europe, where the white people are not quite as white.
The first 20 or so years of the 1900s also coincided with the largest surge in immigration in U.S. history up to that point.
Eugenics was beginning to become a popular topic of discussion.
And among educated racists, it was believed that many different European nations were also effectively different races, per an article in the Migration Policy Institute.
The influential eugenicist Charles Davenport considered Italians prone to crimes of personal violence, while Jews were characterized by intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest.
Since eugenicists believe individual races possess different characteristics and abilities, Davenport argued the government should be careful not to adulterate our national germplasm with socially unfit traits.
And, you know, and what this was in what small corner of the internet?
Oh, wait, this was in academia?
Eugenics and Modern Immigration00:15:27
This is it.
This is in Congress at this point.
I mean, this is so popular.
Like, Americans don't understand how popular that was in the early 20th century.
If you've seen a picture with a man with like a stethoscope or a fucking pincenz or whatever and doctor in front of his name in 1910, he believed the most racist things you can imagine because he read it in a textbook that was like, the devious check has these characters.
It's like a DD source book where it's like, oh, they get plus two to strike, you know?
Like, that's that's literally how these people are like learning this shit.
It's in textbooks and it's in the textbooks that our congressmen are reading.
And they're getting yelled at too about all of the Italians that are coming into the country.
Enter the Dillingham Commission, which was set up by Congress to study the consequences of immigration.
It released a report in 1909.
That's right after, about two years after Michelle came to the United States that argued northern and western Europeans were just kind of better people from the other parts of Europe.
And it suggested the Dillingham Report suggested a wide range of policies to discourage immigration from unworthy places, including literacy tests and racial quotas, right?
That's where a lot of this stuff, you know, is when America really starts thinking about immigration and the border in a very modern way.
You know, there'd been panics over it before and legislation, but a lot of our modern apparatus of how we think about immigration, of how we think about white genocide and that sort of stuff all starts right in this point period of time.
And to make a long story short, the Dillingham Commission releases that report in 1911.
You know, things still move slowly in the halls of power, but this eventually culminates in 1924 in the Immigration Act, which restricted immigration in an attempt to ensure most arriving immigrants were from the good places.
Per the MPI, it closed the door on almost all new Asian immigration and shut out most European Jews and other refugees fleeing fascism and the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe.
One of the most restrictive immigration laws in U.S. history, it played a key role in ending the previous era of largely unrestricted immigration.
So this is when immigration as a like a modern concept really gets started.
And Greg Bovino's ancestor.
This is just a relevant context for people who are like, this is not what America is about.
It's kind of been the way we have been for a while.
It's been our last thing.
Last hundred and something years, you know?
Yeah.
And Greg Bovino's ancestor knew that this posed a threat to his plan because he's making money and he's sending it over to Italy.
But his plan is I want to bring my family with me, right, to the lane of opportunity at some point.
And he sees this act get passed and he's like, shit, that's about to get a lot harder.
So within days of the Immigration Act passing, he files paperwork to start the process of becoming a citizen.
Once this process was completed in 1927, he brought his family over and they became citizens through a process known as chain migration.
Here's how the Sun-Times explains what happened.
After Michelle was naturalized in 1927, he was reunited with his wife and four children in a Pennsylvania coal company town after their arrival on the steamship, the SS Giuseppe Verdi record show.
Then the kids, including Vincenzo 12, Gregory Bovino's future grandfather, automatically benefited from a derivative citizenship law for minors.
Luigi would become a naturalized citizen.
So all his, his, that it's, you know, chain migration is kind of exactly the thing that they're trying to stop now.
It's a big part of why they want to reverse some of the citizenships that have been granted because a lot of them are granted in ways that are very related to this, right?
Right.
And it's what they want to stop because they want to stop families from coming over here and getting larger.
They've just benefited from this random crapshoot of laws.
Everyone did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're just, they don't want anybody else to get lucky like they did.
Right.
And they don't, they don't want any other ethnic groups as they see it or racial groups to come here and start breeding, right?
Which is what Italians did.
You know, it's what everybody did.
It's kind of the entire point of the country, you know?
Kind of the whole deal.
The melting pot is a very chaste way of saying a lot of people came here and started fucking each other.
It's the fucking pot.
It's the fucking pot.
The rest and everything kind of mixed together.
Yeah.
I do love how rigorously Italian everything is.
It's incredibly name of the boat that they came over on.
Oh, yeah.
The Giuseppe.
The Giuseppe Invincenzo.
Yeah.
They were nearly out of pizza by the time they hit the doves.
Yes.
I know.
So the Trump administration has cited the 1924 immigration law as an example of the kind of reforms they seek to make.
They've also repeatedly cited chain migration stories like this as an example of things like why birthright citizenship and jusoli need to be revisited.
For his part, Bovino does not seem interested in his family background, and I don't know that it was much of a factor in his raising.
For him, the most influential thing that happened in 1924 may not have even been the Immigration Act, because that is also the year the Border Patrol was created.
And that's going to be Greg Bavino's whole life.
So, like I said, he's born in San Bernardino because his father had just been drafted to fight in Vietnam.
So, don't worry, like my native Inland Empire people, they don't stay very long.
They're just stationed on a military base nearby.
And two years later, when his father gets discharged, the family moved back east to Blowing Rock, North Carolina, which is the real name of a place.
Don't make fun of it, you know?
Blowing rock, North Carolina.
That's a funny name.
When you first mentioned San Bernardino, I was like confused because he doesn't give big Inland Empire energy.
No, he's not an Inland Empire guy.
No, he's only there two years.
Yeah.
So this makes more sense.
He does give blowing rock energy, I've got to say.
He does.
He really does, Jack.
I do.
I do kind of wonder, is there any, and he doesn't say anything about this, so maybe I'm reading into it.
Maybe two years isn't enough time.
But I've lived in parts of, you know, the deep rural areas where, oh, you didn't come here till you were two.
You're not really from here, boy.
So I don't know if that was any part of his background or not.
That new family?
Mr. Carolina.
Coming up here.
That was 20 years ago, Mark.
They'll called him Hollywood.
Hollywood.
Here comes Hollywood.
Yeah, I could see that, but they don't say anything about that.
That's purely a head cannon for fucking Greg Bavino.
And to be fair, probably not the case because his dad's side of the family has just come here, but his mom's side of the family goes back at least, they say, eight generations in the Blowing Rock area.
The Bavinos had two more children, Natalie and Nicholas, born in 74 and 79 after moving back to their part of the country.
And one gets the feeling that young Greg may have benefited a bit from only child syndrome because he's a good bit older than his siblings, right?
Closer to his sister than his brother, but he's got some oldest sibling memories, at least.
His younger sister, Natalie, is one of our few semi-detailed sources in Greg's childhood, although she seems to idolize her brother.
And I don't credit her with a lot of skepticism or scrutiny about him.
She describes their early childhood as Rockwellian, which means reminiscent of the paintings of Norman Rockwell, right?
And is also based, I think, often on some misunderstandings of them.
But like she's, she's, she's thinking of like those nice paintings of kids hiking in the woods and, you know, idyllic Christmases with the family gathered around the fire and stuff, right?
Like that's what she means.
