It's The Gregory Bovino Villain Origin Story!
Who doesn't like a prequel?
Oh boy, the Chicago Sun-Times put out a long-form villain origin story of Gregory Bovino, Customs and Border Patrol Commander Op at Large / adjudicated liar and gasser of children / leading invader of California, Chicago, Charlotte, and New Orleans, attempting to answer the question on everyone’s minds about the guy: What the fuck went wrong there? by tracing him back to his gel-soaked roots. And it’s intriguing and juicy!
(Bovino himself, of course, refused to comment or participate. You can still cover it anyway, CBS News.)
The Bovino story begins in the organized-crime-plagued village of Aprigliano in Calabria, Italy, in 1909, from which Michele Bovino (he/him) departed for Pennsylvania coal country looking for work as a miner, thanks to President Taft’s open borders policy, leaving his wife Luigia and their four kids behind. The US Border Patrol would be founded 15 years later, in 1924, over concerns that Southern and Eastern Europe were not sending their best! But fortunately Michele was already in the country by then, quickly filed papers to become a citizen, changed his name to Michael at some point, and was naturalized in 1927. And then Luigia and the four kids arrived in the US on the SS Giuseppe Verdi.
That calls for a soundtrack!
Much better. And one of the kids was 12-year-old Vincenzo Bovino, Gregory’s future grandfather, who was automatically granted “derivative citizenship” for minors. That is called chain migration!
And then Vincenzo Bovino’s son Michael married a lady from Blowing Rock, NC, Betty Hartley, and they had Gregory, 55 years ago last March. Today, Gregory leans heavy on his North Carolina roots, sometimes playing up his accent and drawling about Ma and Pa America, though by old-white-Southern-racist kinds of standards, his roots are relatively shallow.
Anyway, what went so wrong in young Gregory’s life? Possibly some clues: From age 11 to 12, around 1981-2, was by all accounts an eventful time. His father Michael Bovino was an alcoholic who owned a bar in Blowing Rock called the Library Club. And on the way home one night, father Michael killed a woman, Janie Mae Mitchell, 26, and seriously injured her husband Larry, by crashing his truck head-on at full speed into their car while he was driving on the wrong side of the road, after drinking what he later admitted was “two, maybe three six-packs of beer.”
Michael had also had a DUI seven years before. And in 1974, it took a lot to get a DUI, that was before there were even blood-alcohol tests yet, or standardized sobriety tests. For Janie Mae Mitchell’s death, Michael spent four months in jail, and Larry Mitchell sued him. Father Bovino lost his bar, and Betty Hartley Bovino divorced him, sending Michael off with only “the pool table, tools, lawnmower, a ‘beer topper,’ three suitcases, a color TV, three baby photos, books, a tennis racket, an ice-cream freezer, a jukebox with records and a mantle clock.”
Ironic, because the Trump administration announced that Operation Midway Blitz was launched in Chicago in honor of 20-year-old DUI-accident-victim Katie Abraham, to the surprise and eventual disgust of Abraham’s mother. Abraham was killed by drunk driver and Guatemalan citizen Julio Cucul-Bol, along with her friend Chloe Polzin, 21, though why the operation was not in honor of Polzin also is unclear. Does Bovino still think about the woman his father killed sometimes?
Also at age 11, Bovino once told a podcast, was when he got inspired to join the Border Patrol, after watching a movie called The Border, produced by a distant cousin of his mom and starring Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel as bad-guy agents who get involved in a human-smuggling ring.
The movie is only rated 65 percent at Rotten Tomatoes, so if you have never heard of it, that’s probably why. And it made an impression on Greg. “But the young Bovino was crestfallen that the movie portrayed the agents as bad guys and said he was moved to join the Border Patrol in 1996 to show he was the opposite — a good border cop.”
And yet his ICE goons sound more like Harvey Keitel in another movie, Bad Lieutenant, going around robbing people.
Though even the Bad Lieutenant only did some drugs and gambled (and forced some teenage girls to watch him masturbate, Louis CK-style). He never gassed children, dragged a pregnant lady across the street by the arm, or robbed somebody of their groceries on Christmas Eve. He was not evil Lieutenant. Nobody wants to watch that.
Later, when Greg was 14, his father Michael moved away to New Mexico, and Greg stayed behind in North Carolina. He enrolled at Watauga High School in Boone, where he was known to be pleasant, funny, a good student, and polite. And he joined the wrestling team, a very good sport for young men on the shorter side who lack active father figures to participate in.
