SerpApi.Org
When you’re entering a genre that’s been beaten to death by TV creators, you’d better make it stand out.
The crime gang model has gone round the world and back again from New Jersey’s The Sopranos, England’s Peaky Blinders, Ireland’s Love/Hate and Colombia’s Narcos.
Now Amazon MGM+ is taking us to a seedy side of New York in the 1980s and an Irish crime gang.
The Westies ruled Hell’s Kitchen before the money spread from the nicer parts of Manhattan, and it got gentrified.
The end of Hell’s Kitchen as an Irish ghetto also coincided with the final assimilation of the sons of Eireann into the American mainstream and the end of distinctive Irish territory.
But 40 years ago, The Westies, despite their small number, ruled their corner of the Big Apple as a distinctly ethnic group whose ethos and loyalty were based on it.
In the 1980s, their power was starting to fade, and they had to come together with the Italian mafia to profit from the imminent building of the Javits Center in their area.
The irony is that the building project was an existential crisis for The Westies’ control of Hell’s Kitchen.
While Sweeney can’t believe his luck at the rich pickings from the arrival of a multi-million-pound development on his doorstep, it’s the beginning of the end for his way of life.
Nonetheless, the gangster tone is set from the start, when one of the Irish crew ignores the new rules and abducts a member of the mafia when he strays into the Irish zone to meet his girlfriend.
Sweeney has to intervene, and, as a demonstration to his own crew and to the Gambino family that they would hold up their end of the bargain, he shoots his own man in the head in cold blood and frees Italian mobster Vinny Zaccaro.
Just when Sweeney thinks he’s crushed his problem, Mickey Flanagan, a Vietnam veteran who’s had his troubles, returns from the psychiatric hospital, apparently, all healed.
Unsurprisingly, he gets everyone into trouble quickly.
Emboldened, Zaccaro comes into one of their pubs with his Irish girlfriend, words are spoken, Mickey takes offence, and we’re back in a warehouse where Mickey has a gun, and the mafioso is tied to a chair.
Again, Sweeney rides to the rescue and this time instructs his key lieutenant Jimmy Roarke (Tom Brittney) to shoot his childhood friend Mickey in the head.
After a dramatic pause, Jimmy shoots Zaccaro instead, and a battle to the death with the Gambino family is imminent.
That is, until Jimmy has a cunning plan.
They “disappear” Zacarro but keep his severed hand, and they go on an armed robbery spree, leaving his post-mortem fingerprints at every scene, thereby denying the Gambinos proof that he’s dead and, they hope, not enough evidence to start an all-out war.
Naturally, there are other IRA connections than disappearing people.
Bridget (Sarah Bolger) is a former IRA member who escapes to the US with the help of a Hell’s Kitchen priest. Now she works with the IRA’s US fundraising arm, Noraid. At the same time, she’s connected to The Westies as Jimmy Roarke’s girlfriend.
She’s left Northern Ireland to preserve her life, but can’t refuse an old comrade and ex-boyfriend when he asks her to mind a rocket-launcher for him.
It’s not groundbreaking television, and it’s never going to be at the level of The Sopranos, but it’s bingeable stuff and well worth your time.
