Behind the Bastards - The Greg Bovino Episode Extravaganza!

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Finally, an episode about the life and times and possibly crimes of Border Patrol sin eater Greg Bovino.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 of Jack O'Brien. Poddad. All of the titles. Esquire.

Esquire. What other titles are there? Do we have titles for like... I don't know. I like the honorable. 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 was just like somebody called him that one time. I think he like helped someone get a parade permit in like New Orleans. And they were like, we'll make you honor. Colonel, sir? And he was like, started signing his name on legal documents that way. If I ever, if I was ever made a Kentucky Colonel or whatever other kind of any time, 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 D&C, 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 Jordan's. My Jordans. Yeah. I have some behind me right there. Yeah. That's what I think.

That's very nice, you, Sophie. I don't think I can take credit for all podcasts. You know what's not nice of me, Jack. Oh, man. Jack, I've thought. Right to it. 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 that a lot.

There's the thing because, like, there are people, he gets angry that people compare ICE to the Gestapo. And he's not with ICE. He's Border Patrol. But, you know, 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 and 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 the Vines. I'm not being suss.

Shock to hear that about you, Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. Yeah. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. In the middle of the night, Sasquia awoke in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.

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and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our heart. to your ears. Listen to two guys, Five Rings on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So, Jack, what do you know about Greg? Gregory?

About time we had a Greg commit, like, crimes against humanity in this country. Greg. Yeah. Greg. 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 department. I host a daily news show called The Daily Zekeist with Miles Greer.

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, 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. Yeah. I have a feeling I was just like kind of using context clues and making educated guesses about what makes him tick. Yeah. 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. Not Greg. Not Greg. Yeah, not Greg. Again, you can't. Like, you go back to like the other crimes against humanity this country has committed. You can't imagine like a Greg having some significant role in like the displacement of the Native Americans, right?

Or like you can't imagine Greg. Like Gregory. It's not an old. It's like, yeah, I have trouble imagine. I can imagine a Gregory. I can imagine like a Gregory something, are there 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. It's 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 it more or less?

Because I feel like, Greg, I do believe Greg doing crimes against too many 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 do Gregs first start showing up? Just not Gregory's, but Gregs. Gregs in the history. 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. It is. 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, uh, Gregory. It's the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Yeah. Yeah. The wrong syllable. Yeah. I recently met a 70-something-year-old man named Corey. Whoa.

That's upsetting. You're, are you the first? Corey? Yeah, are you first? Did you start? 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 Greggs. First Greg history, comma. So I sat down to write this episode. The week Mr. Bovino lost a special job dressing like a Nazi while overseeing Border Patrol operations along alongside ICE in Minneapolis. He'd made the news several times for his statements in the wake of

the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, 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 a 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 he'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. Right. 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 former peers.

Like, they don't really remember him type thing? No, more of like a, 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? Is that Greg? What the fuck?

Whereas, like, Stephen Miller. is like the LeBron James of Nazis. Like where everybody in high school was like, this guy is going to be a Nazi on the world stage. Did you just say the LeBron James of Nazis? I think it's a good comparison. Only in the sense that he was a standout Nazi from the very earliest ages. That he wasn't, wait, that he couldn't miss the town.

He was the chosen one. If you knew LeBron or Stephen Miller in sixth grade, you knew, what they were growing up to do. Sure. This guy's got to be the best basketball player ever, and this guy's going to be a fucking Nazi. Yeah. Wow.

Exactly. Wow, guys. Yeah, I think you're right for the money with that check. 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.

the 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? Sure. 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 L.A.

The pieces, that's such a West L.A. thing to say, too, Jack. It's a, I, well, I'm bad at L.A. stuff, too. I'm just like, I grew up on the East Coast and I'm just like, San Bernardino. Inland Empire, Jack, Inland Empire. Inland Empire. I know about San Bernardino from the Frank Zappa song, San Bernardino. 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 you full of a lot of toxins 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, Again, people do this 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, holy shit. 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. It's like, no, he's a dick. Nope. Yeah, yeah. That's not how they work. So, yeah, 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. Right. That's kind of how it happened here for most people. But as you might have guessed from the name, the Bovino's were originally Italian. In 1909, Michel Bovino, who was Greg's great-grandfather, left the village of Al-Prigliano in the mountains of Southern Italy. His home was racked with poverty and dominated by organized criminal cartels, much like certain countries our administration doesn't think he should be sitting as immigrants today. So it is a pretty direct comparison.