A former teammate of his seems to feel that the old Greg would not approve of the new Greg:
I don’t think Greg would not do his job, and, like, if they’re asking to do something that’s not fair to the minorities, I’m sure he’s hating it. This is kind of a Bible belt community, so I know Greg was exposed to compassion and love for his fellow man. But it’s dangerous to speculate what a man is thinking. I hope whatever happens, I hope it works out good for him and his family and the people that are being mistreated.
The old Greg sounds cool, a nature-loving guy who particularly liked snakes and got a degree in natural resource conservation from Western Carolina University, then a master’s in public administration from Appalachian State University. He might have enjoyed a job as a ranger at one of Western North Carolina’s many beautiful national forests and parks! But instead he got a job with the Boone police department, and after that with the Border Patrol. Then he rose through the ranks and different postings, eventually returning to his first post in El Centro, California, in 2020 as chief of the sector there.
And with social media, the world met new Greg, who as chief of the sector posted pictures of himself toting guns, and tweets about Mexicans and Yemenites. You know, the same guy who now whinges about ICE agents having to wear masks and conceal their identities so they don’t get doxxed!
Yet he was and is still apparently unwilling to put down his own phone and exercise a little discretion for the benefit of everyone else. And mean old Joe Biden’s Border Patrol told him to take his posts down, and even attempted to demote him to a new, vague position in DC. The censorship!
But it wasn’t just the posts, the new Greg was a preening asshole and problematic in other ways, too. His sector was sued twice for racial profiling, and his agents were accused of the same destructive and theatrical moves later pulled in Chicago, like unnecessary violence, and blowing open front doors and smashing car windows.
And his department was rife with sexual misconduct claims, too. One former agent there, Jenn Budd, says she and other women under Bovino’s Border Patrol “were raped as a rite of passage and faced a backlash if they complained.”
Also, “The pattern and practice down here is to make false accusations against the people you just beat up.” We have sure all seen that!
Budd says she quit the job after unearthing wrongdoing and being threatened to keep quiet about it. Her take on Bovino:
“[Bovino] laughs when they call him out on the stuff, and it’s just a bro thing. He’s just going around with his bros, just capturing migrants and people of color and harassing people. They will lie constantly, like you saw in the Chicago courts. They will not think twice about doing it, and nobody will hold them accountable.”
But, maybe not nobody. Bovino and hundreds of his agents already skedaddled away from Chicago like rat snakes after Judge Sara Ellis slapped them with an injunction, following Bovino getting caught lying on camera multiple times. And what do you know, the plaintiffs in the Chicago lawsuit say that since then, ICE has gone forth and sinned no more! At least, not legally, in Chicago, in terms of that lawsuit. At least it’s a step up from shooting a praying priest in the eye with a pepper ball?
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And no matter what Bovino may have told them, individual agents are not operating under some “constitutional exception” to the law. Pam Bondi’s DOJ may not go after ICE agents who break the law, but local prosecutors and judges sure could, or a post-Trump DOJ, inshallah.
Meanwhile, Bovino is now in Louisiana, with “Operation Catahoula Crunch” following a stopover in Charlotte, NC, for “Operation Charlotte’s Web.” Possibly he will be in the Baltimore area next, as soon as he can think of some kind of Bovino-style snappy title to call it. No penis ones, that’s just Hegseth! And “Operation Shoot A Man In A Van In Glen Burnie” is way too long, speaking of local police and prosecutors, ahem. Can’t wait to see what happens with that crazy story.
Wherever Bovino’s boots may go, though, his thumbs are always on social media, posting every day some content matter: AI slop, photos of people his goons have apprehended with unverifiable claims that they are criminals, whines about how violent mobs are trying to assault poor, brave ICE patriots, and feel-good reels of how much everybody loves him and wants to be his best friend.
Because he knows well that everybody does not.
In fact, Bovino has never publicly mentioned a partner or children. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but seems unhealthy that Border Patrol is apparently his entire life and the only thing in it other than shitposting on social media. Does he have a single friend? A purse-sized dog he can talk to and pretend is a person?
It is an unknowable question of the human condition: What DOES make a good boy go bad? Lose their empathy, and keep it off? Become willing, even eager, to lie and break the law to try and impress a felon like Donald Trump? It’s anyone’s guess!
I just assumed his origin story is he never got over being 5’2” with a 1 1/2 inch penis.
I am happy to hear that Bovino is not the Great Santini to some undeserving spawn. He probably just can’t find another human that accepts his nazism.