The Westies is an upcoming MGM+ crime drama about an Irish American gang set in the 1980s in Hell's Kitchen, New York. With a cast led by Titus Welliver and J.K. Simmons, the show will tell us the story of how the gang named Westies ran Hell's Kitchen and posed quite the challenge to the Italians back in their day.Interestingly, the show is based on the life and business of a forgotten New York Irish crime family that operated in Hell's Kitchen in the late 1970s and 1980s.The Westies' true story that might not have been knownWhile many shows often tell the story of fictional crime syndicates, The Westies is based on the real-life Westies gang. Much like the show, the gang was an Irish-American organized crime group that controlled a major part of Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen during the 1970s and 1980s.The trailer of the show tells us that the gang was a relatively small one, and in reality, the original Westies were a small gang as well. Their number ranged from 20 to 60. Despite their small size, the gang had a reputation for being extremely violent and managed to hold significant power over the neighborhood's criminal network, something the trailers have teased we will see in the show as well.According to The Mob Boss Museum, the real Westies gang was led by Mickey Spillane, and he was later succeeded by Jimmy Coonan. There was also quite a struggle for power between the two, and Spillane was killed by a hitman hired by a different crime family so that Jimmy could take over.As the show's logline and trailers have made it clear, we're going to see a similar kind of struggle between Eamon Sweeney and James Roarke, who is also known as Jimmy. A part of the logline reads:"internal conflict between the brash younger generation and the old-school leadership threatens to set a match to this powder keg, which will sweep the Westies into the FBI’s ever-deepening investigation into the Italian mafia."which heavily suggests that the old (Sweeney) and the young (Roarke) are going to fight one another for power, much like the real-life Westies members did. View this post on Instagram Instagram PostThe MGM+ series will show us the FBI building a case against the Italian mafia and how the Westies will get swept up in it. The federal authorities will also use Glenn Keenan (Titus Welliver), a former friend of Eamon Sweeney, to gather evidence about the Irish American gang.This storyline isn't the same but is similar to the real investigation into the Westies, which eventually led to their downfall. Back in the day, federal prosecutors spent years building a racketeering case against the gang. They then used witness testimony from gang member Mickey Featherstone and RICO charges to convict Jimmy Coonan and other leading members of the Westies.In 1988, Jimmy Coonan was sentenced to 75 years in prison and will be released in 2030. It is yet to be known if the show will depict the fall of the gang or just show a chapter of their story, but we will get to see the internal struggles that plagued the real Westies, along with the gang trying to stay out of reach of the FBI.The Westies will premiere on MGM+ on July 12, 2026.For more articles like this, follow Soapcentral.