Not a popular source of people back then, right? No, no, they were not. They weren't thrilled. The United States, not thrilled that these people are coming over. So, Mikkel, 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.

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, 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-year-so years of the 1900s also coincided with the largest search 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 that the government should be careful not to adulterate our national germplasm with socially unfit traits. And, you know. And what this was in what? A small corner of the internet? Oh, wait, this was in academia? This is in Congress at this point. I mean, this is. Yeah. It was 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 Pinsnes 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 the textbook that was like, the devious check has these characters.

It's like a D&D source book. Or it's like, oh, they get plus two to strike, you know? Like that's literally how these people are like learning this shit. It's in textbooks. And it's in the textbooks that are congressmen are reading. and they're going to yell 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, but 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, you know, 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 all starts right in this 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 is 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 kind of.

really get started. And Greg Bevino'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 for 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 a 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 up would become a naturalized citizen. So all is, 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 citizenship 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 benefited from this random crapshoot of laws. Everyone did. Yeah. Yeah. They don't want anybody else to get lucky like they did. Right. And 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, right? Everything kind of mixed together. Yeah.

I do love how rigorously Italian everything is at this point. It's incredibly Italian. The name of the boat that they came over on. Oh, yeah, the Giuseppe and Vincenzo. They were nearly out of pizza by the time they hit the docks. Yes. I know. 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 Bevino'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. Yeah, he does. He really does, Jack. 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 to, you were two, you're not really from here, boy, you know.

So I don't know if that was any part of his background or not. That new family? Mr. Calum. Born you coming up here. That was 20 years ago, Mark. They called him Hollywood. Here comes Hollywood Bovino. Oh, look at Hollywood.

Yeah, I could see that, but they don't say anything about that. That's purely headcanon for fucking Greg Bovino. And to be fair, probably not the case because his dad's side of the family's 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 Bovino's 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 remniscent of the paintings of Norman Rockwell, right? And is also based, I think, often on some misunderstandings of them. But, like, 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. Yeah. There were about a thousand people. Was Norman Rockwell, like, fucked up? I actually don't know. No, he pretty good politics. I mean, he's not person.

There's some stuff. 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, super pro-civil rights movement. 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 fucking Rockwell. Yeah, he was also painting like, because he did some paintings of like civil rights movement like protests and stuff that were contemporaries. It wasn't all, but, you know, they forgot a lot of that. Yeah, they forgot a lot of 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 saying somebody's watching me. Thank you though for bringing that up. Norman fucking Rockwell. Norman fucking. 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 Bovino's 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.

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 town where I can open a bar and no other towns around those can open a bar. I bet people will drink here. I bet people will drink here. And they different time. Because people talk about being able to, like, how 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 there were less ideas had been had. Yeah, it was just 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 and 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 the 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 and at both they'd ride on watoga 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 were they doing there bags of money with sacks of money I've known a few bar owners and none of them have the bouncers drop sacks of money off at their houses. That's, your dad was moving something.

Yeah, he was moving weight, sir. The side business drinkstand 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. Thank Natalie. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah, that doesn't sound like the way you bribe the judges about any cases.

He drove an ice cream truck. And then it's like, what? That's not a way to get incredibly wealthy. You know, the bouncer's dropped sacks of money off at the house, as is normal. Yeah. Stacks and 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 stags at Robert.

I was going to see, speaking of sketchy as fuck. Yeah, that too. Here's the sponsors of our show. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elective. leaders and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart.

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I'm Minnick Lamouber. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was out of breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Almemata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.

