Cormac MacKay

Cormac MacKay is an Irish mobster whose rise to leadership begins with a family coup and a partnership with FBI agent Scarlet O’Bannon. A practiced source of information who protects his own people, he becomes the target of the same corrupt network he suspects has helped his cousin Mickey take power. After his father’s death, Cormac gathers a small band of loyalists and pursues the men responsible; by the confrontation at the ballroom, he has moved from fugitive and heir to a man prepared to claim the Don’s position.

Identity and Background

Cormac belongs to an Irish mob family and is the son of a leader whose intelligence and standing he regards as a measure of what Mickey lacks. He is also Mickey MacFarland’s cousin and Moira’s brother. His criminal identity is not incidental to his later alliance with Scarlet: she knows him as a killer and a mobster, but also as someone who has sometimes supplied information about his rivals. Her reflection that those rivals have ended up jailed while Cormac has never given up one of his own men captures both his usefulness to law enforcement and the boundary around that usefulness.

Before the family’s crisis becomes explicit, Cormac is already someone Scarlet can imagine consulting. When his name is proposed as a possible source of information, his history of helping in earlier investigations makes the suggestion practical, even as Scarlet resists the idea that her interest in him is personal. Their connection thus begins in an uneasy overlap of professional exchange and private attraction: he can offer intelligence, but he remains a criminal whose loyalties do not simply align with hers.

Scarlet O’Bannon and the First Signs of the Coup

At The Leprechaun, Cormac summons Scarlet and waits for her in a conspicuously dressed-up setting. A man in a leprechaun outfit comes from the kitchen carrying a birthday cake, while ten-year-old twins in matching red shirts are celebrated nearby. This ordinary family occasion sits beside the alarming news Cormac has brought her: deliveries are going missing, people have disappeared, his cousin Mickey has been out of sight for about a week, and two missing men have turned up in custody in Los Angeles rather than New York City. Cormac suspects that someone inside the organization is compromised and asks Scarlet to make sense of the disruptions.

The meeting changes abruptly when Cormac learns that his father is dead. He gives Scarlet the news without displaying the grief he may be feeling, describing instead the immediate danger: the men involved in his father’s death have helped Mickey take over the family, and they may now be coming for him. His restrained manner serves as a form of discipline. He treats emotion as something that must not interfere with what he needs to do, even when the loss at the center of the crisis is his own father.

Cormac argues that Mickey could not have engineered the takeover alone. He contrasts Mickey’s lack of intelligence with his father’s competence and asks how such a coup could have succeeded without assistance. The earlier arrests of two of his men in California, followed by Mickey’s sudden ascendancy, strengthen his suspicion that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has helped arrange the conditions for the takeover. This remains a suspicion at first, but Cormac’s account gives Scarlet a reason to consider that the danger reaches beyond the mob itself.

Flight, Evidence, and a Growing Alliance

Cormac and Scarlet’s fears acquire concrete evidence when he opens a car trunk with a shotgun and finds blue jackets bearing the letters FBI, alongside trousers and holsters like those used at crime scenes. The clothing is issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For Scarlet, the contents turn a theory about possible agency involvement into a direct encounter with its material signs. Cormac’s earlier argument about the arrests and Mickey’s rise is no longer only a political inference: the disguises link the threat to people equipped to impersonate federal agents.

Their relationship shifts as they return to New York City and take refuge at Moira’s home. After two days spent together, both agree that they must stop lingering and begin working. Cormac is surprised by how much the embraces between them matter to him; he had not expected to be a man who valued hugging. That admission marks a change in the relationship without displacing the danger around it. Scarlet remains an agent investigating corruption, and Cormac remains a mobster facing a hostile succession struggle, but intimacy has become part of the alliance they are trying to sustain.

Scarlet’s father joins their effort because his daughter has told him about her suspicions and he has suspicions of his own. He also understands that the pair’s links to the Irish mob may help bring Mickey down. Scarlet’s shift from calling Cormac by his familiar nickname to addressing him more formally in front of her father shows her managing the boundary between their private closeness and the professional appearance of the investigation. That boundary does not always hold easily: she challenges Cormac for treating her father like a criminal, making clear that their cooperation does not erase her protectiveness toward her family.

The Struggle to Become Don

After returning to the fight against Mickey, Cormac has little more than a makeshift headquarters: a damp, cold former foreman’s office, where he sleeps on a mattress. Three men—Davey, Sebastian, and Flint—stay with him. They are loyal and want Mickey removed so that the family can be put back on what they consider the right course. Their presence gives Cormac a small force, not a secure command. Reports continue to arrive that Mickey is harming children, selling drugs, and trafficking women, conduct Cormac sees as a disgrace to his father’s legacy.

Cormac’s response to the struggle is not purely defensive. He decides that he must become Don, presenting the position as the only available course. The desire to take power is bound up with his attempt to stop Mickey and restore the family, but it also places Cormac at the center of the organization he means to redirect. The evidence does not make his authority effortless: he works from a poor, provisional base with only three men beside him, and he must find a way to reach Mickey or someone who helped him.

The search is practical as well as personal. After Flint studies a photograph, he points out two towers reflected in a mirror and reasons from their angle that Mickey’s people are at the ballroom. Cormac’s small group has found a possible destination by scrutinizing a detail in an image, turning their limited resources into an investigative advantage. The ballroom becomes the setting where Cormac’s claim to leadership can be tested against Mickey and the people gathered around him.

Claiming Leadership and Defining the Legacy

At the confrontation, Cormac acknowledges Moira and Scarlet before stating that he is there to recognize himself as Don. The declaration makes the succession explicit: he is no longer simply an heir trying to survive Mickey’s takeover, but a claimant asserting authority in front of those whose support matters. The moment also connects his family’s future to the relationships that have sustained him through the pursuit, rather than presenting leadership as a title gained in isolation.

Cormac then strikes Mickey and addresses the people in the room. He names the losses at the heart of the conflict—Scarlet, Moira, and his father—and accuses those present of sharing responsibility. He identifies two people in the room as Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and tells the criminals they are free to go when the agents permit it. The instruction both exposes the agency’s presence and turns Cormac’s attention outward: his accusation is directed not only at Mickey’s personal betrayal but at the network that enabled it.

His final rebuke to the group condemns their conduct as damaging to the name of criminals like themselves. The line is revealing because Cormac does not renounce the mob identity that gives him power; instead, he distinguishes his family’s legacy from Mickey’s reported abuses. His arc therefore culminates in a contested restoration rather than a clean break from violence or criminal authority. The son who measured Mickey against his father becomes Don by confronting the coup directly, while the new leadership remains inseparable from the question of what kind of family he intends to lead.