Speaker 1: Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that
Speaker 1: is about bad people, and it turns out there's a
Speaker 1: lot of those in the world, only more of them
Speaker 1: every year. It feels like to commiserate with me about
Speaker 1: that point. My guest today, Jack O'Brien, Doctor Jack O'Brien,
Speaker 1: mister Colonel Jack O'Brien, President Jack O'Brien. All of the titles,
Speaker 1: esquire what other titles are there? Do we have titles for?
Speaker 2: Like I don't know, I like colonel the honorable colonel,
Speaker 2: because that that's one that when they give it to you,
Speaker 2: you can just start calling yourself that, Like you just
Speaker 2: did an episode about this dream the colonel dream was
Speaker 2: just like just like somebody called him that one time,
Speaker 2: I think in like New Orleans and they were like,
Speaker 2: we'll make you honorable colonel, and he was like started
Speaker 2: trying his name on legal documents.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, what if I ever if I was ever
Speaker 1: made a Kentucky colonel or whatever other kind of anytime.
Speaker 1: The second I get made a colonel, I am never
Speaker 1: introducing myself any other way, like I.
Speaker 3: Like to think.
Speaker 4: So when we went to the R and C and DNC,
Speaker 4: they had this display of President's shoes. I like to
Speaker 4: think if there was like a podcast version of it,
Speaker 4: it would just be Jack's, Jordan's.
Speaker 2: Jordan's Yeah, I have some behind me right there. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that's very nice with you, Sophie. I don't
Speaker 2: think I can take credit for all podcasts.
Speaker 1: You know what's not nice of me? Maybe I thought
Speaker 1: they're telling you the telling you the life story of
Speaker 1: Greg Bovino. No, I really like the Robert.
Speaker 4: Can you share the working title that you did, because
Speaker 4: it's it's a great working title.
Speaker 1: I just I don't know, you see, I was I
Speaker 1: went back and forth on it because I feel like
Speaker 1: it's too obvious. I just called him America's Kirkland brand
Speaker 1: Gestapo chief.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I love it. I like it.
Speaker 1: I like that there's there's the thing because like there
Speaker 1: are people. He gets angry that people compare Ice to
Speaker 1: the Gesta and he's not with Ice, he's Border Patrol.
Speaker 1: But you know they're all gestapo esque and people get
Speaker 1: angry about them. And there's there's like three different kinds
Speaker 1: of people here. There's like normal people who are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like some Gestapo kind of thing. There's like
Speaker 1: closet Nazis and Trump administration being like, first off, it's
Speaker 1: Gestapo and second.
Speaker 2: Second, you're using the wrong font to make that accusation.
Speaker 1: And then there's guys like me who tries to switch
Speaker 1: between the two. Yeah, just because I've read too many
Speaker 1: books and watch too many documentaries about the Gestapo. Wow,
Speaker 1: we're doing Yes, I'm not being sus.
Speaker 4: Shocked to hear that about you. Robert Evans, host of
Speaker 4: Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, Jack, what do you know about Greg Gregory?
Speaker 1: That time we had a Greg commit like crimes against
Speaker 1: humanity in this country? Now, yeah, it was about it
Speaker 1: was not about time, but I feel like it hasn't
Speaker 1: happened before.
Speaker 2: I think, you know, diversity of first name is really important.
Speaker 2: So I was also welcoming when Greg showed up on
Speaker 2: the scene.
Speaker 1: Finally, finally, some Greg representation in the crimes.
Speaker 2: I host a daily news show called The Daily Zeh as.
Speaker 1: A man, you were a man who needed no introduction.
Speaker 1: But clearly that's irresponsible.
Speaker 2: Well no, but I mean due to that show, do
Speaker 2: have some experience covering the latest happenings. But we do
Speaker 2: that show twice a day, and therefore I don't I
Speaker 2: didn't have a lot of time to dig in to
Speaker 2: his backstory to really, uh see what makes this guy tick?
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, I have a feeling. I I was
Speaker 2: just like kind of uh using context clues and making
Speaker 2: educated guesses about what makes him tick. Yeah, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't know that much other than that he his
Speaker 2: rapid rise and precipitous dismissal.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and that's actually happened once before in his career.
Speaker 1: We're not tad about a little bit. Yeah, not Greg
Speaker 1: Greg again. You can't mean, like like you go back
Speaker 1: to like the other crimes against humanity this country has committed.
Speaker 1: You can't imagine like a greg having some significant role
Speaker 1: in like the displacement of the Native Americans, right, or
Speaker 1: like you can't imagine Greg like Greg's not an old
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it's I have trouble imagine. I can
Speaker 1: imagine a Gregory. I can imagine like a Gregory something
Speaker 1: are there being involved in one of this nation's great crimes.
Speaker 1: I can see that name signed on too, like the
Speaker 1: order to in turn people. But not a Greg you know,
Speaker 1: like there weren't Gregs until very recently. I feel like
Speaker 1: it's certainly not in a position where they could do
Speaker 1: crimes against humanity.
Speaker 2: Like Gregg Gregg. It's like kind of got like a
Speaker 2: gen X like quality to it, where it's, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you can just call me Greg.
Speaker 1: Would it be better worse if he was a Craig,
Speaker 1: Like would we believe him more or less? Because I
Speaker 1: feel like Greg, I do believe Greg doing more than Craig.
Speaker 3: Greg is worse.
Speaker 1: Craig is a is a trustworthy name, you know, Greg.
Speaker 1: There's a little something sketchy about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when did Gregg's first start showing up just not
Speaker 2: Gregory's but Greg.
Speaker 1: Greg It had to have been like the seventies.
Speaker 3: My cousin Greg succession.
Speaker 1: There you go, that's the birth of Greg.
Speaker 2: Greig is a young person's name.
Speaker 4: Further point, but literally in that show, he decides he
Speaker 4: wants to be taken seriously and he's like asks people
Speaker 4: to call him Gregory, but he says it like, uh
Speaker 4: gregor as.
Speaker 2: On the wrong syllable, Yeah, the wrong syllable. Uh Yeah.
Speaker 2: I recently met a seventy something year old man named Corey.
Speaker 2: You're are you the first Corey? And I did? I
Speaker 2: did ask him that, and he didn't think it was funny.
Speaker 2: Cory is such a young person's name. Yeah, yeah, Greg.
Speaker 3: Well, we've all tried to learn about this.
Speaker 4: Joyd hearing more because it's gonna be upsetting.
Speaker 1: I will be over on my end googling historical Greg's
Speaker 1: first Greg History Comma uh so I said to have
Speaker 1: to write this episode the week mister Bovino lost a
Speaker 1: special job dressing like a Naziqual overseeing Border patrol operations
Speaker 1: alongside ice in Minneapolis. He made the news several times
Speaker 1: for statements in the wake of the murders of Rede
Speaker 1: Good and Alex Pretty, and during the first year of
Speaker 1: the Trump administration had generally turned himself into the physical
Speaker 1: embodiment of the regime's violence towards Americans. It's too early
Speaker 1: to say what the future holds for Greg, but given
Speaker 1: that he just took a turn a sin eater for
Speaker 1: the Trump administration, I think it's time we look into
Speaker 1: who this guy is and where he came from. And
Speaker 1: in short, he's not quite the guy I expected. There's
Speaker 1: very little in Bovino's early life and even in most
Speaker 1: of his career with the Border Patrol that would have
Speaker 1: led one to predict he'd have turned into this I'm
Speaker 1: not saying you'd have expected him to be like a
Speaker 1: great guy, but that like the fact that he wound
Speaker 1: up in at this moment in history doing this thing
Speaker 1: is like a little surprising most of his former Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's not. He doesn't seem like he was built for
Speaker 1: this his whole life. And you don't get a lot
Speaker 1: of quotes from his pre people who used to know
Speaker 1: him being like, oh yeah, that makes sense for old Greg,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, most.
Speaker 2: Of more just like they don't really remember him no
Speaker 2: more of like, uh huh that guys doing that. Huh.
Speaker 1: It's the general reaction. It's it's again like if this
Speaker 1: guy in your school who wasn't super bad at anything,
Speaker 1: but wasn't very good at anything and never really stood
Speaker 1: out at anything winds up on the news dragging Americans
Speaker 1: out of their home and tear gassing them in the
Speaker 1: street for no reason. You're like, is he dressed like
Speaker 1: a Nazi?
Speaker 2: Whereas like Stephen Miller is like the James of Nazis,
Speaker 2: Like where everybody in high school was like, this guy
Speaker 2: is going to be Nazi the world?
Speaker 3: Did you just say the le bron James of Nazis.
Speaker 1: I think it's a good comparison, so.
Speaker 2: That he was a standout Nazi from from the very
Speaker 2: earliest ages. People you couldn't miss chosen.
Speaker 1: He was the lebron or Stephen Miller in sixth grade.
Speaker 1: You knew what they were growing up to do. This
Speaker 1: guy is gonna be the best basketball player where ever,
Speaker 1: and this guy's gonna be a fucking Nazi.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, I think you're right money with that, Jack,
Speaker 5: Not really.
Speaker 1: No, there's maybe one piece of evidence, but it's not good.
Speaker 1: So most of the evidence is that he's kind of
Speaker 1: like not the guy you'd expect to have done this.
Speaker 1: Now that said, we don't have a lot about Greg's
Speaker 1: early life. The only journalists who have really dug into
Speaker 1: Bovino's life in a credible way are Dan Mihelopolis and
Speaker 1: Lauren Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Sun Times, and they did
Speaker 1: great work. They did both a podcast and an article
Speaker 1: looking into his backstory. Aside from them, there's just one
Speaker 1: Daily Mail article that talks to his sister, and so
Speaker 1: we have a lot from his sister, who I don't
Speaker 1: consider the most credible witness about this guy. Right, So
Speaker 1: there's just not a ton of detail. And then there's
Speaker 1: some sketchier sources on the matter, so we got some
Speaker 1: open questions still. That said Greg was born on March
Speaker 1: twenty seventh, nineteen seventy in San Bernardino, California, which I
Speaker 1: bet you didn't call San Berndino Baby.
Speaker 2: You know that's good I didn't because I don't know.
Speaker 2: I cannot differentiate any like any of those la.
Speaker 1: He's the pieces. That's such a West La thing to say, too, Jack, It's.
Speaker 2: A I'm bad at LA stuff too.
Speaker 1: I'm just like I.
Speaker 2: I grew up on the East Coast and I'm just
Speaker 2: like San.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Inland Empire, Jack Inland Empire.
Speaker 1: In about San Berndino from the Frank Zappa song San Bernandino,
Speaker 1: And hearing that Greg Bobino was born in San Berdino
Speaker 1: makes me also think of the Frank Zappa song Baby Snakes,
Speaker 1: because at this point he's a baby snake, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and those are bad right they can well really but
Speaker 1: yeah baby snakes. Sure, yeah, absolutely, It's not their fault.
Speaker 1: They're just snakes. But yes, yes, he's born there. And
Speaker 1: because he would embark on a career of at and
Speaker 1: facilitating the brutalization of immigrants, a lot has been made
Speaker 1: of the immigration history of his own family. And I
Speaker 1: have some qualms with this because you're mostly bringing this
Speaker 1: up to be like you're hurting these people, yet a
Speaker 1: generation or two ago your family was in the same situation.