There were about a thousand.
Was Norman Rockwell like fucked up?
I actually pretty good politics.
I mean, he's not perfect.
There's some stuff, you know, you find with any illustrator in that period, they did some uncomfortable illustrations if you look back far enough, right?
Sure, sure.
But no, he did a lot of, he was like super pro-integration and super pro-civil rights movement.
Like he was.
It's just like the carefully curated version of the paintings that make it happen to be curated by white supremacists.
As is often the case, a bunch of white supremacists have taken his paintings to be like, this was the ideal America before everything got ruined.
Norman Rockwell was just painting pretty things, you know?
Norman Rockwell.
Yeah, he was also painting like, because he did some paintings of like civil rights movement like protests and stuff that were contemporary.
So it wasn't all, but, you know, they've forgotten a lot of that.
Yeah, they've forgotten that.
So you're sure she was referring to Norman Rockwell when she said Rockwellian and not the 80s artist who's saying somebody's watching me.
Yes.
I do not believe she was referring to the 80s artist who's saying somebody's watching me.
Thank you, though, for bringing that up.
Norman fucking Rockwell.
Norman fucking Rockwell.
There were about a thousand people in their hometown, which she describes as literally perfect.
So again, she has these idyllic memories of their early childhood.
The Bovinos benefited from a tight family and an extensive one, right?
They have a lot of in-laws and relatives, and they had money, too.
They're doing very well for a while.
Their father had started a successful bar, the Library Club.
And the reason why it's such a big deal here is that their town is like the lone wet county in the middle of a bunch of dry counties.
So there's a bunch of bars in town, and it's kind of like a vacation town.
So it's both where people come on vacation, but also if anyone nearby wants to drink, they have to come to Blowing Rock, right?
And the library club's like one of the biggest places they're going to go to.
You can make a good living by having the brilliant innovation of we live in a drink.
It's a town where I can open a bar and no other towns around us can open a bar.
I bet people will drink here.
I bet people will drink here.
And they different dudes because people talk about like being able to like how, you know, previous generations, you could like buy a house for this and like everything was so much cheaper.
It was also so easy to like succeed back then.
There were less ideas had been had.
Like, I don't know.
I think people will use plastic in the future.
I'm getting into plastics.
Yeah.
You become a millionaire.
Yeah, it was easier.
It was easier.
Most of the sources I find.
Now, I will say, though, Jack, I don't know that we fully understand how the library bar made its money.
Most of the sources I find just describe it as a bar.
And weirdly enough, the thing that made me think maybe something more was going on here was that interview I found with Natalie in the Daily Mail, where I don't think she's trying to let on that her dad was a criminal, but that's kind of how it sounds.
Because here's a quote from her.
In those early years, the family was living a good life, thanks largely to the success of the library club.
And here's Natalie.
The bouncers would drop huge sacks of money off, stacks and stacks.
He did incredibly well.
The family was able to buy their house in a boat.
They'd ride on Watauga Lake and a membership in a country club where they ran a side business, a drink stand on the ninth hole.
And that's not how bars work.
What are they doing there?
Don't come to your home with tons of money.
I've known a few bar owners, and none of them have the bouncers dropped sacks of money off at their houses.
That's your dad was moving something.
Yeah, he was moving late, sir.
Side business stand on the ninth hole is such a fantastic detail.
Wow.
Yeah, well, we were basically millionaires for the time because he had a drink stand on the ninth hole of a golf course.
They owned it.
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like the way you bribe the judges about any case.
Proven ice cream truck.
And then, yeah, it's like, what?
What?
Yeah, no, getting small bar.
You know, the bat, the bouncers dropped sacks of money off at the house, as is normal.
Yeah.
Stacks and stacks.
Maybe she's not remembering things right, but that sounds sketchy as fuck to me.
And speaking of stacks and stacks and stacks, speaking of sketchy as fuck.
Yeah, that too.
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I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
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And we're back.
So, yeah, I don't know.
Greg grows up.
To be fair, whatever the truth is about their dad, the kids didn't grow up aware of anything sketchy.
Greg spends his early childhood hunting, fishing, and exploring the woods.
His parents got him his first shotgun at age eight.
He reads hunting magazines voraciously, which is how he encountered his first pieces of pro-Border Patrol propaganda.
And this is interesting because I got a different answer.
Every other article I read was talked about a thing we'll discuss later.
There's a movie he watches.
And this is the first time he encountered the Border Patrol.
And it's actually talking to his sister that the Daily Mail gets this piece of information that I think might be more accurate because it feels more accurate to me at least.
The hunting publications featured columns written by old-time Border Patrol agents such as Skeeter Skelton and Charles Askins.
The young boy had found his calling.
He thought it was the Wild West, Natalie Bavino told the Daily Mail.
It was like a true frontier.
It was those old timers that inspired that in him.
And that is more believable to me than the other story, just because, like, I too was a young boy once, and I've read a lot of similar articles in a lot of similar magazines.
I could see that happening to this kid.
You're familiar with the works of Skeeter Skelton?
You know what, Jack?
I am.
That's what we're going to talk about next.
Because the second, as someone with a comedy background, the second I read the name Skeeter Skelton, I was like, we got to deal with that.
Skeet Skeeter.
Skeeter.
Say more.
Skeeter Skelton.
Fucking rules.
I'm sorry.
What is that short for?
Like, Skeetropolis?
Like, what the fuck?
Skeeter?
I've known a couple Skeeters, but I never thought it was a given Christian name.
I'm going to be honest.
Is it his actual name?
Yes, that's what it seems like.
It's written on everything.
It's byline.
I don't know.
I don't know the man's birth certificate, Jack.
Skeeter Skelton.
It's just weird hearing the name, seeing the name Skeeter written in a real publication is supposed to hearing it across a bar, which is how you're supposed to.
Those guys usually don't make it out of the library club.
They're usually there for.
No, they do not.
I just am thinking of that Nickelodeon show called Cousin Skeeter from like the 90s.
Oh, geez.
I don't even remember that one.
Yeah.
Like I read the name Skeeter Skelton.
I had to look into it more.
And he was a lawman from Hereford, Texas, who served in a bunch of different cop roles.
He did everything.
He was in everything from the Amarilla Police to Border Patrol to DEA to customs.
And he starts writing for Shooting Times, which is a magazine that still exists in 1966.
And again, it's one of those like, no one had had the idea to have a magazine about shooting.
So they start having one in 66.
And he's like, I'm going to write about handguns.
It's like, no one had that idea before.
So he goes from pitching them to becoming the handgun editor the next year because they're like, what a great idea.
People in America are writing about handguns.
You're a genius, Skeeter.
This guy whose nickname is just a slang term for mosquitoes is a genius.
Oh, God.
Skeeter Skelton.
Yeah, he's the handgun editor of Shooting Times until his death in 1998.
If you want to know his main claim to fame, he's generally credited with reviving interest in the 44 special round, which is the bullet that Dirty Harry uses.
So without Skeeter Skelton, we may never have Dirty Harry.
Wow.
He made it easy.
He popularized it before Dirty Harry.
He's not Skeeters wrote about the 44 real early.
Yeah.
Okay.
