‘The Westies’ Review: Inside the Irish Mob’s Fragile Pact with the Mafia

Italian-American organized crime may be cinema’s most mythologized underworld—especially in its New York incarnation—but it was never the only game in town. Other ethnic groups built their own rackets, and among the most notorious were the Irish. The Westies revisits one such crew, a small but fearsome gang that operated in New York, particularly through the 1980s.

The series that bears their name focuses less on a cradle-to-grave chronicle than on a volatile equilibrium: the uneasy coexistence between the Irish mob and their Italian counterparts during a pivotal moment in the city’s transformation. The backdrop is a major real-estate venture—the construction of the Javits Center in Hell’s Kitchen, a historically Irish-controlled enclave of Manhattan. Out of that fragile, negotiated truce emerges a show steeped in familiar references: it borrows liberally from The Sopranos, Peaky Blinders, Boardwalk Empire, and the tonal universe of Martin Scorsese—particularly The Departed and The Irishman.

At the center stands J.K. Simmons as Eamon Sweeney, the imperious boss of the Westies and the axis around which everything turns. Sweeney is both strategist and destabilizer, entangled in a web of decisions that strain the pact with the Italians and test the loyalty of his own men. Historically, the Westies were a relatively small outfit—no more than a few dozen members, compared to the hundreds in the Italian families—but they were notoriously brutal, not especially diplomatic, and well-connected within the NYPD, where many Irish immigrants served.

The series opens with a defining act of authority. When Sweeney catches one of his men about to kill an Italian mafioso (played by Michael Rispoli), he first orders him to stand down, then publicly reminds everyone of the standing truce—and finally executes his own subordinate in cold blood. The message is unmistakable: money and hierarchy trump impulse. But discipline proves elusive. Internal tensions escalate, fueled both by that killing and by the return of Mickey Flanagan (Stanley Morgan), a volatile Vietnam veteran who rejects any accommodation with the Italians.

Caught in the middle is Jimmy Roarke (Tom Brittney), Sweeney’s right-hand man and Flanagan’s closest friend, tasked with maintaining an increasingly untenable balance. By the end of the first episode, that balance collapses: the informal boundaries are crossed, and Sweeney’s priorities crystallize—protect the lucrative deal with the Italians (whose boss is John Gotti, the only real-life figure explicitly named) while keeping his own unruly crew in check. Their loyalty is real, but so is their resentment at having to bow to a rival organization.

Running parallel is the story of Glenn Keenan (Bosch‘s Titus Welliver), an alcoholic NYPD cop of Irish descent who straddles both worlds—his son is a Westie—and serves as Sweeney’s inside source on police investigations. Another subplot, initially more intimate than strategic, follows Bridget Walsh (Sarah Bolger), Roarke’s girlfriend, whose past ties to the IRA pull her back into militant activity. The catalyst is her former lover Brendan (Allen Leech), whose reappearance brings a fresh set of complications that gradually intersect with the main narrative.

The Westies operates squarely within the conventions of the gangster genre and executes them with confidence. It can feel, at times, like an echo of The Sopranos and its descendants, but co-creator Chris Brancato (of Narcos and Godfather of Harlem) and his team carve out a distinct dynamic built on multi-front conflict: Irish, Italian, law enforcement, and other emerging groups. The show features the kind of sudden, brutal violence associated with Scorsese’s Goodfellas era, and even echoes Mean Streets in the fraught, brotherly bond between Flanagan and Roarke.

It doesn’t aim to reinvent the genre, nor does it break new formal ground. What it does achieve—efficiently and often compellingly—is to capture a city in transition. This is 1980s New York at the cusp of reinvention, beginning to shed the chaotic volatility of the previous decade and moving toward the sanitized, commercialized, tourist-friendly metropolis it would become during the 1990s. That shift—mirrored within the criminal organizations themselves, as they edge toward integration with legitimate systems—forms the series’ thematic core. The Westies ultimately charts the end of an era defined by codes and loyalties, and the beginning of another built on negotiation, compromise, and duplicity—the world, in many ways, we still inhabit today.