Speaker 1: Can't you see why that's fucked up? And my answer
Speaker 1: to that is no, they can't. They're bad people, right,
Speaker 1: Like It's like, at a certain point, are you like
Speaker 1: you could again people do this thing with Stephen Miller's
Speaker 1: background or Trump's and it's like, yeah, I mean they're bad.
Speaker 1: They don't care. They don't care, they're bad people.
Speaker 2: They suck Like, oh, that didn't work pointing out the
Speaker 2: hypoglypsy of the behavior their background.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel.
Speaker 2: Like a three million time we do it, it's just
Speaker 2: gonna like break through it and be like a damn
Speaker 2: and they'll be like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the too many people believe their moms when
Speaker 1: they were like that bully. You know, if that bully
Speaker 1: knew he was hurting you, he'd feel bad, and it's like, right,
Speaker 1: he's a dick. That's not how they work. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's also just like, yeah, basically every white person,
Speaker 1: if you go back two generations, has like an immigration
Speaker 1: story in this country because it's the United States. That's
Speaker 1: kind of how it happened here for most people. But
Speaker 1: as you might have guessed from the name, the Bavinos
Speaker 1: were originally Italian. In nineteen oh nine, Michelle Bovino, who
Speaker 1: is Greg's great grandfather, left the village of Alprigliano in
Speaker 1: the mountains of southern Italy. His home was racked with
Speaker 1: poverty and dominated by organized criminal cartels, much like certain countries.
Speaker 1: Our administration doesn't think he should be sending us immigrants today,
Speaker 1: so it is a pretty direct comparison.
Speaker 2: Not a popular source.
Speaker 1: Of people back then, right, No, no, they were not.
Speaker 1: The United States not thrilled these people are coming over.
Speaker 1: So Michel, who I'm sure was immediately called Michael as
Speaker 1: soon as you can't be going by that here, left
Speaker 1: his wife and kids behind. So they are staying back
Speaker 1: in Italy, and I guess he's sending them back money
Speaker 1: as he seeks to make a life for himself in
Speaker 1: the United States. So he's doing that for years until
Speaker 1: this takes a while, until in May of nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 1: there's a panic over immigration in the halls of power
Speaker 1: in the United States, and this was you know, the
Speaker 1: result of kind of a long simmering pot. From the
Speaker 1: early eighteen hundreds, most immigration into the US had been
Speaker 1: Western and Northern Europeans, aka the whitest of the white people.
Speaker 1: And we had some issues with some of them, right,
Speaker 1: There's some like, oh, a welshman's here now, but like
Speaker 1: you know, for the most part, it's like, well, they're
Speaker 1: all pretty We're all pretty white, right, these people. You know,
Speaker 1: not to say that nobody faced bigotry when they came here,
Speaker 1: but they're all you know, this is like the founding
Speaker 1: stock and the ideas of people by that point in time,
Speaker 1: by the time you hit the eighteen hundreds, and by
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundred, shits starting
Speaker 1: to shift. Immigrants are now coming more from Eastern and
Speaker 1: Southern Europe, where the white people are not quite as white.
Speaker 1: The first twenty or so years of the nineteen hundreds
Speaker 1: also coincided with the largest search in immigration in US history.
Speaker 1: Up to that point, eugenics was beginning to become a
Speaker 1: popular topic of discussion, and among educated racists, it was
Speaker 1: believe that many different European nations were also effectively different races.
Speaker 1: Per an article in the Migration Policy Institute, The influential
Speaker 1: eugenicist Charles Davenport considered Italians prone to crimes of personal violence,
Speaker 1: while Jews were characterized by intense individualism and ideals of
Speaker 1: gain at the cost of any interest. Since eugenicists believe
Speaker 1: individual races possess different characteristics and abilities, Davenport argued, the
Speaker 1: government should be careful not to adulterate our national germ
Speaker 1: plasm with socially unfit traits.
Speaker 2: And you know, and what this was in what small
Speaker 2: corner of the internet. Oh wait, this was in academia.
Speaker 1: This is this is in Congress at this point, I mean, this.
Speaker 2: Is it was so popular, Like Americans don't understand how
Speaker 2: popular that was in the early twentieth century. If you've
Speaker 2: seen a picture with a man with like a stethoscope
Speaker 2: or a fucking pince nez or whatever and doctor in
Speaker 2: front of his name. In nineteen ten, he believed the
Speaker 2: most racist things you can imagine because he read it
Speaker 2: in the text book that was like the dvs Czech
Speaker 2: has these characters like a D and D source book
Speaker 2: where it's like, oh, they get plus two to strike,
Speaker 2: you know, like that's literally how these people are like
Speaker 2: learning this shit. It's in textbooks, and it's in the
Speaker 2: textbooks that our congressmen are reading, and they're going to
Speaker 2: yell at too about all of the Italians that are
Speaker 2: coming into the country. Enter the Dillingham Commission, which was
Speaker 2: set up by Congress to study the consequences of immigration.
Speaker 2: It released report in nineteen oh nine, that's right after,
Speaker 2: but two years after Michelle came to the United States
Speaker 2: that argued northern and Western Europeans were just kind of
Speaker 2: better people from the other parts of Europe, and it
Speaker 2: suggested the Dillingham Report suggested a wide range of policies
Speaker 2: to discourage immigration from unworthy places, including literacy tests and
Speaker 2: racial quotas. Right, that's where a lot of this stuff,
Speaker 2: you know, is when America really starts thinking about immigration
Speaker 2: and the border in a very modern way. You know,
Speaker 2: there'd been panics over it before, and you know, legislation,
Speaker 2: but a lot of our modern apparatus of how we
Speaker 2: think about immigration, of how we think about white genocide,
Speaker 2: and that sort of all starts right in this period
Speaker 2: of time. And to make a long story short, the
Speaker 2: Dillingham Commission releases that reported nineteen eleven. You know, things
Speaker 2: still move slowly in the halls of power, but this
Speaker 2: eventually culminates in nineteen twenty four in the Immigration Act,
Speaker 2: which restricted immigration in an attempt to ensure most deriving
Speaker 2: immigrants were from the good places.
Speaker 1: For the MPI, it closed the door in almost all
Speaker 1: New Asian immigration and shut out most European Jews and
Speaker 1: other refugees fleeing fascism and the horrors of the Holocaust
Speaker 1: in Europe. One of the most restrictive immigration laws in
Speaker 1: US history, it played a key role in any of
Speaker 1: the previous era of largely unrestricted immigration. So this is
Speaker 1: when immigration as like a modern concept really gets started.
Speaker 1: And Greg Bevino's ancestor, this is just.
Speaker 2: A relevant context for people who are like, this is
Speaker 2: not what America is about.
Speaker 1: Well, it's kind of been the way we have it
Speaker 1: for a while in the last one hundred and something years.
Speaker 1: And Greg Bavino's ancestor knew that this posts a threat
Speaker 1: to his plan because he's making money and he's sending
Speaker 1: it over to Italy. But his plan is I want
Speaker 1: to bring my family with me right to the lane
Speaker 1: of opportunity at some point, and he sees this Act
Speaker 1: to get passed and He's like, shit, that's about to
Speaker 1: get a lot harder. So within days of the Immigration
Speaker 1: Act passing, he files paperwork to start the process of
Speaker 1: becoming a citizen. Once this process was completed in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven, he brought his family over and they became
Speaker 1: citizens through a process known as chain migration. Here's how
Speaker 1: The Sun Times explains what happened after Michelle was naturalized
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty seven. He was reunited with his wife
Speaker 1: and four children and at Pennsylvania Cold Company Town after
Speaker 1: their arrival on the steamship the SS Giuseppe Verde Record Show.
Speaker 1: Then the kids, including Vincenzo twelve, Gregory Bovino's future grandfather,
Speaker 1: automatically benefited from a derivative citizenship law for minors. Luigia
Speaker 1: would become a naturalized citizen. So all is it's, you know,
Speaker 1: chain migration is kind of exactly the thing that they're
Speaker 1: trying to stop now. It's to be part of why
Speaker 1: they want to reverse some of the citizenships that have
Speaker 1: been granted, because a lot of them are granted in
Speaker 1: ways that are very related to this right, right, and
Speaker 1: it's what they want to stop because they want to
Speaker 1: stop families from coming over here and getting larger.
Speaker 2: They've just they've benefited from this random crapshoot of laws
Speaker 2: and everyone did.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They don't want anybody else to get lucky like they did.
Speaker 1: Right, And they don't want any other ethnic groups, as
Speaker 1: they see it, or racial groups to come here and
Speaker 1: start breeding, right, which is what Italians did. You know,
Speaker 1: It's what everybody did. It's kind of the entire point
Speaker 1: of the country, you know.
Speaker 2: Kind of the whole deal. The melting pot is a
Speaker 2: very chaste way of saying a lot of people came
Speaker 2: here and started fucking each.
Speaker 1: Other pot, right, and.
Speaker 2: Everything kind of mixed together. I do love how rigorously
Speaker 2: Italian everything. It's an incredible name of the boat that
Speaker 2: they came over all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just Agenzo. Yeah, they were nearly out of pizza
Speaker 1: by the time they hit the dops. Yes, I know.
Speaker 1: The Trump administration has cited the nineteen twenty four immigration
Speaker 1: law as an example of the kind of reforms they
Speaker 1: seek to make. They've also repeatedly cited chain migration stories
Speaker 1: like this as an example of things like why birthright
Speaker 1: citizenship and Juwsoli need to be revisited. For his part,
Speaker 1: Baveno does not seem interested in his family background, and
Speaker 1: I don't know that it was much of a factor
Speaker 1: in his raising. For him, the most influential thing that
Speaker 1: happened in nineteen twenty four may not have even been
Speaker 1: the Immigration Act because that is also the year the
Speaker 1: Border Patrol was created, and that's going to be Greg
Speaker 1: Bavino's whole life. So, like I said, he's born in
Speaker 1: San Bordino because his father had just been drafted to
Speaker 1: fight in Vietnam. So don't worry. Like my native Inland
Speaker 1: Empire people, they don't stay very long. They're just stationed
Speaker 1: on a military base nearby, and two years later, when
Speaker 1: his father gets discharged, the family moves back east to
Speaker 1: Blowing Rock, North Carolina, which is the real name of
Speaker 1: a place. Don't make fun of it, you know.
Speaker 2: Blowing Rock, North Carolina.
Speaker 4: When you first mentioned San Bernardino, I was like confused
Speaker 4: because he doesn't give big Inland Empire energy.
Speaker 1: No, he's not an Inland Empire guy. No, he's there
Speaker 1: two years.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so this this makes more sense.
Speaker 2: He does give Blowing Rock energy.
Speaker 1: I do. I do kind of wonder is there any
Speaker 1: and he doesn't say anything about this, so maybe I'm
Speaker 1: reading into it. Maybe two years isn't enough time. But
Speaker 1: I've lived in parts of uh, you know, the the
Speaker 1: deep rural areas where oh, you didn't come here to
Speaker 1: you were two. You're not really from here, boy, you know.