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Listen to the A-building on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the middle of the night, Soskia awoke. in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe.

That's your home. That's your husband. To keep this secret for so many years, He's like a seasoned pro. This is a story about the end of a marriage, but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark. You're a dangerous person who prays on vulnerable and trusting people. Your predator, Michael Leavengood.

Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen-Yin. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan-Cortina-26 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Boone. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie.

Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 explore in 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 get a different answer. Every other article I read was talked about a thing. 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 Bovino, 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 and a lot of similar magazines. I could see that happening to this kid.

You're familiar with the works of Skeeter Skeleton? 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, Skeleton, it's like, we got to deal with that. Skater! 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 with it.

Is it? Is it his actual name? 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 check. Skeeter Skelton.

It's just weird hearing the name. name, seeing the name Skeeter written and a real publication is supposed to hearing it across a bar, which is how you're supposed to do. Those guys usually don't make it out of the library club. They're usually there for life. No, they do not. I just am thinking of that, that Nickelodeon show called Cousin Skeeter from like the 90s. Oh, geez.

I don't even remember that one. Yeah. But when 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 rolls. He did everything. He was in everything from the Amarillo 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 writing about handguns. You're a genius, Skeeter. And he has that job.

This guy whose nickname is just a slang term for mosquitoes. He's 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. He made it sexy. So he popularized it before Dirty Harry. Oh, yeah. He's not like Dirty Harry. He's not like Dirty Harry. He's not like Dirty Harry actually stole that shit from me. I do.

No. I got to. So we're doing a new version of TDZ where we dive into icons. We just did a Maryland Mom Row 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 Dullsville. And he was, and he had a whole origin story about it. Because he was born in Brownsville and moved

to Bronxville. That's just how he thought about Vils. Yeah, like Ville in his blood. 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 a ticket scalper. I love a guy like that. Having a claim to fame that is that specific and stupid is just like my hat's off to, like what a weird world. What a,

it's one of those things. The second someone tells you that, like, you know, I come up with that word splitsville. You're like, you must have. No one else would think of lying about that. No one would claim to have done that. Yeah, that's not a thing anyone would pretend.

Yeah. But to be like, I popularized this one round. That's kind of my shit. If an old, 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, who would lie about that? To lying and like getting it to just find a lie so specific. There you go, people.

That nobody would ever be like, what? Okay. Yeah, I guess so. That makes sense. Yeah. 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 the 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 cops 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. Right. 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, you know, 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 context of the assumption that someone's attack. you. That's how you leave the door in the morning. Yeah, everyone is a combative or not 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, like, as like a nine or 10 or 11 year old, he's reading. Yeah, something like, because he was born in 70, 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 may have been up. He's among the very first kids who got hit with this stuff as a child, you know? Right in the bloodstream. There'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 think. found reference to Bovino reading these magazines. And every other piece on him lists, as I said, a very different inciting incident for his interest in the Border Patrol as a career. Here's 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 at star 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.

Yeah. Like, well, I saw the liberal Hollywood movie about the Border Patrol and I wanted to prove them 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, Skelton, you can just be like, it had Harvey Kytel and Jack Nicholson. Like those are names you've heard before. This will stick in your brain. You don't have to say Skeeter.

I set out to correct those guys rather than being like, well, have you read the works of Skeeter 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? 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 bold over by the impact. Mike was unharmed. The victim's husband sued the Bovino's 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 business. What a clever bit of word play. You kill the woman. Why are we doing wordplay here? Yeah, what's the point, guy? Skip the fucking hallmark poster and just go right to, yeah, I stopped drinking because of a horrible thing that happened as a result of my drinking. Yeah.

That's a weird way to describe it. Murdered a lady, thank you. Yeah. 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 Wittaga 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 wee man. He's a smaller fella, right? And height isn't everything. there's weight classes and stuff. It's not everything in wrestling. It's great for wrestling to be small. Yeah. It can 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 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, it could just be 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, 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 on to 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 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. Yeah. Nobody's like it. That is a very. common bastard trade is that they had

way too much ambition at an early age and then they 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 is Gregory Gregorree. Gregory. Yeah, did you realize he's named Greg? Like, yeah. Sorry to the Greg's out there. I just, it's not even an insult. It's just hard to imagine a Greg being like the mouthpiece of a fascist government.