He's not like Dirty Harry actually stole that shit from me.
I do.
No.
I got it.
So we're doing a new version of TDZ where we dive into icons.
We just did a Marilyn Monroe episode and we found this character named George Solitaire, who I can't stop thinking about and talking about because he had a claim to fame.
He was just Joe DiMaggio's like drinking buddy.
And his claim to fame was that he invented the phrase Splitsville and Dullesville.
And he was a whole origin story about it.
Because he was born in Brownsville and moved to Bronxville.
That's just how he thought about Vills.
He had like Vill in his blood.
Yeah.
But otherwise, he was just a guy who got drunk with Joe DiMaggio and he's like all over the historical record.
And he was like, I love a guy like that.
Having a claim to fame that is that specific and stupid is just like, my hat's off.
Like, what a weird world.
What a, what a why.
It's one of those things.
The second someone tells you that, like, you know, I came up with that word Splitsville.
You're like, you must have.
No one else would think so funny about that.
No one would claim to have done that.
Yeah, that's not a thing anyone would pretend.
Yeah.
Like to be like, I popularized this one round.
That's kind of my shit.
It's kind of my whole, if an ancient man came up to me and said, I made the 44 popular, I'd be like, you probably did.
Yeah, I guess.
I don't know who else would lie about that.
To lying and like getting to just find a lie so specific.
There you go, people.
Nobody would ever be like...
What?
Okay.
Yeah, I guess so.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
I'll believe it.
And so I haven't had the time because he wrote articles for 20-something years.
I haven't had the time to go through all of Skeeter's old articles on shooting times, but I found one article and I read the first paragraph of it, Jack.
And this kind of tells you all you need to know about what young Gregory might have picked up reading Skeeter's columns.
Oh my God.
Almost all the objections to the 357 Magnum as a police weapon come from city police departments.
It is argued with some justification that an officer who fires a magnum in a crowded city is more likely to kill innocent non-combatives than he would be if armed with a standard 38 special.
Not much is given to the fact that the same officer runs a hell of a lot more risk of being killed himself when his low-powered 38 fails to put an armed opponent out of action.
Yeah.
So just like, look, some city cop say using this bigger bullet gets regular people killed because it goes through doors and stuff.
Right.
But have you thought about the danger of not killing a guy?
Yeah.
Out of action.
I love, and you see also, because this was a, this is actually like was published right after his death, but he wrote it a little before.
So this was published like posthumously in 88.
But you can see the early birth of a lot of the warrior ethos, like warrior cop shit here.
The whole, well, you know, you could say an officer was more likely to kill innocent non-combatives as opposed to like innocent people, innocent civilians, non-combatants.
They still could have done something right, right?
Everything is in the corruption of the assumption that someone's attacking you.
That's how you leave the door in the morning.
Yeah, everyone is combative.
Entering a combat situation.
Right.
It's worth the risk to have a gun that shoots through four people in a crowded urban environment.
Exactly.
And so this is the kind of shit he's reading as a kid.
Like the early precursors to a lot of that is what Greg Bovino is.
The fact that as like a nine or 10 or 11 year old, he's he's reading.
Yes, something like, because he was born in the 70s.
So he would have been born like a couple years after this guy started writing for Shooting Times.
So from the time he's a little kid, he's reading stuff like this.
Like he's almost patient zero for this like warrior cop ethos bullshit.
Like he, he may have been, he's among the very first kids who got hit with this stuff as a child, you know?
Like right into the story.
It's not an earlier generation.
Yeah.
Right into the bloodstream.
And it just takes over as far as we can tell.
So Natalie's interview is the only place I found reference to Bovino reading these magazines.
And every other piece on him lists, as I said, a very different and citing incident for his interest in the Border Patrol as a career.
Here's how the Chicago Sun-Times describes it.
Bovino has said that he was inspired to join the Border Patrol when he saw a movie called The Border that came out when he was just 11, produced by a distant cousin of his mom.
It starred Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel as agents.
But the young Bovino was crestfallen that the movie portrayed the agents as bad guys and said that he was moved to join the Border Patrol in 1996 to show that he was the opposite, a good border cop.
Making the border secure is my personal responsibility, Bovino said on a podcast in 2021.
And I wonder, is it that maybe he saw the movie and then started reading the magazines?
But his sister describes the magazines as kind of the first thing.
So is it that Bovino doesn't want to admit that, like, well, I read some magazines by some Border Patrol guys and thinks that, because this is a more convenient right-wing, modern right-wing narrative, right?
That, like, well, I saw the liberal Hollywood moody movie about the Border Patrol and I wanted to prove him wrong, you know, which is kind of what I suspect.
And it's like you're instead of having to rely on people wanting to learn more about Skeeter Skeleton, you can just be like, it had Harvey Keitel and Jack Nicholson.
Like, those are names you've heard before.
Weird Yearbook Predictions for Greg00:13:33
This will stick in your brain.
You don't have to say that I'm trying to correct those guys rather than being like, well, have you read the works of Skeeter Skeleton?
No.
That's a name you just made up, man.
Yeah, that's not a real guy.
Yeah.
So the idyllic perfect part of Greg's childhood also ends the same year the border comes out when he's 11.
His father drives home drunk one night from work.
I'm sure it wasn't the first night.
Can't have been, right?
And he winds up crashing his truck directly into a car, killing a young woman and brutally injuring her husband.
They were 26 and 29 years old, respectively.
It was a bad crash.
There was no sign that Bovino tried to break before hitting the other car, which the local paper described as bowled over by the impact.
Mike was unharmed.
The victim's husband sued the Bovinos and sued Mike's bar.
And ultimately, Mike pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of death by motor vehicle.
But the judge in his case ordered he be sent to state prison as treatment for his alcoholism, and he stays there for four months.
There's an article written about him while he's in jail.
He tells the Charlotte Observer that he'd long struggled with his drinking and that he'd gotten drunk the night of the crash because his wife had begged him to quit the sauce and that had made him angry.
He promised not to do so again after getting out of jail, saying, I've got a dead woman on my hands.
Getting dead drunk just isn't worth it.
I don't know how else you frame that, but that's not the best way, maybe.
I don't know.
The lawsuit destroys his.
What a clever bit of wordplay.
Why do we need word?
You killed a woman.
Why are we doing wordplay here?
Yeah, we can just skip the fucking Hallmark poster and just go right to.
Yeah, I stopped drinking because of a horrible thing.
And as a result of my drinking, that's a weird way to describe it.
I murdered a lady.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just I killed a woman would have been enough to say.
The lawsuit destroyed his business, obviously, forcing him to sell it.
Betty decided she'd had enough and divorced him after this, gaining sole custody of their three children.
Mike left the family and settled in New Mexico.
Greg was 14 when his dad left.
So this takes a while.
You have to imagine this is a bad three years.
And he enters high school right around the same time the divorce was finalized.
He was not recalled by his peers as an overly memorable student, right?
He's not someone who really makes a mark.
When he started at Watauga High School, he joined the wrestling team.
And if you have seen photos of Greg around other people, he's not a large man, right?
No, he's a weak man.
He's a smaller fella, right?
And height isn't everything.
There's weight at classes and stuff.