Speaker 1: So I don't know if that was any part of
Speaker 1: his background or not.
Speaker 2: New family.
Speaker 1: Coming up here. That was twenty years ago.
Speaker 2: Mark called him Hollywood, here comes Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could see that, but they don't say anything
Speaker 1: about that. That's purely a head cannon for fucking Greg Bavino.
Speaker 1: And to be fair, probably not the case because his
Speaker 1: dad's side of the family's just come here, but his
Speaker 1: mom's side of the family goes back at least they say,
Speaker 1: eight generations in the Blowing Rock area. The Bavenos had
Speaker 1: two more children, Natalie and Nicholas, born in seventy four
Speaker 1: and seventy nine, after moving back to their part of
Speaker 1: the country, and one gets the feeling that young Greg
Speaker 1: may have benefited a bit from only child syndrome, because
Speaker 1: he's a good bit older than his siblings, right closer
Speaker 1: to his sister than his brother, but he's got some
Speaker 1: oldest sibling memories. At least his younger sister, Natalie is
Speaker 1: one of our few semi detailed sources in Greg's childhood.
Speaker 1: Although she seems to idolize her brother and I don't
Speaker 1: credit her with a lot of skepticism or scrutiny about him.
Speaker 1: She describes their early childhood as Rockwellian, which means reminiscent
Speaker 1: of the paintings of Dorman Rockwell, right, and is also
Speaker 1: based I think, often on some misunderstandings of them. But
Speaker 1: like she's thinking of like those nice paintings of kids
Speaker 1: hiking in the woods and you know, idyllic Christmases with
Speaker 1: the family gathered around the fire and stuff, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's what she means. There were about a thing.
Speaker 2: Norman Rockwell like fucked up.
Speaker 1: I actually know he's pretty good politics. I mean he's
Speaker 1: not perfect. There's some stuff you know, you find with
Speaker 1: any illustrator of that period. They did some uncomfortable illustrations
Speaker 1: if you look back far enough, right, But no, he
Speaker 1: did a lot of He was like super pro integration,
Speaker 1: super pro civil rights movement. Like he was just like the.
Speaker 2: Carefully curated version of the paintings that make it happen
Speaker 2: to be curated by white supremacists.
Speaker 1: As is often the case, a bunch of white supremacists
Speaker 1: have taken his paintings to be like, this was the
Speaker 1: ideal America before everything got when Norman Rockwell was just
Speaker 1: painting pretty things.
Speaker 5: You know, Norman Rockwell, Yeah, he was also painting like
Speaker 5: because he did some paintings of like civil rights movement,
Speaker 5: like protests and stuff that were contemporaries.
Speaker 1: It wasn't all but you know that. Yeah, they forgot.
Speaker 2: So you're sure she was referring to Norman Rockwell when
Speaker 2: she said Rockwellian and not the eighties artist who's saying
Speaker 2: somebody's watching me.
Speaker 1: Yes, I do not believe she's referring to the eighties
Speaker 1: artists who sick somebody's watching me. Thank you though for
Speaker 1: bringing that up.
Speaker 3: Norman fucking rock Well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were about a thousand people in their hometown,
Speaker 1: which she describes as literally perfect. So again she has
Speaker 1: these idyllic memories of their early childhood. The Bavino's benefited
Speaker 1: from a tight family and an extensive one, right. They
Speaker 1: have a lot of in laws and relatives, and they
Speaker 1: had money too. They're doing very well for a while.
Speaker 1: Their father had started a successful bar, the Library Club,
Speaker 1: And the reason why it's such a big deal here
Speaker 1: is that their town is like the lone wet county
Speaker 1: in the middle of a bunch of dry counties. So
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of bars in town. And it's kind
Speaker 1: of like a vacation town. So it's both where people
Speaker 1: come on vacation, but also if anyone nearby wants to drink,
Speaker 1: they have to come to Blowing Rock, right, and the
Speaker 1: library Club's like one of the biggest places they're going
Speaker 1: to go to.
Speaker 2: You can make a good living by having the brilliant innovation.
Speaker 2: We are in a town where I can open a bar,
Speaker 2: and no other towns around those over the bar. I
Speaker 2: bet people will drink here.
Speaker 1: I bet people will drink here. And they different did.
Speaker 2: Because people talk about like being able to like how
Speaker 2: you know, previous generations you could buy a house for
Speaker 2: this and like everything was so much cheaper. It was
Speaker 2: also so easy to like succeed.
Speaker 1: Backless less ideas had been had, you know, Like I
Speaker 1: don't know, I think people will use plastic in the
Speaker 1: future room getting into plastics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you become a millionaire.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it was easier. It was easier most of
Speaker 1: the sources I find out. I will say, though, Jack,
Speaker 1: I don't know that we fully understand how the Library
Speaker 1: Bar made its money. Most of the sources I find
Speaker 1: just describe it as a bar, and weirdly enough, the
Speaker 1: thing that made me think maybe something more was going
Speaker 1: on here was that interview I found with Natalie and
Speaker 1: the Daily Mail where I don't think she's trying to
Speaker 1: let on that her dad was a criminal, but that's
Speaker 1: kind of how it sounds, because here's a quote from her.
Speaker 1: In those early years, the family was living the good life,
Speaker 1: thanks largely to the success of the Library Club, and
Speaker 1: here's Natalie. The bouncers would drop huge sacks of money
Speaker 1: off stacks and stacks. He did incredibly well. The family
Speaker 1: was able to buy their house into both they'd ride
Speaker 1: on Wataga Lake and the membership in a country club
Speaker 1: where they ran a side business, a drink stand on
Speaker 1: the ninth hole. And that's not how.
Speaker 5: We don't come to your own with sands of money.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've known a few bar owners and none of them
Speaker 1: have the bouncers drop sacks of money off at their houses.
Speaker 1: That's your dad was moving something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was moving.
Speaker 3: On the ninth hole. Is such a fantastic detail.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, Well, we were basically millionaires for the time
Speaker 2: because he had a drink stand on the ninth hole
Speaker 2: of a golf course.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: the way you bribe the judges about it.
Speaker 2: They droven ice cream truck getting sallar.
Speaker 1: You know, the bouncer's dropped sacks of money off at
Speaker 1: the house as is normal. Maybe she's not remembering things right,
Speaker 1: but that sounds sketchy as a fuck to me.
Speaker 3: And speaking of stacks and stacks at stacks.
Speaker 1: Speaking of sketchy as FUCKO, here's the sponsors of our show,
Speaker 1: and we're back. So yeah, I don't know. Greg grows
Speaker 1: up to be fair. Whatever the truth is about their dad,
Speaker 1: the kids didn't grow up aware of anything sketchy. Greg
Speaker 1: spends his early childhood hunting fish and and exploring the woods.
Speaker 1: His parents got him his first shotgun at age eight.
Speaker 1: He reads hunting magazines voraciously, which is how he encountered
Speaker 1: his first pieces of pro border patrol propaganda. And this
Speaker 1: is interesting because I got a different answer. Every other
Speaker 1: article I read was talked about a thing we'll discuss later.
Speaker 1: There's a movie he watches and the like, and this
Speaker 1: is the first time he encountered the border patrol and
Speaker 1: it's actually talking to his sister that the Daily Mail
Speaker 1: gets this piece of information that I think might be
Speaker 1: more accurate, because it feels more accurate to me, at least.
Speaker 1: The hunting publications featured columns written by old time border
Speaker 1: patrol agents such as Skeeter Skelton and Charles Askins. The
Speaker 1: young boy had found his calling. He thought it was
Speaker 1: the wild West. Natalie Babino to The Daily Mail, it
Speaker 1: was like a true frontier. It was those old timers
Speaker 1: that inspired that in him. And that is more believable
Speaker 1: to me than the other story, just because, like I
Speaker 1: too was a young boy once, and I've read a
Speaker 1: lot of similar articles and a lot of similar magazines.
Speaker 1: I could see that happening to this kid.
Speaker 2: You're familiar with the works of Skeeter Skelton.
Speaker 1: You know what, Jack I am. That's what we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about next. Because the second, as someone with
Speaker 1: a comedy background, the second I read the name Skeeter Skeleton,
Speaker 1: like we gotta deal with that, ask Skeeter, Peter.
Speaker 2: Skeeter Skelton fucking rules, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: What is that short for? Like skeet Tropolis? Like, what
Speaker 1: the fuck?
Speaker 3: Skeeter?
Speaker 1: I've known a couple Skeeters, but I never thought it
Speaker 1: was a given Christian name. I'm gonna be honest, is it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what it seems like. It's written on everything that
Speaker 1: it's it's byeline. I don't know. I don't know the
Speaker 1: man's birth certificate, Jack Skeeter Skelton. It's just weird hearing
Speaker 1: the name, seeing the name Skeeter written and a real
Speaker 1: publication is supposed to hearing it across the bar, which
Speaker 1: is how you're supposed to.
Speaker 2: Those guys usually don't make it out of the library
Speaker 2: club are usually there. They do not.
Speaker 4: I just am thinking of that that Nickelodeon show called
Speaker 4: Cousin Skeeter from like the nineties.
Speaker 1: Oh geez, I don't even remember that one. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: read the name Skeeter Skelton. I had to look into
Speaker 1: it more. And he was a lawman from Hereford, Texas
Speaker 1: who served in a bunch of different coproles. He did everything.
Speaker 1: He was in everything from the Amarilla Police to Border Patrol,
Speaker 1: to DEA to customs. And he starts writing for Shooting Times,
Speaker 1: which is a magazine that still exists in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 1: And again it's one of those like no one had
Speaker 1: had the idea to have a magazine about shooting. So
Speaker 1: they start having one in sixty six and he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna write about handguns. It's like, no one had
Speaker 1: that idea before. So he goes from pitching them to
Speaker 1: becoming the handgun editor in the next year because they're like,
Speaker 1: what a great idea people in America writing about handguns.
Speaker 1: You're a genius, Skeeter, And he had.
Speaker 2: Guy whose nickname is just a slang term for mosquitoes,
Speaker 2: as a genius.
Speaker 1: Oh God, Skeeter Skelton. Yeah, he's the handgun editor of
Speaker 1: Shooting Times until his death in nineteen ninety eight. If
Speaker 1: you want to know his main claim to fame, he's
Speaker 1: generally credited with reviving interest in the forty four special round,
Speaker 1: which is the bullet Dirty Harry uses. So without Skeeter Skelton,
Speaker 1: we may never have Dirty Harry.
Speaker 2: He popularized it before Dirty Harry.
Speaker 1: Oh he's not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, he's got like Dirty Harry actually stole that
Speaker 2: ship from me. I do know, I got it. So
Speaker 2: we're doing a new version of TDZ where we dive
Speaker 2: into icons. We just did a Marilyn Monroe episode and
Speaker 2: we found this character named George Solitaire, who I can't
Speaker 2: stop thinking about and talking about because he had a
Speaker 2: claim to fame. Uh, he was just Joe Demaggio was
Speaker 2: like drinking buddy, and his claim to fame was that
Speaker 2: he invented the phrase Splitsville and Dollsville. And he was
Speaker 2: like he had a whole origin story about it that
Speaker 2: because he was born in Brownsville and moved to Bronxville.