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 is the mouthpiece of a fascist regime, you know. We literally all have a cousin Greg, and they're all great. My cousin Greg rocks. Except Greg Bovino's cousin has a cousin great. Not so great. Not so great.

Yeah. 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 ask 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 see him.

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 of you. No, I didn't peg him for a huge asshole. Real job to me. Yeah, I didn't think he'd turned into a piece of shit.

Didn't think he was that kind of prick. Thanks, coach. I love it. 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, you know, because just to be interesting at, like, dinner parties.

Yeah, I remember he never stopped reading that book about Reinhard Hydrick. Just love the guy. Right. Like something, you know. Yeah. But no, there's very other than his sister being like, he read Skeeter. Yeah. That one kind of scy.

And his coach being like, I didn't think he was a big enough asshole to be a cop. Yeah. Jason Perry, his wrestling team, made also express surprise at what. had become of Bovino. 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. He 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, for sure he's heard of it. He must not like what he's doing because he's not supposed to act this way. He's 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 O.P. 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 posts 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 Avino. 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 Wataga High Yearbook has you listed is most likely to shit his pants in public.

Now, they don't. Burn. I've seen his yearbook. That's a nice burn. Also, yearbooks don't do that. That's not a thing. Like, no, public school yearbooks not, someone would go to jail.

In the South, 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. Like, hey, Greg, your history teacher thinks that you're a pathetic Nazi punk. No wonder you've 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, I don't think he actually did fail all of his classes. I haven't found the evidence of that. So the 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. And then the last one is that he.

Like kind of weird and specific enough, like having invented Splitsville. It's like, yeah, he had to be banned from pay less shoes. Yeah. 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 Wittaga Pioneers wrestling team's soggy biscuit? Is it still gay to eat semen off a Bojangles biscuit or was that just an 80s thing? Now, again, first off, he was born in seven.

So he wouldn't have been, I mean, yeah, yeah, that works out, I guess. 80s, yeah, that does work out. The timing works out. The Bojegles biscuits makes 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 throw it out shit because they didn't like him. You know, maybe he did stiff 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 town. Yeah, yeah.

And like he's just like. Yeah, because that's way too specific. Yeah, because those are like good and specific. Like, yeah. Those are real specific. He's probably just taking those and being like, these happen to Greg Bevino. 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 microfeesh. Looking for shoe sniffing. Right, microbech in the basement of the shoe store. It's all just shoe store related art. All right, so I'm going to come clean here and say, I like the smell of new shoes. So if you're smelling, if you're at a shoe store, waiting for people to finish trying on shoes.

Right. So are you taking their shoes while their existing shoes while they're trying them on? Because yeah, that's no good. 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. See, the coast is clear. Dad's O'Brien. I'm going to come clean here. I think new shoe, new tennis ball, and new car are underrated, like, synthetic chemical smells that I enjoy.

Like, I will put my nose in a new pair of sneakers that I just open the box on and take a nice deep, deep puff. And I, should I be banned? Yes. Perhaps. Nobody's worn them yet. What's around 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 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. Okay. So. Anyway, his sister describes him as a voracious reader in high school, and I've seen a few other accounts that match this. He liked military history and cowboy novels, particularly the work of Louis L' Moore. 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 again, 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 Heinleyn was an interesting guy, a very influential science fiction writer, one of his books, the Munizs 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 like 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 fashy.

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 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 the 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 Bovino. Sure. So once he graduates high school in 1988, Bovino 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 his 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, Bovino claims Owens had better grades and graduated at the top of the class, but that he was better at P.E. 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. Yeah. 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. 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, crank. A bunch of hungry people walking across the desert, not a fight. Not a battle. Seeing a couple of battles. They don't look like that. You got some 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, oh, that guy's starving to death. Yeah. Because he hasn't eaten in three weeks. Non-combatants, we'll call them.

