Sean Callan—Stevie “O-Bop” O’Leary

Sean Callan and Stevie “O-Bop” O’Leary’s friendship hardens into a criminal partnership through a choice neither can undo: Callan kills Eddie Friel, and O-Bop stays beside him. They flee together, share the danger of being hunted, and eventually use the disorder around them to establish themselves in Hell’s Kitchen. Their relationship is at once intimate and unsentimental—a bond expressed through companionship, divided action, and the joint work of surviving and profiting.

Friendship Before the Killing

At seventeen, Callan is drinking beers with O-Bop in the Liffey Pub on a sweltering New York afternoon. The bar is nearly empty; the two friends share the room with bartender Billy Shields and Mickey Haggerty, who has spent a roll of quarters making the jukebox repeat “Moon River.” O-Bop cannot let go of what was done to Michael Murphy. The fragmentary account establishes the subject of their conversation without detailing the earlier wrong, but it shows O-Bop drawing Callan into a grievance that will soon become a test of allegiance.

That setting gives their friendship an ordinary, familiar surface: two young men at the bar, drinking and talking. Yet the pub is also a place where loyalties have consequences. Their discussion of Murphy takes place amid the pressures of the neighborhood’s criminal order, and the choices that follow transform friendship from shared company into shared risk. The book does not present O-Bop as a bystander to Callan’s life; from the outset, he is beside him when a private grievance opens onto violence.

The Choice That Makes Them Partners

When Eddie Friel confronts Callan with a demand to choose between him and another man, Callan answers, “Him,” draws a .22 from beneath his shirt, and shoots Friel twice in the forehead. The decision is Callan’s, and the killing is his action. O-Bop’s response is different but consequential: he takes the .38 from Friel’s hand, puts it in the dead man’s mouth, and pulls the trigger repeatedly, crying and shouting obscenities. The scene gives the partners distinct parts in a shared aftermath. Callan makes the decisive choice; O-Bop joins the violence in a burst of grief and rage.

The difference between their actions does not separate them. After Mickey Haggerty warns them to leave town, Callan puts away his .22 and lifts O-Bop by the elbow from where he is crouched over Friel’s body. He tells him to come along, and they leave together. Their departure is both practical escape and a visible act of care: Callan does not abandon his shaken friend at the scene. From this point, their association carries the weight of a killing and the danger of retaliation.

Flight, Shared Risk, and Opportunity

The two hide in a second-floor apartment on Forty-ninth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues. Sleep is scarce; they lie looking at what little sky can be seen from a New York rooftop. O-Bop remarks that they have killed two men, and Callan answers, “Yeah.” The exchange is spare, but it marks their situation plainly: the violence is no longer a single shock that can be left behind. It has become the fact around which their immediate life together is organized.

When word reaches them that the price on their heads is one hundred thousand dollars, O-Bop comes away from the window to ask how much. After hearing the figure, the two look at each other and laugh. The response does not make their danger disappear; instead, the laugh shows them meeting it together. What could divide or paralyze them becomes a shared moment of disbelief and defiance.

A month after the episode later known as the “Rising of the Moon River,” Callan is still alive, and he and O-Bop have become neighborhood heroes. While Jimmy Peaches is dealing with Matt Sheehan, the partners take a black felt-tip pen to Sheehan’s little black book. They erase some debts, reduce others, and preserve the entries they expect will bring them the greatest return. Their collaboration has moved beyond flight: together they decide which obligations to cancel and which to maintain, turning the old ledger into an instrument of their own authority.

From Companions to West Side Rulers

Callan and O-Bop set themselves up in the Liffey Pub as if they own it; the debts in the black book suggest that their claim is not merely theatrical. People come in grateful to be free of Sheehan’s demands, or fearful of remaining indebted to the young men associated with the killings of Eddie Friel and Jimmy Boylan and with the probable killing of Sheehan himself. Their new standing depends on both responses. Gratitude gives them a following; fear gives their decisions force.

The story’s movement is therefore not from violence to safety, but from exposed fugitives to men able to shape the neighborhood’s debts. At the outset, Mickey’s warning sends them out of town because the mob’s reach makes staying dangerous. Later, they occupy the same pub and control the consequences of a ledger that once belonged to someone more powerful. Their partnership enables that change: Callan’s resolve at the moment of killing and O-Bop’s participation afterward lead into a shared escape, and the escape gives way to shared control.

Standing in the street beneath a blue sky, O-Bop throws an arm around Callan and declares, “we’re the kings of the West Side.” The phrase is his, but the claim is made for both of them. It completes the relationship’s early arc: the friends who met over beers and fled together now understand themselves as joint beneficiaries of the power vacuum they helped create. The confidence is inseparable from the violence and debts on which their new position rests; their rise does not erase the danger that produced it, but turns that danger into the basis of their rule.