Speaker 1: That's just he thought about vil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like Bill in a Blood Yeah. But otherwise he
Speaker 2: was just a guy who got drunk with Joe DiMaggio
Speaker 2: and he's like all over the historical record, and he
Speaker 2: was like love it. Scalper was just like like that,
Speaker 2: having a claim to fame that is that specific and
Speaker 2: stupid is just like my hat's off to like what
Speaker 2: a weird world?
Speaker 5: What.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things the second someone tells you that,
Speaker 1: they're like, you know, I kept up with that word Splitsville.
Speaker 1: You're like you must have would claim to have done that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not a thing anyone would pretend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like to be like I popularized this one round,
Speaker 2: that's kind of shit.
Speaker 1: It's kind of if an ancient man came up to
Speaker 1: me and said I made the forty four. Popular'd be like,
Speaker 1: you probably did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess, I don't know. I would like about
Speaker 2: to lying and like get it to just find a lie.
Speaker 1: So specially there you go.
Speaker 2: People, nobody would ever be like, what, Okay, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: guess so that that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll believe it. And so I haven't
Speaker 1: had the time because he wrote articles for twenty something years,
Speaker 1: I haven't had the time to go through all A.
Speaker 1: Skeeter's old articles on shooting times. But I found you
Speaker 1: one article and I read.
Speaker 2: And I read the first.
Speaker 1: Paragraph of it, Jack, And this kind of tells you
Speaker 1: all you need to know about what young Gregory might
Speaker 1: have picked up reading Skeeter's columns.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Almost all the objections to the three point fifty seven
Speaker 1: magnum as a police weapon come from city police departments.
Speaker 1: It is argued, with some justification, that an officer who
Speaker 1: fires a magnum in a crowded city is more likely
Speaker 1: to kill innocent, non combativets than he would be if
Speaker 1: armed with a standard thirty eight special, Not much as
Speaker 1: given to the fact that the same officer runs a
Speaker 1: hell of a lot more risk of being killed himself
Speaker 1: when his low powered thirty eight fails to put an
Speaker 1: armed opponent out of action.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so just.
Speaker 1: Like, look, some city cops say, this bigger bullet gets
Speaker 1: regular people killed because it goes through doors and stuff, right,
Speaker 1: but have you thought about the danger of not killing
Speaker 1: a guy?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Out action?
Speaker 1: I love? And you see also because this was this
Speaker 1: is actually like was published right after his death, but
Speaker 1: he wrote it a little before, so this was published
Speaker 1: like posthumously in eighty eight. But you can see the
Speaker 1: early birth of a lot of the warrior ethos, like
Speaker 1: warrior cop shit here the whole well, you know, you
Speaker 1: could say, you know, an officer was more likely to
Speaker 1: kill innocent non combatives as opposed to like innocent people,
Speaker 1: innocent civilities. Nona could have done something right, right.
Speaker 2: Everything of the assumption that someone's attacking you. That's how
Speaker 2: you leave the door in the morning. Yeah, everyone is
Speaker 2: entering on that situation right with It's it's worth the
Speaker 2: risk to have a gun that shoots through four people
Speaker 2: in a crowded urban environment exactly.
Speaker 1: And so this is the kind of shit he's reading
Speaker 1: as a kid, Like the early precursors to a lot
Speaker 1: of that is what Greg Bavino is the fact that like,
Speaker 1: as like a nine or ten or eleven year old,
Speaker 1: he's reading yes, something like because he was born in seventy,
Speaker 1: so he would have been born like a couple of
Speaker 1: years after this guy started writing for Shooting Times. So
Speaker 1: from the time he's a little kid, he's reading stuff
Speaker 1: like this, like he's almost patient zero for this, like
Speaker 1: warrior cop ethos bullshit, like he may have been. He's
Speaker 1: among the very first kids who got hit with this
Speaker 1: stuff as a child, you know, he's not an earlier generation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: right into the bloodstream and it just takes over as
Speaker 1: far as we can tell. So Natalie's interview is the
Speaker 1: only place I found reference to Bavino reading these magazines,
Speaker 1: and every other piece on him lists as I said,
Speaker 1: a very different, inciting incident for his interest in the
Speaker 1: Border Patrol as a career. Here's how the Chicago Sun
Speaker 1: Times describes it. Bavino has said that he was inspired
Speaker 1: to join the Border Patrol when he saw a movie
Speaker 1: called The Border that came out when he was just eleven,
Speaker 1: produced by a distant cousin of his mom. It just
Speaker 1: starred Jack Nicholson and Harvey kai Tell as agents, but
Speaker 1: the end, Bvino was crestfallen that the movie portrayed the
Speaker 1: agents as bad guys and said that he was moved
Speaker 1: to join the Border Patrol in nineteen six ninety six
Speaker 1: to show that he was the opposite a good border cop.
Speaker 1: Making the border secure is my personal responsibility, Bavino said
Speaker 1: on a podcast in twenty twenty one. And I wonder
Speaker 1: is it that maybe he saw the movie and then
Speaker 1: started reading the magazines. But his sisters describes the magazines
Speaker 1: as kind of the first thing. So is it that
Speaker 1: Bovino doesn't want to admit that, like, well, I read
Speaker 1: some magazines by some Border Patrol guys and thinks that
Speaker 1: because this is a more convenient right wing, modern right
Speaker 1: wing narrative, right that, Like well, I saw the liberal
Speaker 1: Hollywood movie about the Border Patrol, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: prove him wrong, you know, which is kind of what
Speaker 1: I suspect.
Speaker 2: And it's like, you're instead of having to rely on
Speaker 2: people wanting to learn more about Skeeter Skelton, you can
Speaker 2: just br like it had Harvey Kaye Tell and Jack
Speaker 2: Nicholson like that, those are names you've heard before. This
Speaker 2: will stick in your brain. I don't have to say,
Speaker 2: Skeeter correct those guys, rather than being like, well, have
Speaker 2: you read the works of skied Skill? No? Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: a name you just made up?
Speaker 1: Man, Yes, it's not a real guy. So the idyllic
Speaker 1: perfect part of Greg's childhood also ends the same year
Speaker 1: the Border comes out. When he's eleven, his father drives
Speaker 1: home drunk one night from work. I'm sure it wasn't
Speaker 1: the first night, can't have been right, and he winds
Speaker 1: up crashing his truck directly into a car, killing a
Speaker 1: young woman and brutally injuring her husband. They were twenty
Speaker 1: six and twenty nine years old, respectively. It was a
Speaker 1: bad crash. There was no sign that Bevino tried to
Speaker 1: break before hitting the other car, which the local paper
Speaker 1: described as bold. Over by the impact, Mike was unharmed.
Speaker 1: The victim's husband sued the Bovenos and sued Mike's bar
Speaker 1: and uncle. Ultimately, Mike pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge
Speaker 1: of death by motor vehicle, but the judge in his
Speaker 1: case ordered he'd be sent to state prison a treatment
Speaker 1: for his alcoholism, and he stays there for four months.
Speaker 1: There's an article written about him While he's in jail,
Speaker 1: he tells the Charlotte Observer that he'd long struggled with
Speaker 1: his drinking and that he'd gotten drunk the night of
Speaker 1: the crash because his wife had begged him to quit
Speaker 1: sauce and that had made him angry. He promised not
Speaker 1: to do so again after getting out of jail, saying
Speaker 1: I've got a dead woman on my hands. Getting dead
Speaker 1: drunk just isn't worth it. I don't know how else
Speaker 1: you frame that, but that's not the best way. Maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know. The lawsuit destroys this.
Speaker 2: Clever bit of word play.
Speaker 1: We need you kill the woman. Why are we doing
Speaker 1: word play here?
Speaker 2: We could just skip the fucking Hallmark poster And yeah,
Speaker 2: I stopped drinking a horrible thing as a result of
Speaker 2: my drinking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a weird way to describe it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just I killed a woman would have been enough to say.
Speaker 1: The lawsuit destroyed his business, obviously forcing him to sell it.
Speaker 1: Betty decided she'd had enough and divorced him after this,
Speaker 1: gaining soul custody of their three children. Mike left the
Speaker 1: family and settled in New Mexico. Greg was fourteen when
Speaker 1: his dad left so this takes a while. You have
Speaker 1: to imagine this is a bad three years. And he
Speaker 1: enters high school right around the same time divorce was finalized.
Speaker 1: He was not recalled by his peers as an overly
Speaker 1: memorable student, right, He's not someone who really makes a mark.
Speaker 1: When he started it would talk a high school. He
Speaker 1: joined the wrestling team. And if you have seen photos
Speaker 1: of Greg around other people, he's not a large man, right, No, man,
Speaker 1: he's he's a smaller fella, right. And height isn't everything.
Speaker 1: There's weight a classes and stuff. It's not everything. And
Speaker 1: wrestling it's.
Speaker 2: Great for wrestling to be small.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it can, it can be handy. But he's also,
Speaker 1: even in that world, kind of small, right, And he
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to have developed in other ways to compensate
Speaker 1: for that. And everyone who talks about his time in
Speaker 1: wrestling is very polite about this, but he was not
Speaker 1: good at it. Sometimes people actually talk to his old
Speaker 1: high school coach, who it seems like a very nice
Speaker 1: man because when they bring up was he good, he's like, well,
Speaker 1: when he was, you know, he wasn't the biggest boy.
Speaker 1: He wasn't the biggest guy. But at the end of
Speaker 1: his senior year, he got the Most Improved award, which
Speaker 1: is something even though the team had an unusually tear season,
Speaker 1: which is a very sweet way to try to describe
Speaker 1: this boy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, our team got so shitty that he was actually
Speaker 2: like kind of par for the course for our tea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of what he's saying.
Speaker 2: How I am just curious, now that you've researched three
Speaker 2: thousand of the worst people to ever live, how common
Speaker 2: is the like not remembered versus like, oh yeah, I
Speaker 2: remember that shit ahead.
Speaker 1: Like mostly you know, generally, when we come across a
Speaker 1: guy who there's not much about their childhood or background,
Speaker 1: it's because they were like some weird con person the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, and it's like they just hopped onto the
Speaker 1: historic record when they were thirty and we don't know
Speaker 1: what the fuck was going on previously. Yeah, or it's
Speaker 1: someone who's such a minor weirdo or creep that there's
Speaker 1: just not a lot, you know, no one, no major
Speaker 1: you know, they haven't been covered by a major newspaper,
Speaker 1: no one's dug into them that much. With someone like Greg,
Speaker 1: this is it's not common. They have this little We
Speaker 1: actually talked to a bunch of their classmates in Peers.
Speaker 1: That's the weird thing.
Speaker 4: The one thing that we that we typically come across
Speaker 4: that's like a common commonality is like somebody who has
Speaker 4: crazy ambition, and that's what people remember. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 4: I'm not hearing that here for Greg at all.
Speaker 1: Nobody says that about about because that's.