Height's not everything in wrestling.
It's great for wrestling to be small.
Yeah.
It can also be handy.
But he's also, even in that world, kind of small, right?
And he doesn't seem to have developed in other ways to compensate for that.
And everyone who talks about his time in wrestling is very polite about this, but he was not good at it.
Sometimes people actually talk to his old high school coach, who it seems like a very nice man, because when they bring up, was he good?
He's like, well, when he was in, you know, he wasn't the biggest boy.
He wasn't the biggest guy.
But at the end of his senior year, he got the most improved award, which is something, even though the team had an unusually terrible season, which is a very sweet way to try to describe this boy.
Yeah, you're exactly that.
Our team got so shitty that he was actually like kind of par for the course for our team.
Yeah, that's kind of what he's saying.
I am just curious now that you've researched 3,000 of the worst people to ever live.
How common is the like not remembered versus like, oh, yeah, I remember that shit.
Mostly, you know, generally, when we come across a guy who there's not much about their childhood or background, it's because they were like some weird con person in the 1800s.
And it's like they just hopped onto the historic record when they were 30 and we don't know what the fuck was going on previously.
Or it's someone who's such a minor weirdo or creep that there's just not a lot.
You know, no one, no major, you know, they haven't been covered by a major newspaper.
No one's dug into them that much.
With someone like Greg, this is, it's not common to have this little when you actually talked to a bunch of their classmates and peers.
That's the weird thing.
The one thing that we, that we typically come across that's like a common commonality is like somebody who has crazy ambition and that's what people remember.
Yeah.
I'm not hearing that here for Greg at all.
Nobody says that about Greg.
That is a very common bastard trait is that they had way too much ambition at an early age and then they, you know, become like Jeff Bezos or whatever.
They were like, yeah, he was voted person least likely for you to be asking this question about them because he thought he wasn't going to do shit.
Because Greg, seriously, Greg?
Greg?
You're talking about Greg.
Well, first of all, Greg.
Gregory.
Yeah, did you realize his name Greg?
Yeah.
Sorry to the Gregs out there.
I just, it's hard to, it's not even an insult.
It's just hard to imagine a Greg being like the mouthpiece of a fascist.
I do literally have a cousin Greg, and he is delightful.
Cousin Greg, if you're listening to this, I love you, Cousin Greg.
Yeah, I'd have trouble imagining your cousin Greg as the mouthpiece of a fascist regime, you know?
Yeah.
We literally all have a cousin Greg.
They're all great.
My cousin Greg rocks.
Except Greg Bovino's cousin has a cousin Greg.
Not so great.
Not so great.
Yep.
So Greg's coach said this about him.
Quote, Greg was not bashful.
He had no problems asking the coach questions.
And, you know, he liked to tell stories, funny stories.
He also expressed when these reporters asked him a lot of surprise that he went into law enforcement.
And he says so in a way, I love this.
The coach says this in a way that makes me think like, oh, I think this coach might not like the police very much.
Quote, that was a real surprise.
I just didn't picture Greg being in law enforcement.
He was always very pleasant and I didn't see him as that.
That to me didn't seem to fit his personality.
It wasn't a dick.
I wouldn't have guessed he'd become a cop.
Good talking to you, comrade.
Hell yeah.
No, I didn't peg him for a huge asshole.
Real job.
Yeah, I didn't think he'd turn into a piece of shit.
Didn't think he was that kind of prick.
Thanks, coach.
Thanks, coach.
Cool guy.
When you go back, like, it's also interesting when they don't have anything interesting to say because, like, I do feel like most of the time when you're asking a normal person about like they'll have made up a memory about them.
Yeah.
You know, because just to be interesting at like dinner parties.
Yeah.
I remember he never stopped reading that book about Reinhard Heydrich.
Just love the guy.
Like something, you know?
Yeah.
But no, there's very other other than his sister being like, he read Skeeter.
He read Skeeter.
And his coach being like, I didn't think he was a big enough asshole to be a cop.
He should be a cop.
Yeah.
Jason Perry, his wrestling teammate, also expressed surprise at what had become of Bavino.
He described Greg in school as very polite and added, I don't think Greg would not do his job.
And like, if they're asking him to do something that's not fair to minorities, I'm sure he's hating it.
This is kind of a Bible belt community.
So I know Greg was exposed to compassion and love for his fellow man, but it's dangerous to speculate what a man is thinking.
I hope whatever happens, I hope it works out good for him and his family and the people that are being mistreated.
Just knows about it.
Such a middle of the road thing.
I hope both the guy hurting people and the hurt people get better.
Okay.
It's crazy because I know he's aware of compassion.
Like he's heard of it.
Like he's aware he's not supposed to.
He must not like what he's doing because he's not supposed to act this way.
Heard of compassion.
Yeah.
I know he's not supposed to be doing this shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, if you spend any amount of time looking this guy up on social media, you'll run into some claims made by a purported former classmate of his on Reddit that are much more negative than the recollections gathered by the Sun Times.
It opens with the OP head bar 9316 writing, I just found out I know Greg Bovino personally.
Here are some things you can tell him when you next see him.
And the poster claims that he's a current Minneapolis resident who used to live in Boone, North Carolina, near where Bovino grew up, and that they went to the same school.
And he posted a clip from a yearbook with a picture of Bovino on the wrestling team as evidence that said a bunch of these pictures are floating around.
Not guaranteed that that means he actually went to school with this guy.
And then he provides a bunch of suggestions for things that protesters should say to Bovino.
Hey, Greg, you're the reason your dad got drunk and killed that woman in Blowing Rock, which led to your parents' divorce.
And I don't think that that's necessarily accurate.
I think his dad killing someone and bankrupting the family is probably enough of a reason.
That might be a bit of a dick move, but I think we're just being an asshole to this guy.
That doesn't really expand our knowledge about Greg, though, right?
So let's move on to the next one.
Hey, Greg, do you think it's weird that the Watauga High yearbook has you listed as most likely to shit his pants in public?
Now, they don't.
That's a nice burn, but also, yearbooks don't do that.
That's not a thing.
Like, no school, public school yearbooks, not you, someone would go to jail in the South.
That's putting that in a public school.
You're not allowed to do that for a lot of reasons.
It's abusive to the students.
Again, he would have been 18.
Hey, Greg, your history teacher thinks that you're a pathetic Nazi punk.
No wonder you failed all his classes.
This doesn't seem to be accurate based on, again, it's a burn, but I don't think it's true because I think his grades were decent.
At least it sounds like that.
I can believe some of his teachers hate him now, but I just don't think he actually did fail all of his classes.
I haven't found the evidence of that.
So another next allegation is that a local store banned him for sniffing shoes after people tried them on.
Don't have anything about that one way or the other.
Right?
It's a good one, though.
Now we're getting to like pretty good lies to tell about someone.
Yeah.
The last one.
Like kind of weird and specific enough, like having invented Splitsville.
It's like, no, he had to be banned from Paylet's shoes.
The last one is really specific, Jack.
And again, not one we can back up in any way.
Hey, Greg, do you remember eating that the Watauga Pioneers wrestling team's soggy biscuit?
Is it still gay to eat semen off of Bojangles biscuit, or was that just an 80s thing?
