Summary
As familiar as it might be, The Westies immediately sets the tone in “The Troubles” with a great cast, multiple competing agendas, and a surprising sense of fun.
It’s unavoidable that nothing going on in The Westies is anything you haven’t seen before. The battleground is Hell’s Kitchen of the 1980s; the players are the Irish, competing with the Italian mob; and the prize is whatever profits can be made from the under-construction Javitz Center and other key territories. Aside from some cultural texture – Episode 1 is titled “The Troubles” and has a thick vein of Irish pride running through it – this is a show you’ve seen many, many times before.
The good news is that it seems very much like a show you’ll be happy to see again. I was sold from the opening scene, in which an Irish hood named Davey O’Brien is holding an Italian named Vinnie Zaccaro to ransom. This isn’t an event that’s particularly out of the ordinary, but the rules have changed. The Irish head honcho, Eamon Sweeney, has cut a deal with “Big Paul” through his intermediary, John Gotti, so the Italians are off limits. To prove it, Sweeney shoots Davey dead.
The compelling thing about The Westies is that Sweeney isn’t really the point. It isn’t an origin story; it doesn’t unfold from his perspective in the way that these things usually do. Instead, it’s rooted in the viewpoint of his right-hand man, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s girlfriend, Bridget, neither of whom loves the idea that Sweeney killed their friend, Davey. But they’re trapped. They need work; they need protection, and Sweeney controls those things. He’s a means to an end, a “better the devil you know” kind of deal.
This is a sentiment not especially well understood by Mickey Flanagan, another member of the same crew who has just been released from a stint of “psychiatric care” – read: electroshock therapy – in Bellevue following what is implied to be time spent fighting overseas, presumably in Vietnam. Mickey’s return to the fold shakes up the dynamic, since he doesn’t know what happened to Davey and is too unstable to find out, but he also needs money, and Sweeney is the most obvious source of it. So it is that Jimmy and Mickey are recruited by Sweeney to “silence” a popular Irish union leader named Deke Kinsella, which they do by beating up his goons and cutting out his tongue.
Despite having done this at the behest of the Italians, though, the relationship is still extremely frayed, certainly as far as Mickey is concerned. When Vinnie comes around disrespecting Erin, an Irish girl whose services he regularly pays for, Mickey goes bonkers, and Jimmy has to drag him away. Feeling betrayed, he takes Vinnie hostage for the second time in the episode, which is a nice mirror of the cold open, with Sweeney and Jimmy arriving in the same way to try and talk things out. Sweeney wants Jimmy to kill Mickey, since he, like Davey, “has got to go”, but Jimmy instead executes Vinnie rather than turn on his friend. The lucrative alliance has hit a major roadblock before it has even gotten going.
This is the cliffhanger ending of The Westies Episode 1, but there’s plenty more going on besides. For instance, we’re introduced to Glenn Keenan, a cop who runs a sports book out of the precinct, who is headhunted by FBI Special Agent Birdie Polk to join the task force building a RICO case against the Gambino crime family. Keenan refuses at first, since he clearly has a history with Sweeney and takes kickbacks from him. Sweeney, though, wants Keenan to play the inside man. Keenan agrees in exchange for Sweeney no longer giving his son, Danny, any errands to run, but Sweeney refuses, so Keenan later joins the task force anyway, but on the proviso that the FBI leave Danny alone when they invariably take Gotti and Sweeney down.
There’s also an emerging subplot involving Bridget, whose original name is Sarah, and an old associate named Brendan Cahill who wants to use her position at the docks to illegally smuggle a rocket launcher into the country, for purposes as-yet unknown. There’s history between Bridget and Brendan that clearly upsets Jimmy, but since he has other things to be worrying about, namely Mickey, this whole matter takes a bit of a back seat. It’s something to keep an eye on, though, since rocket launchers in highly volatile climates don’t typically tend to yield positive results.
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