New York City is the urban setting that repeatedly brings Scarlet O’Bannon’s Federal Bureau of Investigation work into contact with Cormac MacKay and the Irish mob. Rather than functioning as a single backdrop, the city is presented through distinct working and hiding places: an office where Scarlet weighs a confidential informant’s usefulness, the streets and buildings through which characters move under threat, and The Leprechaun, a pub whose changing ownership reflects the mob’s altered position. Across these settings, the city links professional investigation, personal attachment, and the danger of an unfolding power struggle.

Offices and Investigation

New York City’s Federal Bureau of Investigation offices are a center of Scarlet’s professional life and an early site of tension around Cormac. After an overnight session reviewing closed-circuit television footage of a drug deal, she meets with her boss, Max Smithson. The work has left her head throbbing, but she has chosen to examine the recordings herself rather than delegate them to newer agents. Her insistence on attending to detail establishes the investigative discipline through which she approaches the city’s criminal networks.

That office is also where the boundaries between investigation and personal involvement become difficult to maintain. Max presses Scarlet to explain whether Cormac has supplied useful information before and suggests that she should meet with him when he requests it. He also insinuates that her attitude may reflect attraction to Cormac. Scarlet rejects that interpretation internally, describing Cormac to herself as a mobster, killer, and criminal, while acknowledging that his information has helped put some rivals in jail. The office encounter therefore makes New York’s institutional setting more than a workplace: it is where Scarlet’s judgment of a source, her professional obligations, and her feelings are placed under scrutiny.

The city’s offices remain significant later, when Scarlet returns to work after two weeks spent on the run with Cormac. She imagines seeing his face in strangers on the way to the Federal Bureau of Investigation offices, then forces herself to attend to her duties. Her meeting with Max concerns the investigation into Mickey MacFarland’s mob, which Scarlet and her father have linked to prostitution, hard drugs, and murder. Their evidence points to Max’s connection with Mickey, but is not yet sufficient to bring him in; acting prematurely could warn Mickey. The same office where Scarlet once discussed Cormac thus becomes a place where she must assess possible corruption within the institution itself.

Streets, Routes, and Concealment

New York City’s streets connect official work to the risks surrounding it. When Scarlet visits Moira, who is living in witness-protection housing, she does not drive straight to the apartment. She circles through the city, watches for anyone following, leaves her car several blocks away, and enters an alley before continuing. These precautions give the urban setting a practical role in the investigation: routes and entrances become part of how Scarlet protects a vulnerable witness while keeping the location of that protection discreet.

The city also provides spaces of exposure rather than safety. After an intense confrontation, Cormac walks out into the street with his head lowered and his hands in his pockets, moving without a particular destination. The episode contrasts this solitary movement with his earlier departure from The Leprechaun alongside Scarlet, when he pulls her away from the bar and toward his car because he fears that Mickey’s men may return. In both instances, a street is a passage between immediate dangers, not a settled refuge.

Later, Flint drives Cormac and Sebastian through New York toward Scarlet’s apartment building. Cormac is consumed by the possibility that Scarlet may be in danger, and he rushes upstairs with his companions behind him. His aim has shifted: although he still wants to become Don, he recognizes that saving Scarlet matters more to him than securing that position. The apartment building and the route through the city therefore mark a personal crisis within the broader struggle for power. New York’s streets carry characters toward choices whose stakes are no longer only criminal or professional.

The Leprechaun and the Mob

The Leprechaun is one of New York City’s most distinctive meeting places in these episodes. When Scarlet arrives to meet Cormac, the pub’s exterior bears a large model leprechaun whose green clothing has weathered to grey, while a newly installed green sign flashes above the entrance. Inside, Cormac waits in a booth, one foot extending into the aisle as he traces the rim of his glass. The details establish a venue marked by both age and renewal, a public-facing pub that also serves as a setting for contact between an FBI agent and an Irish mobster.

Scarlet’s arrival follows a phone call in which Cormac assumes that her job will require her to come. She hangs up without answering, but half an hour later approaches the pub dressed less conspicuously as an FBI agent. The sequence sets professional distance against the fact of their meeting: the encounter is tied to her work, yet Cormac’s presence and Scarlet’s response make it personally charged as well. The Leprechaun thus gathers several tensions in one place, including the informant relationship, the investigation of criminal rivals, and Scarlet’s growing difficulty in separating her duties from her attachment to Cormac.

In the epilogue, The Leprechaun appears again as the new Irish mob compound, now a pub that has changed hands twice in the past year. Scarlet walks there in spring, after the events known as the Ballroom Bust. The venue’s return links the earlier meeting place to a changed political landscape: the pub remains recognizable, but its ownership and role within the mob have shifted. Its recurrence gives the city a measure of continuity while showing that control of its criminal spaces is not fixed.

A City of Attachment and Aftermath

New York City also becomes the setting in which Scarlet recognizes the emotional consequences of her time with Cormac. After returning from their time together, she sees reminders of him in ordinary passersby on her way to work, though the strangers do not actually resemble him. She understands those two weeks as transformative, shaped by years of working alongside him as well as by their time fleeing, their conflict, and their days at Moira’s. The city’s everyday movement does not erase the experience; it repeatedly gives her opportunities to mistake a stranger for the absent man she is trying not to think about.

For Cormac, the city’s apartment buildings and streets likewise give his attachment a concrete setting. At Scarlet’s building, he arrives with Flint and Sebastian and is prepared to abandon his ambition to become Don if that is what saving her requires. Earlier, his walk into the street had been directionless, an expression of rage at the conflict that had set Scarlet against him. These moments make New York a space where private feeling interrupts the forward motion of a criminal power struggle.

The epilogue reframes the same urban network through the consequences of the investigation. As Scarlet walks toward The Leprechaun, she recalls the extensive paperwork required for the Ballroom Bust and the work she shared with her father, conducting interviews and corroborating evidence. Mickey is serving life for multiple murders, his men are imprisoned or on trial, and corrupt Federal Bureau of Investigation agents have been removed. New York City remains the setting of the pub and the investigation, but the balance of power within it has changed. The city’s significance lies in that movement: from surveillance and uncertainty, through flight and danger, toward an aftermath in which investigative work has altered who can safely occupy its institutions and criminal meeting places.