Now, again, first off, he was born in the 70s, so he wouldn't have been.
I mean, yeah, yeah, that could, that works out, I guess.
80s.
Yeah.
Yeah, that does work out.
The timing works out.
The Bojangles biscuits make sense.
That said, I can't back up the rest of this.
And there's enough wrong with the previous parts of this that I maybe this is someone who went to school with him and is just like throwing out shit because they didn't like him.
You know, maybe he did sniff shoes in a local shoe store.
I can't prove it, but there's no evidence.
People are going to bring this up because it went crazy viral.
I can't back any of this up.
And there's nothing in here.
I feel like we can confirm both of those things happened in that guy, whoever the poster is.
There's someone in that guy.
Yeah, yeah.
And like, he's just like good and specific and weird.
Like, yeah, those are real.
He's probably just taking those and being like, these happened to Greg Bovino.
And yeah, I believe some guy did those things.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, yeah, again, maybe, but I can't, I can't prove it.
And I can't find any specific reason to believe that this post that people are sharing around is real.
Boy, if anyone can prove that Greg Bovino got banned from a store for sniffing shoes, let's have it.
But nobody else seems to be sharing this yet.
Great, some cub reporter, go down to Boone and figure this out.
Break the mystery.
So just looking through micro fiche shoe sniffing.
Microfiche in the basement of the shoe store.
It's all just shoe store-related articles.
All right.
So I'm going to come clean here and say, I like the smell of new shoes.
What is it?
So if you're smelling, if you're at a shoe store, waiting trying on shoes.
Right.
So are you taking their shoes while their existing shoes while they're trying them on?
Because I can see how you'd shoot this in a TV show, right?
Where, like, you have, you have somebody putting on, take off the shoe, put it up, and then you have like, oh, Greg, sneak around the corner and check, see that the coast is clear.
Jackie, I'm going to go chase me off with the fucking broom.
I think new shoe, new tennis ball, and new car are underrated, like, synthetic chemical smells that I enjoy.
Like, I will have a nose and a new pair of sneakers that I just open the box on and take a nice deep, deep huff.
And I die.
Okay.
Should I be banned?
Yes.
Perhaps.
Perhaps.
Nobody's worn them yet.
What's wrong with that?
I don't know, shoe sniffer.
All right.
New shoe sniffer.
Brand new shoe sniffer.
Brand new.
Come on now.
All right.
So that's the that's that's the myth about Greg DeVino that I had to, I don't know.
It's not even busting.
It's just pointing out I've seen this going around.
This doesn't directly comport with anything else that's independent, and I have no specific reason to believe this is all true.
So anyway, his sister describes him as a voracious reader in high school.
And I've seen a few other accounts that match this.
Busting the Shoe Sniffer Myth00:08:36
He liked military history and cowboy novels, particularly the work of Louis Lemour.
And his favorite book was probably Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Surprising No One.
His sister told the Daily Mail that he reads Starship Troopers once a year, which completely makes sense.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
And I get so did I back in the day.
Now, wait, I know the movie is satirical.
Is the book also?
No, not at all.
Okay.
So Robert Heinlein was an interesting guy, a very influential science fiction writer.
One of his books, The Moon is the Harsh Mistress, is often seen as providing a lot of the ideological underpinning for the libertarian movement, right?
Like it's a foundational text for American libertarianism.
Yeah.
They've been coming off well in this whole thing, by the way.
I said influential.
I said influential.
That's not a value term.
And he's a guy.
He started out as a socialist, and then he had his like weird, super reactionary right-wing, like John Bircher period.
And then he became kind of more of like a normal libertarian sort of deal.
But Starship Troopers was, it's often seen as a fascist novel, and that's certainly a very valid reading of it.
There's a lot of it that reads very fashion.
It's also, if you understand Heinlein's life, there's a lot of it that's like, oh, yeah, you were a guy who like joined up during World War II and served in the military during that period of time.
Of course, you have a very positive view on what the state and the military could do together, right?
Like there's also a bit of that in it where it's like, well, you just feel there's some like nostalgia towards that period of time too in this.
But it is, it is a book about, no, literally, the best type of government would be the military runs everything, right?
So I can see why Greg Bovino is attached to this book as a kid, especially without any of these slight mitigating factors in Heinlein's own life.
And Heinlein, pretty racist guy.
I'm not that interested in mitigating it.
I'm just saying there's a little bit more there than there would be with a guy like Bavino.
So once he graduates high school in 1988, Bevino went to Western Carolina University, where he studied natural research conservation before becoming the first member of his family to graduate college.
He then joined the Border Patrol in 1996.
He graduated as part of class 325.
One of his classmates, Jason Owens, would wind up as head of Border Patrol.
The two have podcasted together per the Sun Times with Jack, you know, is the strongest bond that two people can share.
That's right.
During their podcast together, Bavino claims Owens had better grades and graduated at the top of the class, but that he was better at PE and marksmanship.
And he makes this claim a lot that he was the best shot in the Border Patrol, basically.
I haven't seen independent confirmation of this.
Seems like he might be kind of just jazzing himself up a little bit.
But pretty easy claim to make.
Pretty easy claim for you to make.
Rarely do people be like, all right, that's it.
Let's go to a range together right now.
Yeah.
You know, yeah.
It's usually like at least an hour-long thing to set up, you know.
He starts working at the famous El Centro sector, which is on the border of California, not far from where he'd been born, but across the country from his home.
Per the Sun-Times, quote, Bovino told Owens later that he was impressed when the sector chief showed up in the field alongside the agents.
Bovino said it showed him the need to get into the fight.
It's not a fight.
It's not a fight.
A bunch of hungry people walking across the desert.
Not a fight.
Not a battle.
Seen a couple of battles.
They don't look like that.
Enemy bugs out there.
I mean, there are hungry people stumbling around battlefields, but you don't look at them and go, ah, the fight.
You look at them and go, that guy's starving to death because he hasn't eaten in three weeks.
Non-combatants, we'll call them.
For non-combatants, it's a good thing.
We got to see, though, if they got any weapons.
They might get into the fight.
Yeah.
That's right.
So he was promoted steadily over the years and wound up transferred to Washington, where he got a master's degree in national security at the National War College, and then New Orleans, where he led a sector.
In 2020, he was sent back to El Centro as a commander.
He also spent some time in tactical units, per his sister, who makes this dubious claim.
Early in his career, Greg would run into cartels and be the first one in the door because he had the best marksmanship there.
You see that claim again.
A lot of times it was drug cartel base, which he said has now infiltrated every major city with the crime and corruption.
And again, I don't think Natalie knows all that much about this stuff.
I think her big brother just told her this and she's like, that's the way it's got to be.
By the way, if you talk to the son or like sister or children of any law enforcement officer who are gullible enough, this is the same.
First in the door.
First of all, you guys don't know how dangerous it is out there.
And second in the door.
Their dad is actually secretly the sickest marksman.
Yeah, he's the best with a gun.
Like it's crazy.
They thought he had a gust dog.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
But it's great.
You know, it's a certain type of person who lies about this stuff to their sister.
Right.
Because I haven't found this claim repeated elsewhere.