Speaker 4: Like that that is a very common bastard tradi is
Speaker 4: that they had way too much ambition at an early
Speaker 4: age and then they, you know, become like Jeff Bezos
Speaker 4: or whatever.
Speaker 2: They were like, Yeah, yeah, he was voted person least
Speaker 2: likely for you to be asking this question about them
Speaker 2: because he thought he wasn't gonna do ship.
Speaker 1: Because Greg, seriously, Greg.
Speaker 2: Gregg, Well, first of all, Greg, Greg, Yeah, did.
Speaker 1: You realize his named Greg? Sorry, the Greg's out there.
Speaker 1: I just it's hard to It's not even an insult.
Speaker 1: It's just hard to imagine a Greg being like the
Speaker 1: mouthpiece of a.
Speaker 4: Fashion I do literally have a cousin and he is delightful.
Speaker 4: Cousin Greg, if you're listening to this, I love you,
Speaker 4: cousin Greg.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd have trouble imagining your cousin Greg is the
Speaker 1: mouthpiece of a fascist regime.
Speaker 2: You know, we literally all cousin Greg. They're all great,
Speaker 2: My cousin Greg rocks except Greg. Bavino's cousin has a
Speaker 2: cousin Greg. Not so great.
Speaker 3: Not so great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Greg's coach said this about him. Quote. Greg
Speaker 1: was not bashful, He had no problems asking the coach questions,
Speaker 1: and you know, he liked to tell stories, funny stories.
Speaker 1: He also expressed when these reporters ask him a lot
Speaker 1: of surprise that he went into law enforcement. And he
Speaker 1: says so in a way. I love this. The coach
Speaker 1: says this in a way that makes me think, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I think this coach might not like the police very much.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: That was a real surprise. I just didn't picture Greg
Speaker 1: being in law enforcement. He was always very pleasant and
Speaker 1: I didn't see him as that. That to me didn't
Speaker 1: seem to fit his personality. It wasn't did beg him
Speaker 1: for a huge asshole.
Speaker 2: He turned into a piece.
Speaker 1: He was that kind of pricks coach.
Speaker 2: I love it, cool guy, when you go back like
Speaker 2: it's it's also interesting when they don't have anything interesting
Speaker 2: to say, because, like I do feel like most of
Speaker 2: the time when you're asking a normal person about like
Speaker 2: that they'll have made up a memory about them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, because just to be interesting at like dinner parties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember he never stopped reading that book about
Speaker 1: Ryan hard Heidrich. Just love the guy like something, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but no, there's very other other than his sister being
Speaker 1: like he read Skeeter he read.
Speaker 2: And his coach being like, I didn't think he was
Speaker 2: a big enough asshole to be aoud be a copy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Jason Perry, his wrestling teammate, also expressed surprise at
Speaker 1: what had become of Bovino. He described Gregan's school as
Speaker 1: very polite and added, I don't think Greg would not
Speaker 1: do his job, and like, if they're asking him to
Speaker 1: do something that's not fair to minorities, I'm sure he's
Speaker 1: hating it. This is kind of a Bible Belt community,
Speaker 1: so I know Greg was exposed to compassion and love
Speaker 1: for his fellow man, but it's dangerous to speculate what
Speaker 1: a man is thinking. I hope whatever happens, I hope
Speaker 1: it works out good for him and his family and
Speaker 1: the people that are being mistreated. You know, is such
Speaker 1: a middle of the road thing. I hope both the
Speaker 1: guy hurting people and the hurt people are get better.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's crazy because I know he's aware of compassion,
Speaker 2: like he's heard of it.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, he's aware. He's not supposed to He must
Speaker 1: not like what he's doing because he's not supposed to
Speaker 1: act this way he has heard of Yeah, I know
Speaker 1: he's not supposed to be doing this shit. Yeah yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: if you spend any amount of time looking this guy
Speaker 1: up on social media, you'll run into some claims made
Speaker 1: by a purported former classmate of his on Reddit that
Speaker 1: are much more negative than the recollections gathered by The
Speaker 1: Sun Times. It opens with the opie head bar nine
Speaker 1: three one six writing, I just found out I know
Speaker 1: Greg Bovito personally. Here are some things you can tell
Speaker 1: him when you next see him, And the poster claims
Speaker 1: that he's a current Minneapolis president who used to live
Speaker 1: in Boone, North Carolina, near where Bvino grew up, and
Speaker 1: that they went to the same school, and he posted
Speaker 1: a clip from a yearbook with a picture of Bevino
Speaker 1: on the wrestling team as evidence that said a bunch
Speaker 1: of these pictures are floating around, not guaranteed that that
Speaker 1: means he actually went to school with this guy, and
Speaker 1: then he provides a bunch of suggestions for things that
Speaker 1: protesters should say to Bovino. Hey, Greg, you're the reason
Speaker 1: your dad got drunk and killed that woman in Blowing Rock,
Speaker 1: which led to your parents' divorce. And I don't think
Speaker 1: that that's necessarily accurate. I think his dad killing someone
Speaker 1: and bankrupting the family is probably enough of a reason.
Speaker 1: That might be a bit of a dick move, but
Speaker 1: I think we're just being an asshole to this guy.
Speaker 1: That doesn't really expand our knowledge about Greg though, Right,
Speaker 1: so let's move on to the next one. Hey, Greg,
Speaker 1: do you think it's weird that the Wataga High yearbook
Speaker 1: has you listened as most likely to shit his pants
Speaker 1: in public? Now they don't seen this yearbook. That's a
Speaker 1: nice burn. But also yearbooks don't do that. That's not
Speaker 1: a thing. Like no public school yearbooks not are you
Speaker 1: someon go.
Speaker 2: To jail in the South?
Speaker 1: In public school, You're not allowed to do that for
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons. It's abusive to the students. Again,
Speaker 1: he would have been eighteen, Like, hey, Greg, your history
Speaker 1: teacher thinks that you're a pathetic Nazi punk. No wonder
Speaker 1: you failed all his classes. This doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: accurate based on again it's a burn, But I don't
Speaker 1: think it's true because I think his grades were decent.
Speaker 1: At least it sounds like that I could. I can
Speaker 1: believe some of his teachers hate him now, but I
Speaker 1: just I don't think he actually did fail all of
Speaker 1: his classes. I haven't found the evidence of that. So
Speaker 1: another extal allegation is that a local store banned him
Speaker 1: for sniffing shoes after people tried them on. Don't have
Speaker 1: anything about that, one way or the other.
Speaker 2: Right, it's a good one. Now we're getting too like
Speaker 2: pretty good lies to tell about someone. Yeah, kind of
Speaker 2: weird and specific enough, like having invented Splitsville. It's like, no, yeah,
Speaker 2: he had to be from pay less shoes.
Speaker 1: The last one is really specific and again not when
Speaker 1: we can back up in any way, Hey, Greg, do
Speaker 1: you remember eating that the Wataga Pioneers wrestling team's soggy biscuit?
Speaker 1: Is it still gay to eat stemen off of Bojangles biscuit?
Speaker 1: Or was that just an eighties thing?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: Again, first off, he was born in seventies, so he
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been I mean, yeah, yeah, that could that
Speaker 1: works out. I guess, yeah, yeah, that does work out.
Speaker 1: The timing works out. The Bojangles biscuits make sense. That said,
Speaker 1: I can't back up the rest of this, and there's
Speaker 1: enough wrong with the previous parts of this that I
Speaker 1: maybe this is someone who went to school with him
Speaker 1: and is just like throw it out shit because they
Speaker 1: didn't like him. You know, maybe he did sniff shoes
Speaker 1: in a local shoe store. I can't prove it, but
Speaker 1: there's no evidence. People are gonna bring this up because
Speaker 1: it went crazy viral. I can't back any of this up,
Speaker 1: and there's nothing here.
Speaker 2: I feel like we can confirm both of those things
Speaker 2: happened in that guy whoever in the post. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and like he's just like spific because those are like
Speaker 2: good and specific weird, Like, yeah, those are real. He's
Speaker 2: probably just taking those and being like these having a
Speaker 2: Greg Bovino And.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I believe some guy did those things.
Speaker 2: Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, again, maybe, but I can't I can't
Speaker 1: prove it, and I can't find any specific reason to
Speaker 1: believe that this post that people are sharing around is real.
Speaker 1: Uh boy, if anyone can prove that Greg Bovino got
Speaker 1: banned from a store for sniff and shoes. Let's have it.
Speaker 1: But nobody else seems to be sharing this yet great,
Speaker 1: some cub reporter go down to boone figure this out
Speaker 1: break the mystery.
Speaker 2: So just looking through microfiche looking for sho.
Speaker 1: Sniffing microfiche in the basement of the shoe store. It's
Speaker 1: all just shoe store related articles, all right.
Speaker 2: So I'm gonna come clean here and say, I like
Speaker 2: the smell of new shoes.
Speaker 1: What is it?
Speaker 2: So if you're smelling, if you're at a shoe store,
Speaker 2: wait to finish on shoes, right, So are you taking
Speaker 2: their shoes while they're they're existing shoes while they're trying
Speaker 2: them on? Because yeah, that's you.
Speaker 1: Can see how you'd shoot this in a TV show,
Speaker 1: right where like you have you have somebody putting on
Speaker 1: take off the shoe, put it up, and then you
Speaker 1: have like, oh, Greg sneak around the corner check see
Speaker 1: that the coast is clear to the shoom.
Speaker 2: I think new shoe, new tennis, ball, and new car
Speaker 2: are underrated, like synthetic chemical smells that I enjoy, Like
Speaker 2: I will I will pair of sneakers that I just
Speaker 2: opened the box on and take a nice deep deep
Speaker 2: huff and I, okay, should I be banned?
Speaker 1: Yes, for.
Speaker 2: Nobody's worn them yet, I don't know. Shoe sniffer, A
Speaker 2: new shoe sniffer, brand new shoes.
Speaker 1: Brand new. Come on now, all right, So that's that's
Speaker 1: the myth about Greg Devino that I had.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's not even busting, it's just pointing out I've seen
Speaker 1: this going around. This doesn't directly comport with anything else
Speaker 1: that's independent, and I have no specific reason to believe
Speaker 1: this is all true. So anyway, His sister describes him
Speaker 1: as a voracious reader in high school, and I've seen
Speaker 1: a few other accounts that match this. He liked military
Speaker 1: history and cowboy novels, particularly the work of Louis Lamore,
Speaker 1: and his favorite book was probably Robert Heinland Starship Troopers.
Speaker 1: Surprising no one. His sister told The Daily Mail that
Speaker 1: he reads Starship Troopers once a year, which completely makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh man, yeah, and I get so did I back
Speaker 1: in the day.
Speaker 2: But no, wait, I know the movie is satirical. Is
Speaker 2: the book also?
