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Thousands of families visit the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center every year for events like the Westminster dog show, Comic Con and International Auto Show.

Very few of them realize the blood spilled, extortion extracted and dead bodies connected with the exhibition space, as it rose from the ashes of former rail-yards to host such jazzy gatherings.

During construction between 1979 through 1986 and in the early years of operation, the burgeoning Center on the very West end of 34th Street was a cash cow for New York’s criminal elite.

It also limned the rise and fall of a violent Hell’s Kitchen-based Irish gang, the Westies. Those gangsters and the Javits Center play key roles in a new scripted crime series, “The Westies,” premiering July 12 on MGM+.

“The Westies felt like they owned the neighborhood where the Javits Center was,” series co-creator Chris Brancato, who specializes in historically inspired crime dramas, told The Post.

“Cops were on the pad [payroll] and the Westies felt a sense of freedom to do what they wanted, whether it was legal or not,” such as bookmaking, loan sharking, drug dealing and contract killings.

Underhand opportunities abounded at the New York City signature construction project of the ‘80s, which required the use of workers from a wide swath of unions, who already had mobsters rifling their coffers.

“Everyone understood that the Javits Center was going to be an unprecedented bounty of criminal rackets,” T.J. English, author of the definitive book on the gang, “The Westies” (not part of the series, which is more a “historical fiction,” according to Brancato) told The Post.

At the time, English explained, no source of kickback or extortion was too trivial for milking: “That included food carts for the workers, the laying of cement, painting,” even porta-potties.

“Everything from soup to nuts [and bolts] in the construction. There were different unions that were controlled by different players in the universe of organized crime.”

Money flowed from the project to the unions to the mobsters. “That,” said English, “was how things were done in New York during the ‘70s and ‘80s.”

The Westies formed in the early 60s, originally under Irish-American mobster Mickey Spillane (not to be confused with the writer of the same name) who controlled Hell’s Kitchen.

Money flowed from the project to the unions to the mobsters. “That,” said English, “was how things were done in New York during the ‘70s and ‘80s.”

They used a familiar playbook across the west side of Manhattan. By the time the Javits Center went up on their turf, they had cut their teeth by exploiting the building of Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue and 54th Street (it would later move 20 blocks downtown), the New York Coliseum, where the Time Warner Center currently sits, and every Broadway show that required set building or costume making.

While different mobs generally kept to their turf, the construction of the Javits Center — occupying a 20-acre plot of land — immediately attracted the attention of the Italian mafia, particularly the Gambino crime family, then led by Paul Castellano, who wanted to wet their beaks.

That was problematic for Spillane, and led to what became known as the Irish-Italian war of the 70s.

“In came a rivalry, which was actually a low-grade war,” said English, explaining Spillane was adamantly against working with the Italians.

“The Gambino family hired a notorious Irish hitman named Joseph ‘Mad Dog’ Sullivan and they started associating with underlings related to Spillane. They cut Mickey’s organization out from under him. They basically wanted his group inside [their own] so they could move in [on Javits]. This was all a business decision.”

Known as the “Gentleman Gangster,” Spillane was shot down in front of the Queens apartment building where he and his family lived.

Whether or not “Mad Dog” killed him is unclear, although he was a suspect and reportedly iced two of Spillane’s henchmen.