For non-combatants is a good term for them. 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, you know, children of any law enforcement officer who are gullible enough, this is the same. First of all, first of all, you guys don't know how dangerous it is out there.

And second of all, their dad is actually secretly the sickest marksman. Yeah, he's the best with a gun. Like, it's crazy. They thought he had like super power. Yeah. That's amazing. But it's great. You know it's a certain type of person who lies about that 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 sometimes quotes Monica Langerica, a senior attorney for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, is 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.

and 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, Bevino 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, E.D. 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 of illegal immigrants posed 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 asked to take a photo with Harmon, each standing on opposite sides of a cactus. And... That's just so weird, man. It's so weird.

That's weird guy behavior. What do you mean? What you mean, dude? It was the Biden administration. I think he's trying, he's got to pretend he cares about the environment. 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? Is if you're like, well, they're bad for the environment, you know? And thankfully, Harmon made the very...

Greg? Fuck off. Yeah. Fuck off, Greg. And Harmon made the very good point that, like, he wanted to install a water tank

for that. The reason the sheep are endangers 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 gonna be razors laying 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 like very into animals and animal rights and stuff like that? Like that's not uncommon for those two things to overlap. No, and I think, you know, this may just, this may be Bevino. Maybe there's another version of Greg Bevino who just went into conservation. But also maybe it's just, 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. It's like a naked juice.

It's like what they call. That's like a naked juice flavor. Yeah. Green machine, it is. Yeah. They named themselves after the green juice from naked juice that like sometimes it's real. Like sometimes fine. And sometimes it's so fucking bad.

Have you ever had a bad green juice? I have. I have, man. One of those, yeah, like 7-Eleven green juice can go off. Yeah. Speaking of random products, Robert, it's about that time. Oh, is it time for another ad. You don't want me to keep talking about how naked 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 look 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 that picture somewhere, I am going to have them put that up on the, on the Netflix work. My finest work. Oh, man. All right, everybody.

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To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people would die. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a black black. Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to the A-building on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.

Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. So keep this secret for so many years.

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And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan Cortina-2026 winner Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bob, hi, Matt. Hey, L. Hey, Matt, hey Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.

Listen to two guys, five rings on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. So, Bovino, as I said, really drinks the Border Patrol Kool-Aid. He loves reciting the agency's slogan on her 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 in branded El Centro, the premier sector.

He's the one who considers it that. It is a very busy sector. It's a big, a lot of people come through it. But he's like, no, this is the state of the art. you know, this is the best one. You know, we're the standard from which all the other sectors are set. I appreciated what one journalist for cow matters.org said about this. It's similar to the way states have mottoes 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 a- 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, like, people from Missouri were so dumb that, like, if, they wouldn't believe you unless you showed them something, right? You can't just tell someone like, oh, there's big

boats now. They got to see the boat because they're dumb. Right, right. Don't believe in dinosaurs, that sort of thing. Right, right. Yeah. Calling something the premiere anything is a great, like, weasel, where, like, that's got to be one of the MVP's of, like, bad movies, posters.

Like where the premier crime film. It's like Miller calling itself the champagne of beer. Yeah, okay, guys. No one's going to call it that unless we're joking. The poetry of lying, you know? Yeah. During the Biden years, Bovino 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 to 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 and change at least, repeatedly brought up the threat of undocumented immigrants driving drunk as a reason for aggressive immigration frauds and arrest. Yes. Robert. Wow.

Nothing psychological there. Okay. Okay. That's. Okay, great. That's too good. That's so wild, man. Last year's Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, which is where Bevino, 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 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 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 it 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 and 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 it. Yep. 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 one percent of... It's so much plot. It's so much plot for such a shitty ad. That's like 30 minutes of a Chuck Norris movie. 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? Right. They just get 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.

Yep. 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.

Vino 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, yeah. Retribution for him saying, being a dick, yeah.