Clearly, not anywhere credible.
But we do have documentation of his career running El Centro, where he oversaw about 1,100 employees.
Critics say that under Bovino's leadership, BP employees were violent and cruel towards migrants.
The ACLU accused one of his agents of assaulting a Salvadoran migrant in 2022, separating her from their 10-year-old child for nearly a year after presumably she was beaten.
The woman was charged with assaulting an agent in detention, and then the charges were dropped.
The Sun-Times quotes Monica Lungarica, a senior attorney for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, as saying, I think it was a prosecution that sought to silence her, stop her from speaking out about the assault that she experienced.
We've seen it here at the border for a very long time.
And now, obviously, you know, Bovino has taken that show on the road.
And I bring this up because you can see this exact pattern in the rest of it, in his most recent chunk of his career, right?
Yeah.
Right.
Where someone is being assaulted by the people under his command, and that is treated as an assault somehow.
Yep.
There.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
Yep.
So for his part, Bovino has bragged that the consequences El Centro agents force upon migrants lead to fewer people trying to cross in the first place.
Earlier in his career, he seems to have had more of an interest in portraying himself as a good guy to members of the public.
Not long after he got transferred back to lead El Centro, a local activist, Edie Harmon, 81, complained about Border Patrol vehicles harming wildlife.
Bovino fancies himself a conservationist.
He's gotten a degree on the subject, and he once wrote a thesis about the danger illegal immigrants pose to animals in the Southwest.
So he agreed to go hike with Harmon and he wrote her a thank you note insisting Border Patrol cared about the environment too.
Per the Sun-Times, she said Bovino tried to win her over by offering to install a guzzler, a watering tank for the sheep, and to dedicate it in the name of her dead husband.
She said she declined because no biologists recommended that.
Before Bavino left their hike, he's asked to take a photo with Harmon, each standing on opposite sides of a cactus.
And that's just so weird, man.
That's weird.
That's weird guy behavior.
What do you mean?
What do you mean?
The Biden administration, I think he's trying, he's got to pretend he cares about the environment.
And I think he also sees it as, because he's got this background, this is a wedge you can drive between the liberal conservationists and the quote-unquote illegals, right?
As if you're like, well, they're bad for the environment, you know?
And you're bad for the environment, Greg.
Fuck off.
Fuck off, Carl.
And Harmon made the very good point that, like, he wanted to install a water tank for that.
The reason the sheep are in danger is because the Border Patrol keeps putting concertina wire up across their grazing ground.
It's the razor wire that's bad for the sheep.
Yeah, I don't think they need water.
They need their razors lying around.
They're going to want some water, Robert.
Yeah.
That is true.
As somebody who has done 3,000 podcasts on Hitler, wasn't Hitler also very into animals and animal rights?
Yeah, yeah, he's very big enough.
I'm not in common interested in for those two things to overlap.
No, and I think, you know, this may just, this may be Bavino.
Maybe there's another version of Greg Bovino who just went into conservation.
But also, maybe it's just, it's, there's a degree.
I think certainly by the time he's back at El Centro, there's this understanding that, like, well, maybe this is a way we can drive a wedge between the people that I want to target and the majority of the voting population of this state, right?
Yeah.
Bovino is one of the guys who completely drank the Border Patrol Kool-Aid, right?
He loves to use the nickname the Green Machine to refer to the Border Patrol, which is what they call themselves.
I think they think it's cool.
For good.
Another Version of Greg Bovino00:04:55
That's like a naked juice.
That's like what they call it.
That's like a naked juice flavor.
Yeah.
Green machine it is.
Yeah.
And Anna loves after the green juice from naked juice that like sometimes fine.
And sometimes it's so fucking bad.
Have you ever had a bad green juice?
I have.
I have.
Oh, man.
One of those.
Yeah.
Like 7-Eleven green juice can go can go off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Speaking of random products, Robert, it's about that time.
Oh, is it?
Do you want me to keep talking about how maybe your juice green machine can sometimes go off?
I've never seen you drink a naked juice.
I sat next to you for years.
Yeah, that's because I had a bad experience once.
I'll tell you what.
You're a Mountain Dew guy.
That's right.
Sophie's seen me at my finest.
That's your green juice is a Mountain Dew.
That's right.
Why?
What were you talking about?
I once did a money phone in front of Sophie with a six-pack of Mountain Dew.
I think I have that picture.
If I do have that picture somewhere, I am going to have them put that up on the Netflix.
My finest work.
Oh, man.
All right, everybody.
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Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
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10-10 shots fired.
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From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Brutal Acts by Border Patrol Men00:16:00
Somebody tell me that.
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Listening to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
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And we're back.
So, Bavino, as I said, really drinks the Border Patrol Kool-Aid.
He loves reciting the agency's slogan, honor first, with little provocation, which at least one Border Patrol whistleblower has said is often used by men in the Border Patrol to mean on her first, because they like to sexually assault female agents and women in their custody.
Good stuff, the Border Patrol.
Bovino described the Border Patrol as his life's work and branded El Centro the premier sector.
He's the one who considers it that.
It is a very busy sector.
It's a big, it's a lot of people come through it, but he's like, no, this is the state of the art.
This is the best one.
We're the standard from which all the other sectors are set.
I appreciated what one journalist for CalMatters.org said about this.
It's similar to the way states have mottos on license plates that aren't necessarily used by anybody else to describe that state.
Right.
There's some good ones of those.
Yeah, there's some good ones of those.
So during the show state.
Hey now, hey now, hey now.
I got to stand up.
Actually, that is an insult to people from Missouri.
Yeah, why do they do that?
Why they do that?
It dates back to, again, like the 1800s, but it means that people from Missouri were so dumb that they wouldn't believe you unless you showed them something, right?
Can't just tell someone like, oh, there's, there's big boats now.
They got to see the boat because they're dumb.
Right.
Don't believe in dinosaurs, that sort of thing.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Calling something the premiere anything is a great like weasel word.
Like that, that's got to be one of the MVPs of like bad movies posters where they're like the premier crime.
It's like Miller calling itself the champagne of beer.
It's like, yeah, okay, guys.
No, no one's going to call it that unless we're joking.
The poetry of lying, you know?
Yeah.
During the Biden years, Bavino started running into trouble.
First for tweeting.
He made a lot of tweets that got him in trouble.
One of them was about a citizen who had been killed by an undocumented person driving drunk that his superiors made him delete because it was too political.
He claimed to be apolitical and did not understand what was wrong with his post, but he would later prove to have something of an obsession with the subject.
He has in the Trump years, the most recent year in change, at least, repeatedly brought up the threat of undocumented immigrants driving drunk as a reason for aggressive immigration and arrest.
Yes.
Yes.
Wow.
Nothing psychological there.
Okay.
Okay.
That's okay, Greg.
That's stupid.
That's wild, man.
Last year's Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, which is where Bavino, and not where he first gained widespread national visibility, but it really, really massively increased his visibility, was in honor of a 20-year-old who'd been killed in a DUI, right?
Like, this is a thing for Greg.
And it's like, again, man, like, okay, you didn't want to go to therapy, but you're just taking your anger at your dad out on some random people, almost none of whom did anything wrong.
