"They caused a great deal of mayhem": The Westies creators on bringing the 1980s gangster drama to life

Showrunner Chris Brancato and co-creator/executive producer Michael Panes tell us about the inspiration behind The Westies and how they brought the series to television

An older man in a dark suit stands confidently at the centre of a dim pub, holding a pint of beer. Around him, several people sit or stand with drinks, watching him closely. A pool table with scattered billiard balls sits behind the group, lit by a stained‑glass lamp. Warm, vintage décor—framed pictures, dark wood, soft amber lighting—creates a classic bar atmosphere that suggests a tense or dramatic moment.

Published: July 22, 2026 at 4:25 PM

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HistoryExtra: Can you tell us a little about the setting of the series?

Chris Brancato: The 1980s is associated with big shoulder pads, Don Johnson, Miami Vice, yuppies, Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, but Hell’s Kitchen is a corner of New York that hasn’t yet hit that revitalisation. There’s still a rough-hewn character to the neighbourhood and the people who lived in it.

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The Westies are shown almost as ‘frenemies’ to the Mafia. There are cultural similarities through Catholicism, but differences too. How did that dynamic work?

CB: The interesting thing is that you could call the Italians organised crime, where you have a capo, you have under-bosses, you have soldiers, you have hundreds to a thousand members in a particular crime family like the Gambinos or the Colombo family, whereas the Irish were about 20-25 odd souls who caused a great deal of mayhem for their relatively small numbers.

A black‑and‑white photo of three men standing outdoors near a parked car and a metal gate. Two face the camera while the third stands with his back turned. The man on the left wears a dark shirt; the man in the centre wears a vest over a light shirt; and the man on the right wears a light short‑sleeved shirt. They appear to be talking in a quiet, serious moment, with decorative ironwork and an urban building entrance behind them.

Crime bosses John Gotti and Angelo Ruggiero speak to a Mafia underling, 1989. Relations between the Italian Mafia and the Irish Mob were important but often fraught | Credit: Getty Images

They were working in league with the Italians, but that was a very fraught partnership. On the one hand, they did jobs for the Italians, they knocked people off if necessary. On the other hand, they were fighting with the Italians for spoils, for the profits of drug dealing, and also extortion of the Javits Center and other building projects. So you have a group that represents disorganised crime. They don’t have a typical structure, they don’t have a boss above other bosses, at least not to too much of a degree. You watch a very ragtag group of criminals here.

Michael Panes: They’re not just fighting against the Italians, they’re also fighting with each other. There was a compelling amount of chaos built into the gang that we thought was interesting.

The Mafia sometimes paid the Westies to kill fellow mobsters. Was their relationship in part about plausible deniability?

CB: Yes, it was. And also there was the fact the Westies were parked in the proximity of the Javits Center, which was [one of] the biggest construction projects in the history of New York City. The Italians were going to get a piece of that through their extortion, through stealing from job sites, through all the things that the Mafia does, concrete contracts and all sorts of things like that. But they needed the Irish because the Irish were there on the spot. Irish workers were doing the construction projects, so the Italians, with some reluctance, had to cut the Irish in. That’s where our show begins: with the decision to bilk the Javits Center out of money, and the relationship between the Italians and the Irish during that time.

A black‑and‑white photo of a large urban construction site filled with concrete columns, steel framework, and dense scaffolding. Several workers move among the structures, while a concrete mixer truck and a concrete pump truck operate in the foreground. Tall city buildings rise in the background, emphasising the scale of the project and the busy, industrial atmosphere.

Construction of the Javits Center progresses, 1980s. This project presented the opportunity for extortion – and was central to the Westies’ powerful stance alongside the Mafia in New York | Credit: Getty Images

How did you go about researching this? While a lot of what happened is written down, maybe a lot of it is folklore.

MP: There’s a lot of folklore, there are a lot of stories banded about. We did do a fair amount of research, but our show clearly is not a documentary, it’s a fictionalised history. What we wanted to do with the research was to distill the essence of what the Westies did, and who they were, and how they were, and then build our show around that. We blend. Some characters are real, some are fictionalised. They’re all on many levels a fictionalised composite of things.

Is there still that Irish New York tradition that we all know about?

CB: That’s a very good question. I think it moved outside of Manhattan. I’m sure that there are boroughs in Queens and Brooklyn that are heavily Irish, and where some of that lore remains, but in terms of the West Side of Manhattan, it’s not the same anymore. What’s interesting is that the Javits Center, which was going to enrich these Irish gangs and enrich the neighbourhood, [was part of] a kind of gentrification that pushed them all out.

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The Westies is available to stream via MGM+

Authors

Jonathan Wright

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