Horrendous stuff and being bad. Yeah, for him being a fucked up asshole, but I guess that counts. And it's also, this is retribution. I was fired as retribution for being bad. He kind of admits he's bad at his job in this, right? Because his old claim is that, like,

you've 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 returned to cinder, per calmaters.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. I haven't seen that weed out of the state.

I haven't seen it here or smelled it here since. Ever since. That's 33 pounds. put a dent 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 Cal Matters investigation partnered with evidence in Bellingcat showed that the Border Patrol had no prior knowledge of criminal history of any kind for 77 of 78 arrestees. This was 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 you, 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 like, this was very illegal.

You know, I think this is all very illegal. Slashed. Slashed the tires. They love doing that. They love doing it. What, what, so on what grounds were they arresting them if it wasn't for them having, like, warrants or anything? Here illegally.

Here illegally. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, that's their argument is that, like, they were doing, that's the illegal thing they were doing, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So Minju-

Not 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 Bevino would later spearhead around the country. He 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 gasped 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. His habit of giving answers to questions that present only the other answer is like, well, so then you're incompetent, right? If you didn't know he was in the bill, like, what the fuck was this about, dip shit? We just like saw a crowd and we just like kind of, we were like, oh, shit, we better go there. Border Patrol does.

Was this also when they did the military rage of MacArthur Park in Ellis? Yes, yes, yes, yes, which we should be talking. And he was like, we're giving this back to Ma and Paul 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, dip shit. But again, he knows this. I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow of every violent act has been perpetrated, but I should read this quote from an article by Gabrielle Cannon and 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 L.A., 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 lied to the U.S. District Judge Sarah Elles. about this. That seems fireable, Robert. Should be? It seems fireable to be.

Should be. Doing a violent thing and claiming, they hit me in the head with a rock. And then being like, I love. Such a cop thing to do. Sorry. 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 dipshit is not going to be able to help himself. He was the face man 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 Houser at the end of Starship shit like this serves as a useful distraction. But Vino has gotten to defend his choice of outerware several times in interviews, per global security.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 M-1939-style overcoats or bridgecoats. 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

like Dugie 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, let's take a look at the U.S. military history. Yeah. Yeah, there is something we were talking on Zykeis about how they're thinking about bringing ice to the Winter Olympics.

And there's just a quote from somebody in Italy talking about their prison camps over there, like they're deporting Albanians and taking them to like 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 they're like, yeah, it's almost like we're America as they're like,

Ashism, Touchstone. Jesus, Christ. 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? Yeah. He had made a couple of claims, 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 in your retirement. 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 L.A. Fuck it. Like, um, anyway, that's, that's my read of the Greg Bovino story. Uh, we will, we'll maybe do an update on the fucker if more becomes of him, but it may also just be a thing. Well, 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 plan to.

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. 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. I have a great news.

Molly Conger has a show called Weird Little Guys. It's on Coolzone Media. They figured out how to launch a second. podcast. Incredible. Jack, is there anything you 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 Crack, 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 Lichtenen, 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 my wonderful, 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. Oh, Lord.

We did it. We made it to 2000. What it is. were 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 crack podcast will like call 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 horrockses 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 Sophie lore for you my first ever crush was Einstein's great grandson are you serious? Yeah damn yeah I should have had you on to talk about that 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 bone snapping backwards like Steven Seagal. Yeah. Yeah. No, he definitely knew. And his name is Greg Einstein.

So, Greg Einstein, shout. Simon Einstein, shout out. 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 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. So, okay. 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. Yeah. It's fantastic. Love James. That'll do it, right, Robert? Yep, that'll do it. Holy shit. Bye-bye.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix. dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel,

YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. and immediately the mask came off.

You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. At a Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson,

locked up the members of the board of trustees, including Martin Luther King's senior. It's the true story of protests and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Mena Lick Lamumba. Listen to the A building on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacked black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo.

The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bowen-Yin. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast,

in the lead-up to the Milan Quartina-206 winner Olympic Games, We've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bob, hi Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, boy. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.

Listen to two guys, five rings on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.