Like, almost none of whom have ever driven drunk, right?
This is up there with Tucker.
I'm sure you guys have talked about it before on the show, but Tucker Carlson's.
We got to get our Tucker.
Hatred of hippies and women.
And then his mom left his dad for like a French hippie and like his mom was a hippie.
It's just like, damn, man, it's almost like too obvious.
Like, how do you land where you are without being like, this is like everybody's going to know why I'm the way I am.
This is so bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's often the case.
And, you know, it is, it's the case with old Greg, right?
Now, one thing that made Bovino's El Centro stand out is that he had five agents whose whole full-time job was making videos, which is interesting.
And it shows, again, he understands he's at least someone who sees how good a shot Trump has at coming back in the Biden years and is like, I know what to do to get on this fucker's radar.
Is I need to start making some shit that goes viral.
I got to piss off some libs, right?
Here's how Cal Matters describes a representative example.
Two agents sit in their vehicle at night listening to a news broadcast about an undocumented migrant charged with the rape and murder of a 64-year-old woman in Santa Maria.
The news clip is from a real CBS report from 10 years ago.
An agent shakes his head in disgust and turns off the radio, saying, Man, that's the second one in less than a week.
Things are getting out of hand.
Oh, wow.
And if you're trying to make the case that, like, wow, every week, multiple people are getting raped by immigrants.
And it's like, yeah, your one example was from a news clip from 10 years ago.
Their most powerful weapon maybe is selection bias, where they will find a crime and make it seem like it is constantly happening right next to her to you.
Yeah.
Yep.
Now, at that moment, dispatch comes over the radio and it tells the agents there's a nearby vehicle loaded with migrants.
The agents catch three of the men, but one gets away and sneaks into any town USA where he murders an American citizen, taking the man's cell phone and running off.
And the screen goes dark and the message, every apprehension matters.
Do you know who got away?
And again, less than so much plot.
It's so much plot for such a shitty ass.
That's like 30 minutes of a Chuck Norris movie.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the opening of a Chuck Norris movie.
Only about 1% of the people the Border Patrol encounters have a criminal conviction compared to 8% of American citizens.
But there's little point in bringing reality into this.
They don't care, right?
They just begin to treat these people like complete shit.
Right.
And so it's like a chance.
Yeah, it's bully tactics where you just find the person who's the least protected and then go after him.
Yeah.
So Bovino was called to testify before Congress in 2023.
He discussed how crossings in his sector had increased significantly and basically made the border hot case that the Biden administration was failing to protect the border.
Bovino's own history came up, including what turned out to be repeated issues with social media.
One relevant quote was, I think there was one post with two Yemenis, terrorists.
I was ordered to take that down.
Bovino was relieved of command after his testimony, which the Republican House members who'd convened the hearing saw as retribution.
And it probably was, right?
Like, retribution for him saying being a dick.
Horrendous stuff and being for him being a fucked up asshole, but I guess that counts.
And it's also retribution.
I was fired as retribution for being bad.
He kind of admits he's bad at his job in this, right?
Because his whole claim is that like you got to be brutal to reduce crossings.
And he admitted that crossings were at an all-time high and he's in charge.
I don't know, man.
Maybe you were just saying you sucked at your job.
But he didn't suffer any consequences for his actions.
Those House members complained about his demotion and he was reinstated at El Centro.
And you know what happened not long after?
Donald Trump won re-election.
On January 7th, 2025, the day after Congress certified his victory, Bovino led 65 agents in Operation Return to Cinder per calmatters.org.
Most of the official information about the raid came from Bovino's Facebook comments.
He posted blurred photos of three Latino men alongside a photo of 33 pounds of marijuana in the trunk of a car.
He wrote, here in the premier sector, we go the extra mile, or 500 of them, to protect our nation and communities from bad people and bad things.
So congratulations, Greg.
You protected California from pot.
Like, great, man.
Keeping that weed out.
I've seen it here or smelled it here ever since.
That 33 pounds really put a dint in the state.
Wow.
78 people were arrested.
The Border Patrol told local business owners that the raids were targeting criminal activity, but this was obviously untrue.
And a CalMatters investigation partnered with Evident and Bellingcat showed that the Border Patrol had no prior knowledge of criminal history of any kind for 77 of 78 arrestees.
This is very likely illegal, and the ACLU has sued on behalf of the farm workers.
Agents are accused of failing to ID themselves or present warrants and of using brutal force.
In one case, they slashed the tires of a U.S. citizen and then arrested them for seemingly no reason.
I say very likely, this was very illegal.
You know, like this is all very illegal.
Slashed the tires.
They love doing that.
They love doing it.
So on what grounds were they arresting them if it wasn't for them having like warrants or anything?
Here illegally.
Yeah.
I mean, that's their argument is that like they were doing, that's the illegal thing they were doing, you know?
So Minjo.
I was having the papers.
Right.
Yeah, that's who they all are.
Minju Cho, a senior lawyer for the ACLU, called this operation a pilot project for the ones that Bavino would later spearhead around the country.
He'd earned the attention of the Trump administration for his combative presence on social media and willingness to use federal forces to brutalize people.
On June of 2025, he was named tactical commander of a mass raid in Los Angeles, which sparked protests across the city.
And you're all pretty familiar with what happened next.
We're not going to go into crazy detail about everything Bovino did in the last year because you all lived through it, right?
We don't need to do a ton of that.
His agents helped ICE agents as they brutally detained random Angelinos.
They blew open doors to houses.
They gassed people in the street.
Bovino had his video division craft ads depicting his men's violence to regular working people as action movie scenes.
He led his agents in an armed patrol outside of a political rally held by Gavin Newsom, which some might suggest could be seen as actual treason.
Bovino claimed not to have known that Newsom was in the building, continuing his habit of giving answers to questions that present only the only other answer is like, well, so then you're incompetent, right?
If you didn't know he was in the building, like what the fuck was this about?
Dipshit.
We just like saw a crowd and we just like kind of, we were like, oh shit, the Border Patrol does.
Was this also when they did the military raid of MacArthur Park?
Yes, which we should be talking.
And he was like, we're giving this back to Ma and Paw America.
And it's like, man, the people who live there are the ones that you're fucking with.
They're the ones who use the park dipshit.
But again, he knows this.
I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow of every violent act his men perpetrated, but I should read this quote from an article by Gabrielle Cannon in The Guardian.
Two undocumented people have died trying to flee Bovino's agents.
A Mexican farm worker fell from a greenhouse and a Guatemalan day laborer was hit by a vehicle following a raid at Home Depot.
In another episode, the paper reported, they detained a disabled 15-year-old high school student in a case of mistaken identity after drawing their guns and handcuffing him, leaving unfired bullets on the ground.
So cool people, just like well-trained, good at their jobs.
Bovino's obviously sent to Chicago after LA, where he enacts similar violence.
On one occasion, he throws tear gas on camera against a crowd of peaceful protesters.
He and his agency had just been enjoined against using gas without justification.
So Bovino claimed that he'd been hit in the head with a rock and had no choice.
Bovino later admitted that he'd lied to the U.S. District Judge Sarah Ellis about this.
That seems fireable, Robert.
Should be fireable to be clear.
