The Westies Season 1 episode 4 recap: Who is the target from Bridget’s past that Cahill is after and what is Sweeney’s real agenda with the drug operation?

The Westies is MGM+’s 1980s Hell’s Kitchen crime drama created by Chris Brancato and Michael Panes, the team behind Narcos and Godfather of Harlem. Brancato serves as showrunner. The eight-episode first season premiered on July 12, 2026 with the first two episodes dropping together before moving to weekly Sunday releases.


The series follows the Irish-American Westies as they try to claim a share of the profits from the Jacob Javits Convention Center construction while holding a fragile working arrangement with the Italian mafia. J.K. Simmons leads as Eamon Sweeney, the calculating boss who works hard at looking like a community man. Tom Brittney plays Jimmy Roarke, the ambitious younger enforcer Sweeney raised. Titus Welliver is Glenn Keenan, the NYPD detective with deep and messy ties to the neighbourhood. Sarah Bolger stars as Bridget Walsh, Jimmy’s partner and a former IRA operative living under a new name.

Allen Leech appears as Brendan Cahill, the republican who brings old weapons and old scores back into Bridget’s life. Stanley Morgan is Mickey Flanagan, Jimmy’s loyal but damaged Vietnam veteran friend. Jessica Frances Dukes plays FBI agent Birdie Polk.


Episode 4, titled 'Favours and Funerals' and directed by Chris Grismer, aired on July 26, 2026. It picks up right after the Starship raid that freed Mickey and left the crew holding a large amount of Colombian cocaine. The hour spreads its attention across funerals, private deals, family pressure and a quiet ambush that forces several people to show what they are really willing to protect.

The episode opens at Pat Murphy’s funeral. Pat was killed at the end of the previous episode after Keenan followed him and suffocated him with a plastic bag. The official story inside the crew is still thin. People talk about Pat as a solid guy and the family’s sole breadwinner. Sweeney uses the gathering to give a long, polished speech about the old neighbourhood, the men who came up in it, and the need to look after their own.

On the surface it sounds like the kind of talk a local leader gives. Mickey stands near Jimmy and quietly undercuts the whole performance. He reminds Jimmy that Sweeney was ready to let Mickey die not long ago and that the same man signed off on Pat’s removal. The gap between the speech and the actual behaviour is hard to miss.

Jimmy wants to know who killed a Westie on their turf. Sweeney quickly steers him toward Puerto Ricans and tells him to drop the investigation. Later, away from the others, Sweeney and Keenan speak more honestly. Danny, Keenan’s son, has figured out enough of the truth to start applying pressure. Danny knows Keenan was involved in Pat’s death and is using that knowledge to demand his place back inside the crew. Sweeney makes it clear that Keenan is responsible for shutting the problem down. If Jimmy or the others ever learn that Sweeney authorised the hit, the fallout for Sweeney himself would be severe.


Keenan tries talking first. He goes to the house where Danny lives with Moira, the sister of Keenan’s late wife Eileen. Moira has been raising the boy and has little patience left for Keenan’s sudden interest. She reminds him of the years he was absent while Eileen was sick and dying. When Danny appears, Keenan apologises for the beatings and the long stretch of neglect. He sounds sincere.

Danny asks the direct question: did you kill Pat? Keenan lies and blames a drug deal that went wrong. For a short stretch it seems Danny accepts the story. Then Keenan later sees Danny meeting with Sweeney at a bar. The boy is still working both sides and is prepared to use what he knows.

Keenan goes to Agent Polk with a deal. He will dig further into Sweeney’s connections with Big Paul Castellano and the Starship raid if Polk has Danny arrested on drug possession charges and moved out of the city. The drugs are planted. Danny is taken into custody. Moira cuts Keenan off completely after that. She has already lost her sister. She will not lose the boy to Keenan’s version of protection as well.

The storyline leaves Keenan more isolated than before. He has once again chosen the path that keeps Danny breathing in the short term while destroying whatever thin family connection remained. It also leaves Sweeney with one less immediate threat, at least for the moment.


Jimmy and the remaining crew still hold the bricks of c*c*ine taken from the Starship. Mickey and Connor see an obvious chance to make money that could help Pat’s family and put cash in their own pockets. Jimmy knows Sweeney’s standing rule against the drug trade but decides the moment is right to push. He brings the product to Sweeney at the Javits construction site.

Sweeney is in a good mood about receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hibernian Society. After some banter about Irish heritage and religion, Jimmy raises the subject of the cocaine. Sweeney shuts the idea down without much discussion. He takes possession of the bricks and states that they will be destroyed so Castellano never hears a word about them.

That is the version Jimmy is given. Behind closed doors Sweeney discusses the situation with Breen. Breen advises against selling. Even a one-time deal risks the exact conflict Sweeney has spent years trying to avoid. Sweeney decides the risk is manageable. He contacts a buyer named Leon and arranges the sale at forty thousand dollars per brick. The meeting happens at the Javits site.

Leon is surprised to be dealing with Sweeney directly. Sweeney lies about the origin of the product and stresses the need for secrecy. The money goes into Sweeney’s control. Some of it appears to support the charitable donations that help maintain his public image as a respectable Irish community figure. The same week he accepts the Hibernian award and delivers another carefully worded speech about looking after their own.


