Chapter 1: Who is Greg Bovino and what is his significance?
Call 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, yeah. What other titles are there? Do we have titles for like... I don't know. I like the honorable 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 was just like 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 honorable colonel sir and he was like started signing his name on legal documents that way
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 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.
Yeah.
I have some behind me right there.
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Chapter 2: What controversies surround Greg Bovino's career?
When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeart 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. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis.
And at 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 Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba.
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Chapter 3: How did Greg Bovino's upbringing influence his actions?
Would it be better or worse if he was a Craig? 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 Greggs first start showing up? Just not Gregory's, but Greggs. Greggs, 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. 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 Gregory.
Emphasis on the wrong syllable. Yeah. The wrong syllable. Yeah. I recently met a 70 something year old man named Corey. That's upsetting. Are you the first, Corey? Yeah, you are first. Did you start the trend? 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 Gregg history, comma. So I sat down to write this episode. The week Mr. Bovino 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 Rene Good and Alex Preddy.
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Chapter 4: What role did Greg Bovino play in the Border Patrol?
Wow. Wow, guys. Yeah, I think you're right on the money with that, Jack. 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
are Dan Michalopoulos 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. pieces. That's such a West L.A. thing to say to Jack.
It's a I 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.
I know about San Bernardino from the Frank Zappa song, San Bernardino. Oh, my gosh. 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. Not really, but yeah. Baby snakes. Yeah. 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 with Stephen Miller's background or Trump's. And it's like, 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, their background. Yeah, I feel like 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. It's like, no, he's a dick.
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Chapter 5: What incidents highlight Bovino's controversial methods?
Yeah.
So pop 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 pince-nez or whatever and doctor in front of his name in 1910, he believed the most racist things you can imagine. Because he read in the textbook that was like, the devious Czech has these characters.
It's like a D&D sourcebook 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 going to yell that to 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, you know, legislation, but a lot of our modern apparatus of how we think about immigration 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 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 yeah, Greg Bovino's ancestor 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 thing. Last hundred and something years, you know? Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How has Bovino's social media presence impacted his career?
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 Bovinos 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 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 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 people. Was Norman Rockwell, like... Fucked up? I actually don't know. No, 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, 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 and also painting rockwell yeah he was also painting like because he did some paintings of like civil rights uh movement like protests and stuff that were contemporaries it wasn't all but you know i thought i remembered 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 sang Somebody's Watching Me? Yes. I do not believe she was referring to the 80s artist who sang 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.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Bovino's actions on public perception?
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Welcome to the A Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a 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 iHeartRadio 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. 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 preys on vulnerable and trusting people. Your creditor might go up in good.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt. Hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for Greg Bovino?
There's a movie he watches and then like 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 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 and 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, well, we got to deal with that. Skeeter. Say more. Skeleton 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 you. Is it?
Is it his actual name? Yeah, 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, seeing the name Skeeter written in a real publication as opposed to hearing it across a bar. Right. Which is how you're supposed to encounter Skeeter.
Those guys usually don't make it out of the library club. No. They're usually there for life. 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. 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 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 are writing about handguns.
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