Speaker 1: No, not at all. So Robert Robert Heinland was an
Speaker 1: interesting guy, a very influential science fiction writer. One of
Speaker 1: his books, The Moon's a Harsh Mistress, is often seen
Speaker 1: as providing a lot of the ideological underpending for the
Speaker 1: libertarian movement. Right Like, it's a foundational text for American libertarianism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: by the way, I said influential. I said influential. That's
Speaker 1: that's not a value term. And he's a guy he
Speaker 1: started out as a socialist and then he had his
Speaker 1: like weird super reactionary right wing like John Bircher period,
Speaker 1: and then he became kind of more of like a
Speaker 1: normal libertarian sort of deal. But Starship Troopers was It's
Speaker 1: it's often seen as a fascist novel, and that's certainly
Speaker 1: a very valid reading of it. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: it that reads very fasci It's also, if you understand
Speaker 1: Heinland's life, there's a lot of it that's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you were a guy who like joined up during World
Speaker 1: War Two and served in the military during that period
Speaker 1: of time. Of course you have a very positive view
Speaker 1: on what the state and the military could do together,
Speaker 1: right Like, there's also a bit of that in it
Speaker 1: where it's like, well, you just feel there's some like
Speaker 1: nostalgia towards that period of time too. In this but
Speaker 1: it is. It is a book about no Literally, the
Speaker 1: best type of government would be the military runs everything right.
Speaker 1: So I can see why Greg Bavino is attached to
Speaker 1: this book as a kid, especially without any of these
Speaker 1: slight mitigating factors in Island's own life. And Heinland pretty
Speaker 1: racist guy. I'm not that interested in mitigating it. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying there's a little bit more there than there
Speaker 1: would be with a guy like Baveno. So once he
Speaker 1: graduates high school in nineteen eighty eight, Baveno went to
Speaker 1: Western Carolina University, where he studied natural research conservation before
Speaker 1: becoming the first member of his family to graduate college.
Speaker 1: He then joined the Border Patrol in nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 1: He graduated as part of class three hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 1: One of his classmates, Jason Owens, would wind up his
Speaker 1: head of Border Patrol. The two have podcasted together per
Speaker 1: The Sun Times with Jack you know is the strongest
Speaker 1: bond that two people can share. During their their podcast together,
Speaker 1: Baveno claims Owens had better grades and graduated at the
Speaker 1: top of the class, but that he was better at
Speaker 1: pe and marksmanship, and he makes this claim a lot
Speaker 1: that he was the best shot in the border patrol. Basically,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen independent confirmation of this. Seems like he
Speaker 1: might be kind of just jazzing himself up a little bit.
Speaker 1: But pretty easy claim to make, Pretty easy for you
Speaker 1: to make.
Speaker 2: Rarely do people be like, all right, that's it, let's
Speaker 2: go to a range together, right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, yeah, you got used. Usually like at
Speaker 1: least an hour long thing to set up, you know.
Speaker 1: He starts working at the famous El Centro sector, which
Speaker 1: is on the border of California, not far from what
Speaker 1: he where he'd been born, but across the country from
Speaker 1: his home. For the Sun Times quote, Bavino told Owens
Speaker 1: later that he was impressed when the sector chief showed
Speaker 1: up in the field alongside the agents. Bavino said it
Speaker 1: showed him the need to get into the fight. It's
Speaker 1: not a fight. It's a bunch of hungry people walking
Speaker 1: across the desert, not a fight. Not a battle. Seeing
Speaker 1: a couple of battles, they don't look.
Speaker 2: Like that enemy bugs out there.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are hungry people stumbling around battlefields, but
Speaker 1: you don't look at them and go, ah, the fight.
Speaker 1: You look at them and go that guy's starving. To
Speaker 1: death because he hasn't eaten in three weeks.
Speaker 2: Non combatants, we'll call them for bat is good to
Speaker 2: see though, if they got any weapons.
Speaker 1: They might get into the fight. Yeah, that's right. So
Speaker 1: he was promoted steadily over the years and wound up
Speaker 1: transferred to Washington, where he got a master's degree in
Speaker 1: national security at the National War College, and then New
Speaker 1: Orleans where he led a sector. In twenty twenty, he
Speaker 1: was sent back to El Centro as a commander. He
Speaker 1: also spent some time in tactical units. Per his sister,
Speaker 1: who makes this dubious claim, early in his career, Greg
Speaker 1: would run into cartels and be the first one in
Speaker 1: the door because he had the best marksmanship. There you
Speaker 1: see that claim again. A lot of times it was
Speaker 1: drug cartel base, which he said is now infiltrated every
Speaker 1: major city with the crime and corruption. And again, I
Speaker 1: don't think Natalie knows all that much about this stuff.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I think her big brother just told her this and
Speaker 1: she's like, that's the way it's got to be.
Speaker 2: By the way, if you talk to the sun or
Speaker 2: like sister, or you know, children of any law enforcement
Speaker 2: officer who are gullible enough, this is the same first
Speaker 2: person in You guys don't know how dangerous it is
Speaker 2: out Yeah the door. Their dad is actually secretly the
Speaker 2: sickest marksman.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's the best for the gun.
Speaker 2: Like it's crazy. They thought, ye how yeah, yeah, that's amazing,
Speaker 2: but it's great. You you know, it's a certain type
Speaker 2: of person who lies about stuff to their sister, right.
Speaker 1: Because I haven't found this claim repeated elsewhere, clearly not
Speaker 1: anywhere credible, but we do have documentation of his career
Speaker 1: running El Centro, where he oversaw about eleven hundred employees.
Speaker 1: Critics say that under Boveno's leadership, BP employees were violent
Speaker 1: and cruel towards migrants. The acl you accused one of
Speaker 1: his agents of assaulting a Salvadoran migrant in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: separating her from their ten year old child for nearly
Speaker 1: a year after presumably she was beaten. The woman was
Speaker 1: charged with assaulting an agent in detention, and then the
Speaker 1: charges were dropped. The Suntimes quotes Monica Lungerica, a senior
Speaker 1: attorney for the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, as saying,
Speaker 1: I think it was a prosecution that sought to silence her,
Speaker 1: stop her from speaking out about the assault that she experienced.
Speaker 1: We've seen it here at the border for a very
Speaker 1: long time, and obviously, you know, Bavino has taken that
Speaker 1: show on the road. And I bring this up because
Speaker 1: you can see this exact pattern and the rest of
Speaker 1: it in his most recent chunk of his career, right, yeah, right, where.
Speaker 2: Someone is being assaulted by the people under his command
Speaker 2: and that is treated as an assault somehow.
Speaker 1: Yep. There, Yeah, it's interesting, yep. So for his part,
Speaker 1: Bavino has bragged that the consequences El Centro agents force
Speaker 1: upon migrants lead to fewer people trying to cross in
Speaker 1: the first place. Earlier in his career he seems to
Speaker 1: have had more of an interest in portraying himself as
Speaker 1: a good guy to members of the public. Not long
Speaker 1: after he got transferred back to lead El Centro, a
Speaker 1: local activist Edie Harmon eighty one complained about border patrol
Speaker 1: vehicles harming wildlife. Bavino fancies himself a conservationist. He's gotten
Speaker 1: a degree on the subject, and he once wrote a
Speaker 1: thesis about the danger of illegal immigrants post to animals
Speaker 1: in the Southwest. So he agreed to go hike with
Speaker 1: Harmon and he wrote her a thank you note, insisting
Speaker 1: Border Patrol cared about the environment too. For The Sun Times,
Speaker 1: she said Movino tried to win her over by offering
Speaker 1: to install a guzzler a watering tank for the sheep
Speaker 1: and to dedicate it in the name of her dead husband.
Speaker 1: She said she declined because no biologists recommended that. Before
Speaker 1: Mavino left their hike, He's asked to take a photo
Speaker 1: with Harmon each standing on opposite sides of a cactus.
Speaker 1: And that's just.
Speaker 3: So weird, man, so weird weird. That's weird guy behavior.
Speaker 1: What do you mean, what do you mean the Biden administration.
Speaker 1: I think he's trying. He's got to pretend he cares
Speaker 1: about the environment. And I think he also sees it
Speaker 1: as because he's got this background. This is a wedge
Speaker 1: you can drive between the liberal conservationists and the the
Speaker 1: quote unquote illegals, right, is if you're like, well, they're
Speaker 1: bad for the environment, you know, and.
Speaker 3: For the environment, Greg fuck off off.
Speaker 1: And and Harmond made the very good point that like
Speaker 1: he wanted to install a water tank for that the
Speaker 1: reason the sheep are in dangerous because the Border Patrol
Speaker 1: keeps putting concertina wire up across their grazing ground. It's
Speaker 1: the razor wire that's bad for the sheep. They need water.
Speaker 1: Them lying around.
Speaker 2: Now, they're gonna want some water. Robert, Yeah, that is true.
Speaker 2: As somebody who has done three thousand podcasts on Hitler,
Speaker 2: I'm wasn't Hitler also like very into animals and animal
Speaker 2: rights US not at all for those two things to overlap.
Speaker 1: No, And I think, you know, this may just this
Speaker 1: may be Vino. Maybe there's another version of Greg Levino
Speaker 1: who just went into conservation. But also maybe it's just
Speaker 1: it's there's a degree. I think certainly by the time
Speaker 1: he's back at Alcentro, there's this understanding that like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe this is a way we can drive a wedge
Speaker 1: between the people that I want to target and the
Speaker 1: majority of the voting population of this state. Right. Baveno
Speaker 1: is one of the guys who completely drank the Border
Speaker 1: Patrol kool aid. Right. He loves to use the nickname
Speaker 1: the Green Machine to refer to the Border Patrol, which
Speaker 1: is what they call themselves. I think they think it's
Speaker 1: cool good.
Speaker 3: That's like a naked juice. It's like what they that's
Speaker 3: like a naked Juice flavor.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is, yeah, after the green juice from Naked
Speaker 2: Juice that like some it's really like sometimes fine and
Speaker 2: sometimes it's so fucking bad. Had a bad green juice
Speaker 2: I have? I had one of those, Yeah, like seven
Speaker 2: eleven green juice can go can go off.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, speaking of random products, Robert, it's about that time.
Speaker 2: Don't want me to keep talking about how native juice
Speaker 2: green machine can sometimes go off.
Speaker 3: I've never seen you drinking naked juice. I sat next
Speaker 3: to you for years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's because I had a bad experience once.
Speaker 3: You're a round dew guy.
Speaker 2: That's right. Sophie's seen me at my finest.
Speaker 3: That's your green.
Speaker 2: Juice is about That's right. Why what were you talking about?
Speaker 2: I once did a money phone in front of Sophie
Speaker 2: with a six a mountain dew.
Speaker 3: You at that picture.
Speaker 4: If I do know that that picture is somewhere, I
Speaker 4: am gonna have them put that up on the nutfla.
Speaker 2: My finest work.
Speaker 1: All right, everybody, here's ads and we're back. Sou But Vino,
Speaker 1: as I said, really drinks the Border Patrol kool aid.
Speaker 2: He will.
Speaker 1: He loves reciting the agency slogan on her first with
Speaker 1: little provocation, which at least one Border Patrol whistleblower has
Speaker 1: said is often used by men in the Border Patrol
Speaker 1: to mean on her first because they like to sexually
Speaker 1: assault female agents and women in there. Credit cust today,
Speaker 1: good stuff the Border Patrol. Bavino described the Border Patrol
Speaker 1: as his life's work in Brandon el Centro, the premier sector.