Should be doing a violent thing and claiming they hit me in the head with a rock.
I'm a huge piece of shit.
Sorry, guys.
In October of 2025, he'd been declared commander-at-large of the Border Patrol, which is not a real job, but basically removed him from the normal Border Patrol hierarchy without giving him formal control over the whole group.
In other words, it's the job you give a guy who you want, you want out there in public.
You want to let him do stuff for a while because you know eventually you piss people off too much and you want to be able to make him your sacrificial lamb, right?
Let's make him a job that'll put him out in front of everybody because this dip shit is not going to be able to help himself.
He was the faceman for Trump's brutal mass deportations.
And his main job, again, I think was to provide a focus for public outrage.
Walking around in his Nazi coat looking like Doogie Hauser at the end of Starship Troopers.
Shit like this serves as a useful distraction.
But Vino has gotten to defend his choice of outerwear several times in interviews per globalsecurity.org.
He explained that he purchased it around 1999 as a young border patrol agent and had worn it for more than 25 years in cold weather or formal settings without prior controversy.
He pointed to a 2022 Department of Homeland Security ceremony under the Biden administration where he wore it and received only compliments.
Survivors argue that the design draws from longstanding U.S. military traditions, such as the M1939 style overcoats or bridge coats used in law enforcement and formal uniforms rather than exclusively fascist imagery.
But we know why you're doing it, Greg.
Come on, man.
We know why you like it.
You like it because it makes you look like Doogie Hauser at the end of Starship Troopers.
And also to be like, it's not fascist.
It's from the U.S. military.
He's like, well, okay.
Let's take a look at the U.S. military history.
Yeah, there was something we were talking on Zeitgeist about how they're thinking about bringing ICE to the Winter Olympics.
And there was just a quote from somebody in Italy talking about their prison camps over there.
Like they're deporting Albanians and taking them to a black site.
And they were like, it's like Italian Guantanamo.
And I was like, oh, we use Nazis as like our touchstone.
The other countries use us as their, they're like, yeah, it's, it's almost like we're America as their like fascism touchstone.
Jesus.
Yes.
So anyway, I'm not sure how much there is to say.
I mean, there's a lot more, but you've all lived through it, right?
You know, we know where he is right now.
After two murders in Minneapolis, he was picked to be the face of the Trump administration's miscalculation.
He was removed from his fake job and sent back to El Centro.
I'm sure this is not the end of us hearing about Gregory Bovino.
They're kind of keeping him in the cooler, right?
He had made a couple of claims previous, even previous to Minneapolis, about wanting to retire in the next two years, which I think was part of why the Trump administration, this may have even been an open, like, look, we're going to give you a special fancy job.
You're going to be on camera.
You're going to get to be the face of the Border Patrol doing all this fascist bullshit you've always wanted to do.
And then when stuff gets too hot for us, we're going to cut bait, right?
And then you'll just retire with full benefits.
Doesn't that sound good to you?
You can get a nice job on Fox News or something and you're retired.
You get to wear that jacket that you keep asking us to wear to every meeting.
You get to wear that on the news.
You can wear that every day, buddy.
Greg, anytime you want to wear your dumb jacket, please put it on.
Put it on in LA.
Fuck it.
Like, anyway, that's my read of the Greg Bovino story.
We will maybe do an update on the fucker if more becomes of him, but it may also just be a thing where he'll wait around a little while in El Centro, you know, probably get his rocks off a few times hurting people down there and then retire, you know, like he'd planned to.
Retiring with Full Benefits00:07:37
Right.
Did you see the video of the woman who was just like kind of dragging him outside of a 7-Eleven?
And his response was just, he was like, oh, that's real nice.
Oh, you're being real nice.
It was just like, I don't know, man.
That's, I don't think your place is to tell people that they're being not nice at this stage.
He's a weird little guy that got too much power.
And I hope to never see him again.
But I think unfortunately, the way this world's been working, we probably will.
Yep.
Yeah, there's a lot of weird little guys, I feel like.
Someone should make a show about that.
Yeah, we should probably have a show about weird little guys on our podcast network.
Oh, great news, Robert.
I have great news.
Molly Conger has a show called Weird Little Guys.
Oh, it's on cool zone.
They figured out how to launch a second podcast.
Incredible.
Jack, is there anything you'd like to plug here at the end?
Oh, my God.
Sophie, thank you so much.
First of all, such a pleasure to be with you guys.
Robert, my first intern at Cracked, our first intern, discovered by the great Daniel O'Brien.
And so fun to have been working with you in the podcast space all these years.
And Sophie Lichterman, one of the greats to ever do it.
So thank you guys so much.
Always enjoy being back.
Daily Zeitgeist is a show that I do twice a day with twice a day.
Long-suffering co-host Miles Gray.
And we just published our 2000th episode.
Oh, congratulations, dude.
2000th main episode.
Crazy.
The second.
We didn't even count the second one.
We did it.
We made it to 2000.
What it is, we're not sure, but we did it.
Wow.
And then, like I mentioned, we have a new series that I think fans of the cracked podcast, the old cracked podcast will like called the iconograph, where each Monday me and a researcher do a deep dive into a different icon.
What's an icon, you ask, by our definition.
So our first episode was about Einstein and our second was about Urkel.
So it's just any of these like big pop culture whore cruxes that drive a lot of meaning in the zeitgeist.
And it lets us do a show that isn't about the news, which is so nice.
Fun, fun, fun Sophie lore for you.
My first ever crush was Einstein's like great grandson.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
Damn.
Yeah, for sure.
I should have had you on to talk about that.
Yes.
If you're listening to this, yes, I loved you.
It was first grade.
I loved you.
Yes.
Hi.
You don't think he knew?
Oh, no.
I was not cool.
You know me.
I can't hide anything.
I've never changed.
I've always been this way.
Like he for sure knew.
He for sure knew.
And the way I know he knew is I got teased about it by this other guy.
So I kicked him in the shin and then I got in trouble.
So he knew.
He knew.
I've been this way my entire life.
And I picture you kicking him in the shin and his shin bones snapping backwards like Steven Seagal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, he definitely knew.
But, and his name is Greg Einstein.
So Greg Einstein.
Simon Einstein, shout out.
If you're listening, if you're listening to this, I loved you.
I was in first grade.
But yeah, anyways, that's a fun one.
Those come out every Monday morning.
We're calling them the iconograph.
We just did Marilyn Monroe, which is a really fun episode.
Dolly Parton, Tony Hawks coming up.
And Robert would love to have you on one.
Sophie, we like to reach out to the guests and be like, okay, here's our list.
Who do you like?
Or pitch us the icon that you want to go over.
So maybe a chance for you guys to talk about people you don't who aren't the worst.
Sure.
People who aren't the worst.
Yes.
Icons.
Icons.
Yes.
Like the iconic Jack O'Brien, who thank you for being on our show.
Oh, it's so wonderful being here.
Also, Jack underscore O'Brien on Twitter.
Yeah.
One last plug against the state by James Stout, our colleague.
His book is available now.
Please buy it.
It's fantastic.
Love James.
That'll do it, right, Robert?
Yep, that'll do it.
Holy shit.
Bye-bye.
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