The secrecy does not hold. Charlie, an associate of Leon’s, sells the information. John Gotti receives word that the Westies are moving product that should never have left the Starship. Gotti already believes the Westies acted against him on Castellano’s orders during the disco raid. The drug sale confirms the pattern in his mind. He orders a hit on Sweeney for the night of the award dinner, ignoring advice from Phil to reconsider.

Jimmy learns the truth from an unexpected source. While collecting protection money with Mickey, they pressure Finn, an army surplus shop owner who is behind on payments because of gambling. Mickey criticises the custom dog tags Finn sells. Jimmy threatens physical consequences.

Finn, desperate to keep his hands intact, first mentions knowing Jimmy’s mother and then, on a return visit, reveals that Sweeney has already sold the c*c*ine through Leon. The information lands hard. Jimmy and Mickey talk it through on the street. Mickey lists the people Sweeney has already been willing to sacrifice or deceive. Davey. The near-death situation with Mickey. The quiet approval of Pat’s murder. Now the c*c*ine that Jimmy risked his life to take.

Jimmy still goes to the Hibernian dinner. After the speeches and the photographs, Sweeney steps into the alley for a cigarette. Two shooters are waiting. Jimmy arrives in time, kills both men, and gets Sweeney out of the immediate danger. Later the two of them share a quiet drink at the Javits site. Very little is said out loud. The look that passes between them makes the new reality clear.


Jimmy knows what Sweeney did with the drugs. Sweeney knows that Jimmy knows. The loyalty is still functioning for the moment, but the foundation under it has shifted. Sweeney’s real agenda with the cocaine was never about protecting the truce or the crew. It was about retaining control of the money and the narrative while ordering everyone else to stay clean.

Bridget has been managing Cahill’s presence since he first arrived with crates of weapons. She stored the material. She even supplied Jimmy with the rocket launcher that made the Starship raid possible. That decision left Cahill short one critical piece of equipment. When she tries to explain the missing launcher by suggesting dock cleaners must have discarded it in a landfill, Cahill stops accepting half-answers.

He tells her the target. Colonel Geral Markham is a British operative who has spent years hunting Irish republicans who escaped to the United States. Markham is also the man responsible for the deaths of Bridget’s parents. The information lands with real force. Bridget had been helping Cahill out of old political loyalty and a residual sense of unfinished business from her earlier life. Learning that the intended target is the person who killed her own family turns the entire arrangement personal. She no longer has the heavy weaponry that was planned, which only raises the risk of whatever comes next.


She does not give Jimmy the complete picture. She tells him only that she needs to remain involved with Cahill’s work and asks him to trust her. At home she walks in on Mickey and Erin together on the couch, a small private reminder that the people around her are also rearranging their lives. By the end of the hour Bridget has committed to the Markham operation. The distance between her current life with Jimmy and the violence she once left behind has narrowed again.

The final stretch of Favours and Funerals leaves three situations more dangerous than they were at the start of the hour. Jimmy has saved Sweeney’s life after discovering the man sold the cocaine in secret. The act of protection still happens. The quiet drink that follows is stripped of easy trust. Sweeney almost certainly offers some justification, something about protecting the crew from Big Paul’s reaction if the drugs had been sold more openly. Jimmy accepts the explanation for now, but the calm way he sits with the knowledge suggests the conversation has changed the balance between them. Mickey’s earlier list of Sweeney’s past choices is still hanging in the air.

Keenan has removed his son from the street by arranging an arrest. Danny is out of the immediate orbit of the Westies, which was the short-term goal. The cost is the complete break with Moira and a deeper obligation to Agent Polk. Keenan is now more isolated and more compromised than before. He has protected Danny by the only method still available to him, and it has left him with fewer places to stand.


Bridget has stepped fully into Cahill’s plan against the man who murdered her parents. She has done it without giving Jimmy the full details. The missing rocket launcher means the operation will be riskier and closer range. Her decision closes the gap between the life she has built in Hell’s Kitchen and the one she left behind in Ireland.

The official outline for episode 5, 'A Right Rose Tree', shows the next pressures landing quickly. Sweeney tells Jimmy he can sell cocaine only if he sources the product himself. That single condition places Jimmy directly in Gotti’s path at the exact moment Gotti already suspects the Westies of working against Castellano.

Bridget continues helping Cahill secure explosives for the larger IRA plot. Agent Polk increases the pressure on Keenan and pushes him toward wearing a wire. The generational friction inside the Westies, the Italian response to the cocaine sale, and Bridget’s personal war are all set to tighten in the same stretch of days.

Episode 4 does not deliver one single explosion that resets the board. Instead it removes several of the remaining comfortable lies the characters had been living with. Sweeney can no longer present himself as the steady, rule-bound father figure without the cracks showing clearly. Bridget’s past is no longer something she can keep at a safe distance.

Jimmy continues to be the person who arrives when the shooting starts, yet the cost of that reliability is becoming harder to ignore. The hour leaves the crew more exposed, more suspicious of one another, and closer to the kind of open conflict the early episodes had managed to keep just under the surface.

The Westies Season 1 Episode 4 is streaming now on MGM+. The season contains eight episodes in total, with new instalments releasing every Sunday through the finale on August 23, 2026.