Speaker 1: He's the one who considers it that. It is a
Speaker 1: very busy sector. It's a big it's a lot of
Speaker 1: people come through it. But he's like, no, this is
Speaker 1: the this is the state of the art. You know,
Speaker 1: this is this is the best one. You know, We're
Speaker 1: the standard from which all the other sectors are set.
Speaker 1: I appreciated with One journalist for calmatters dot org said
Speaker 1: about this, it's similar to the way states have mottos
Speaker 1: on license plates that aren't necessarily used by anybody else
Speaker 1: to describe that state.
Speaker 2: Right, there's some good ones of those.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's some good ones of those. So state, Hey,
Speaker 1: now hey, now hey, now I gotta stand but actually
Speaker 1: that that's that is an insult to people from Missouri.
Speaker 2: Yeah, why do they do that? Why they do that?
Speaker 1: It dates back to again like the eighteen hundreds. But
Speaker 1: it means that, like people from Missouri were so dumb
Speaker 1: that like if if they wouldn't believe you unless you
Speaker 1: showed them something. Right, he just tells someone like, oh
Speaker 1: there's there's big boats, now you gotta they got to
Speaker 1: see the boat because they're dumb.
Speaker 2: Right, don't believe in dinosaurs, that sort.
Speaker 1: Of thing, right, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Calling something the premiere anything is a great like
Speaker 2: weasel where like that that's got to be one of
Speaker 2: the MVPs of like bad movies posters. Yeah, like we're
Speaker 2: like the premiere crime.
Speaker 1: It's like Miller calling itself the Champagne of beer. Yeah, okay, guys, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's gonna call it that unless we're joking the poetry
Speaker 1: of lying, you know. Yeah. During the Biden years, Bavino
Speaker 1: started running into trouble, first for tweeting. He made a
Speaker 1: He made a lot of tweets that got him in trouble.
Speaker 1: One of them was about a citizen who had been
Speaker 1: killed by a documented person driving drunk that his superiors
Speaker 1: made him delete because it was too political. He claimed
Speaker 1: to be a political and did not understand what was
Speaker 1: wrong with his post, but he would later prove to
Speaker 1: have something of an obsession with the subject. He has
Speaker 1: in the Trump years, the most recent year in Change
Speaker 1: at least repeatedly brought up the threat of undocumented immigrants
Speaker 1: driving drunk as a reason for aggressive immigration rest. Yes, yes, wow,
Speaker 1: nothing psychological there, Okay, Okay, that's okay, great, Like that's
Speaker 1: so fuck. Last year's Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, which
Speaker 1: is where theveno and not where he first gained widespread
Speaker 1: national visibility, but it really, really massively increased his visibility
Speaker 1: was in honor of a twenty year old who'd been
Speaker 1: killed in a duy, right, Like this is a thing
Speaker 1: for Greg And it's like again, man, like, Okay, you
Speaker 1: didn't want to go to therapy, but he's taking your
Speaker 1: anger at your dad out on some random people, almost
Speaker 1: none of whom did anything wrong, Like almost none of
Speaker 1: whom have ever driven drunk.
Speaker 2: Right, this is up there with Tucker. I'm sure you
Speaker 2: guys have talked about it before on the show. But
Speaker 2: Tucker Carlson's we got to get our tucky of hippies
Speaker 2: and women and then his mom left his dad for
Speaker 2: like a French hippie and like his mom was a hippie.
Speaker 2: It's just like, damn man, it's almost like too obvious,
Speaker 2: Like how do you land where you are without being
Speaker 2: like this is like everybody's know what? This is so bad? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's often the case, and you know it. It's
Speaker 1: the case with old Greg right now. One thing that
Speaker 1: made Bevino's El Centro stand out is that he had
Speaker 1: five agents whose whole full time job was making videos,
Speaker 1: which is interesting and it shows again he understands he's
Speaker 1: at least someone who sees how good a shot Trump
Speaker 1: has it coming back in the Biden years and is like,
Speaker 1: I know what to do to get on this fucker's radar.
Speaker 1: Is I need to start making some shit that goes viral.
Speaker 1: I got to piss off some libs. Right. Here's how
Speaker 1: cal Matters describes a representative example. Two agents sitting their
Speaker 1: vehicle at night listening to a news broadcast about an
Speaker 1: undocumented migrant charged with the rape and murder of a
Speaker 1: sixty four year old woman in Santa Maria. The news
Speaker 1: clips from a real CBS report from ten years ago.
Speaker 1: An agent shakes his head and discussed and turns off
Speaker 1: the radio, saying, man, that's the second one in less
Speaker 1: than a week, things are getting out of hand.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 1: And if you're trying to make the case that, like, wow,
Speaker 1: every week, multiple people are getting raped by immigrants, and
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, your one example was from a news
Speaker 1: clip from ten years ago.
Speaker 2: Their most powerful weapon maybe is selection bias, where they
Speaker 2: will find a will find and make it seem like
Speaker 2: it is constantly happening right next toward you. Yeh, yep.
Speaker 1: Now at that moment, dispatch comes over the radio and
Speaker 1: it tells the agents there's a nearby vehicle loaded with migrants.
Speaker 1: The agents catch three of them in, but one gets
Speaker 1: away and sneaks into any Town, USA, where he murders
Speaker 1: an American citizen, taking the man's cell phone and running off,
Speaker 1: and the screen goes dark, and the message every apprehension matters.
Speaker 1: Do you know who got away?
Speaker 2: Again?
Speaker 1: So much plot, it's so much plot for such a
Speaker 1: shitty ad.
Speaker 2: Like thirty minutes of a Chuck Norris movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's the opening of a Check Norris movie.
Speaker 1: Only about one percent of the people the border patrol
Speaker 1: encounters have a criminal conviction, compared to eight percent of
Speaker 1: American citizens. But there's a little point in bringing reality
Speaker 1: into this. They don't care, right.
Speaker 2: They just to treat these people like complete shit, right,
Speaker 2: and so it's like a chance. Yeah, it's bully tactics
Speaker 2: where you just find the person who's the least protected
Speaker 2: and then.
Speaker 1: Yep, go after him.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Bavino was called to testify before Congress in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three. He discussed how crossings in his sector had
Speaker 1: increased significantly and basically made the border hot case that
Speaker 1: the Biden administration was failing to protect the border. Bavino's
Speaker 1: own history came up, including what turned out to be
Speaker 1: repeated issues with social media. One relevant quote was, I
Speaker 1: think there was one post with two Yameni's terrorists. I
Speaker 1: was ordered to take that down. Ravino was relieved of
Speaker 1: command after his testimony, which the Republican House members who
Speaker 1: convened the hearing saw his retribution, and it probably was
Speaker 1: right like retribution.
Speaker 2: For him, say, being a dick this stuff and being.
Speaker 1: Me at a fucked up asshole. But I guess that counts,
Speaker 1: and it's also those retribution. I was fired as retribution
Speaker 1: for being bad, as he's bad at his job in
Speaker 1: this right because he's his old claim is that like
Speaker 1: you got to be brutal to reduce crossings, and he
Speaker 1: admitted that crossings were at at all time high and
Speaker 1: he's in charge. I don't know, man, maybe you were
Speaker 1: just saying you sucked at your job. But he didn't
Speaker 1: suffer any consequences for his actions. Those House members complained
Speaker 1: about his demotion, and he was reinstated at El Centro.
Speaker 1: And you know what happened not long after Donald Trump
Speaker 1: won re election. On January seventh, twenty twenty five, the
Speaker 1: day after Congress certified as victory, Bavino led sixty five
Speaker 1: agents in operation returned to cinder per calmatters dot org.
Speaker 1: Most of the official information about the raid came from
Speaker 1: Vino's Facebook comments. He posted blurred photos of three Latino
Speaker 1: men alongside a photo of thirty three pounds of marijuana
Speaker 1: in the trunk of a car. He wrote, here, in
Speaker 1: the premier sector, we go the extra mile or five
Speaker 1: hundred of them to protect our nation and communities from
Speaker 1: bad people and bad things. So congratulations, Greg, you protected
Speaker 1: California from pot Like great man, keeping that welled out
Speaker 1: of a store smelled it here ever since that thirty
Speaker 1: three pounds really put a dint in the state. Wow,
Speaker 1: seventy eight people were arrested. The Border Patrol told local
Speaker 1: business owners that the raids were targeting criminal activity, but
Speaker 1: this was obviously untrue, and a cal Matters investigation partnered
Speaker 1: with Evident in Bellingcat, showed that the Border Patrol had
Speaker 1: no prior knowledge of criminal history of any kind. For
Speaker 1: seventy seven of seventy eight arrestees, this was very likely illegal.
Speaker 1: In the acl you has sued on behalf of the
Speaker 1: farm workers agents are accused of failing to id themselves
Speaker 1: or percent warrants, and of using brutal force. In one case,
Speaker 1: they slashed the tires of a US citizen and then
Speaker 1: arrested them for seemingly no reason. I say, very like,
Speaker 1: this was very illegal. You know, this is all very illas.
Speaker 2: Slashed the tires.
Speaker 1: They loved doing that, they loved doing it.
Speaker 2: What so on what grounds were they arresting them if
Speaker 2: it wasn't for them having like warrants or anything.
Speaker 1: Here legally here, illegally here, illegally.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean that's their argument, is that like they were doing,
Speaker 1: that's the illegal thing they were doing.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Son the papers, right, Yeah, that's who they all are. Minjucho,
Speaker 1: a senior lawyer for the ACLU called this operation a
Speaker 1: pilot project for the ones that Bavino would leader spearhead
Speaker 1: around the country. He earned the attention of the Trumpet
Speaker 1: administration for his combative presence on social media and willingness
Speaker 1: to use federal forces to brutalize people. On June of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, he was named tactical commander of a
Speaker 1: mass rate in Los Angeles, which sparked protests across the city.
Speaker 1: And you're all pretty familiar with what happened next. We're
Speaker 1: not going to go into crazy detail about everything Bavino
Speaker 1: did in the last year because you all lived through it, right,
Speaker 1: we don't need to do a ton of that. His
Speaker 1: agents helped ICE agents as they brutally detained random Angelino's.
Speaker 1: They blew up indoors to houses, They gas people in
Speaker 1: the street. Bavino had his video to Division craft ads
Speaker 1: depicting his men's violence to regular working people as action
Speaker 1: movie scenes. He led his agents in an armed patrol
Speaker 1: outside of a political rally held by Gavin Newsom, which
Speaker 1: some might suggest could be seen as actual treason. Bavino
Speaker 1: claimed not to have known that Newsom was in the building.
Speaker 1: Continue his habit of giving answers to questions that present
Speaker 1: only the The only other answer is like, well, so
Speaker 1: the end, you're incompetent, right if you didn't know he
Speaker 1: was in the build, like what the fuck was this about?
Speaker 2: Dipshit? We just like saw a crowd and we just
Speaker 2: yeah kind of we were like, oh shit that patrol does.
Speaker 2: Was that also when they did the military rage of
Speaker 2: uh MacArthur Park.
Speaker 1: And yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, which we should be
Speaker 1: talking and he was like, we're giving this back to
Speaker 1: Maul and Paul America. And it's like, man, the people
Speaker 1: who live there are the ones that you're fucking with.
Speaker 1: They're the ones who use the park dipshit. But again
Speaker 1: he knows this. I'm not going to give a blow
Speaker 1: by blow of every violent act as men perpetrated, but
Speaker 1: I should read this quote from an article by Gabrielle
Speaker 1: Cannon and The Guardian. Two undocumented people have died trying
Speaker 1: to flee Babino's agents. A Mexican farmworker fell from a greenhouse,
Speaker 1: and a Guatemalan day laborer was hit by a vehicle
Speaker 1: following a rate at home depot. In another episode, the
Speaker 1: paper reported they detained a disabled fifteen year old high
Speaker 1: school student in a case of mistaken identity, after drawing
Speaker 1: their guns and handcuffing him, leaving unfired bullet. It's on
Speaker 1: the ground, so cool people just like well trained, good
Speaker 1: at their jobs. Raveno's obviously sent to Chicago after LA,
Speaker 1: where he enacts similar violence. On one occasion, he throws
Speaker 1: tear gas on camera against a crowd of peaceful protesters.
Speaker 1: He and his agency had just been enjoined against using
Speaker 1: gas without justification, so Bavino claimed that he'd been hit
Speaker 1: in the head with a rock and had no choice.
Speaker 1: Bavino later admitted that he'd lied to the US District
Speaker 1: Judge Sarah Ellis about this.
Speaker 2: That seems fireable. Robert should spirable doing violent, a violent thing,
Speaker 2: and they hit me in the head with a.
Speaker 1: To do I'm a huge piece of shit, sorry, guys.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: In October of twenty twenty five, he had been declared
Speaker 1: Commander at Large of the Border Patrol, which is not
Speaker 1: a real job but basically removed him from the normal
Speaker 1: Border Patrol hierarchy without giving him formal control over the
Speaker 1: whole group. In other words, it's the job you give
Speaker 1: a guy who you want, you want out there in public,
Speaker 1: you want to let him do stuff for a while,
Speaker 1: because you know eventually you pissed people off too much
Speaker 1: and you want to be able to make him your
Speaker 1: sacrificial lamb. Right, it's make him a job that'll put
Speaker 1: him out in front of everybody, because this dipshit is
Speaker 1: not going to be able to help himself. He was
Speaker 1: the face man for Trump's brutal mass deportations, and his
Speaker 1: main job, again, I think, was to provide a focus
Speaker 1: for public outrage walking around in his Nazi coat looking
Speaker 1: like Doogie Howser at the end of Starship Troopers. Shit
Speaker 1: like this serves as a useful distraction, but Vino has
Speaker 1: gotten to defend his choice of outerwear several times. In
Speaker 1: interviews per globalsecurity dot org, he explained that he purchased
Speaker 1: it around nineteen ninety nine as a young Border patrol
Speaker 1: agent and had worn it for more than twenty five
Speaker 1: years in cold weather or formal settings without prior controversy.
Speaker 1: He pointed to a twenty twenty two Department of Homeland
Speaker 1: Security ceremony under the Biden administration where he wore it
Speaker 1: and received only compliments. Survivors argue that the design draws
Speaker 1: from long standing US military traditions such as the m
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine style overcoats or bridge coats used in
Speaker 1: law enforcement and formal uniforms rather than exclusively fascist imagery.
Speaker 1: But we know why you're doing it, Greg, and we
Speaker 1: know why you like it. You like it because it
Speaker 1: makes you look like Doogie Howser at the end of
Speaker 1: Starship Troopers.
Speaker 2: And also to be like it's not fascist, it's from
Speaker 2: the US military. He's like, well, okay, let's take a
Speaker 2: look at the US military history. Yeah, there was something
Speaker 2: we were talking on Zecho about how the like they're
Speaker 2: thinking about bringing ice to the Winter Olympics, and there
Speaker 2: there's just a quote from somebody in Italy talking about
Speaker 2: their prison camps over there, like they're deporting Albanians and
Speaker 2: taking them to like a black site. And they were like,
Speaker 2: it's like Italian Guantanamo. And I was like, oh, we
Speaker 2: use Nazis as like our touchstone. The other countries use
Speaker 2: US as they're They're like, yeah, it's it's almost like
Speaker 2: we're America as they're like fascism touchstone.
Speaker 3: M yes, yes.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I'm not sure how much there is to say.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot more, but you've all lived
Speaker 1: through it. Right, you know, we know where he is
Speaker 1: right now. After two murders in Minneapolis, he was picked
Speaker 1: to be the face of the Trump administration's miscalculation. He
Speaker 1: was removed from his fake job and sent back to
Speaker 1: El Centro. I'm sure this is not the end of
Speaker 1: us hearing about Gregory Bavino. They're kind of keeping him
Speaker 1: in the cooler, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He had made a couple of claims previous, even previous
Speaker 1: to Minneapolis, about wanting to retire in the next two years,
Speaker 1: which I think was part of why the Trump administration
Speaker 1: this may have even been an open like, Look, we're
Speaker 1: gonna give you a special, fancy job. You're gonna be
Speaker 1: on camera. You're gonna get to be the face of
Speaker 1: the border patrol doing all this fascist bullshit you've always
Speaker 1: wanted to do. And then when stuff gets too hot
Speaker 1: for us, we're gonna cut bait, right, and then you'll
Speaker 1: just retire with full benefits. Doesn't that sound good to
Speaker 1: you? You can get a nice job on Fox News or something,
Speaker 1: and you're retired.
Speaker 2: You get to wear that jacket that you keep asking
Speaker 2: us to wear to every meeting. You get to wear
Speaker 2: that on the news.
Speaker 1: You can wear that every day, buddy, Greg, anytime you
Speaker 1: want to wear you dumbedge, please put it on. Put
Speaker 1: it on a la fuck it like anyway. That's that's
Speaker 1: my read of the Greg Bavino story. We will maybe
Speaker 1: do an update on the fucker if more becomes of him,
Speaker 1: but it may also just be a thing. We'll wait
Speaker 1: around a little while in elcenttro you know, probably get
Speaker 1: get his rocks off a few times, hurting people down there,
Speaker 1: and then retire, you know, like he'd plan.
Speaker 2: To, right. Did you see the video of the woman
Speaker 2: who was just like kind of dragging him outside of
Speaker 2: a seven eleven and his response was just he's like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's real nice. Oh you're being real nice. It was
Speaker 2: just like, I don't I don't know, man, that's I
Speaker 2: don't think your place is to tell people that they're
Speaker 2: being not nice. At this stage.
Speaker 4: He's a weird little guy that got too much power,
Speaker 4: and I hope to never see him again, but I think, unfortunately,
Speaker 4: the way this world's been working, we probably will.
Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, there a lot of weird little guys. I
Speaker 2: feel like someone should make a show about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we should probably have a show about weird little
Speaker 1: guys on our podcast network.
Speaker 3: Oh great news. I have a great news.
Speaker 4: Molly Conger has a show called Little Guys.
Speaker 1: They figured out how to launch a second podcast.
Speaker 3: Wow, Jack, is there anything you like to plug here
Speaker 3: at the end?
Speaker 2: Oh my god, Sophie, thank you so much. First of all,
Speaker 2: such a pleasure to be with you, guys, Robert uh
Speaker 2: The my first intern at Cracked, our first intern discovered
Speaker 2: by the great Daniel O'Brien, and so so fun to
Speaker 2: have been working with you on the podcast base all
Speaker 2: these years. And Sophie Lichterman, one of the greats to
Speaker 2: ever do it. So thank you guys so much. I
Speaker 2: always enjoy being back Daily Zeitgeist is a show that
Speaker 2: I do twice a day with Wonderful day suffering cou
Speaker 2: Miles Gray. And we just published our two thousandth episodes.
Speaker 4: Oh congratulations, dude, two thousandth main episode Crazy, the second.
Speaker 2: We didn't even count the second one, but lord, we
Speaker 2: did it. We made it to two thousand. What it
Speaker 2: is We're not sure, but we did it.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And then, like I mentioned, we have a new series
Speaker 2: that I think fans of the Cracked podcat the old
Speaker 2: Crack podcast will like, called the iconograph where each Monday,
Speaker 2: me and a researcher do a deep dive into a
Speaker 2: different icon. What's an icon, you ask? By our definition?
Speaker 2: So our first episode was about Einstein and our second
Speaker 2: was about Erkle. So it's just any of these like
Speaker 2: big pop culture wore cruxes that drive a lot of
Speaker 2: meaning in the zeitgeist, and it lets us do a
Speaker 2: show that isn't about the news, which is so nice.
Speaker 4: Fun Sophie lore for you. My first ever crush was
Speaker 4: Einstein's like great grandson.
Speaker 2: Are you serious? Damn?
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2: I should have had you on to this talk about that.
Speaker 4: If you're listening to this, Yes, I loved you. It
Speaker 4: was first grade. I loved you.
Speaker 2: Yes, Hi. You don't think he knew?
Speaker 4: Oh no, he I was not cool, you know me.
Speaker 4: I can't hide any anything. I've never changed. I've always
Speaker 4: been this way, Like.
Speaker 3: He for sure knew, He for sure knew.
Speaker 4: And the way I know he knew is I got
Speaker 4: teased about it by this other guy, so I kicked
Speaker 4: him in the shin and then I got in trouble, so.
Speaker 3: He knew he knew. I've been this way my entire life.
Speaker 2: And I picture you kicking him in the shin and
Speaker 2: his shin bone snapping backwards like Steven Segal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, no, he definitely knew but h and.
Speaker 2: His name was Greg Einstein, Gretin Simon Einstein.
Speaker 4: Shout out if you're listening to If you're listening to this,
Speaker 4: I loved you.
Speaker 2: I was in grade. But yeah, anyways, that's a fun one.
Speaker 2: Those come out every Monday morning. We're calling the iconograph.
Speaker 2: We just did Marilyn Monroe, which is a really fun episode.
Speaker 2: Dolly Parton, Tony Hawk's coming up and Robert would love
Speaker 2: to have you on one. So sure. We like to
Speaker 2: reach out to the guests and be like, Okay, here's
Speaker 2: our list. Who do you like or pitch us the
Speaker 2: icon that you want to go over. So maybe a
Speaker 2: chance for you guys to talk about people you don't
Speaker 2: who aren't the.
Speaker 1: Worst, Sure, people who aren't the worst? Yes, icons, icons, Yes,
Speaker 1: like the iconic Jack O'Brien, who thank you for being
Speaker 1: on our show.
Speaker 2: It's so wonderful being here. Also Jack underscore O'Brien on Twitter.
Speaker 4: And yeah, one last plug against the State by James Stout,
Speaker 4: our colleague. His book is available now, please buy it.
Speaker 4: It's fantastic. Love James, That'll do it right, Robert.
Speaker 1: Yep, That'll do it Holy shit?
Speaker 3: By bye.
Speaker 4: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 4: of you, statistically speaking,