Evsei Agron
Russian-American-Jewish mobster (1932-1985)
Evsei Borisovich Agron (; Russian: Евсей Борисович Агрон; 25 January 1932 – 4 May 1985) was a Soviet-American mobster and boss of New York City's Russian mafia during the 1970s and 1980s. Known for his cruelty, he was called the "Godfather" of the Russian American mafia.
Criminal career
Born in Leningrad, of Jewish origins, Agron was a pickpocket. He served seven years in a Soviet prison camp and emerged as a vor. Agron was expelled from the vor brotherhood, however, for failure to pay a gambling debt. He left the Soviet Union in 1971 and controlled a large prostitution and gambling ring in Hamburg, West Germany.
Agron emigrated to the United States, arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City on October 8, 1975 and listing his occupation as a jeweler. The investigative journalist Robert I. Friedman described Agron as a "short, grandfatherly man". He swiftly gained control of criminal operations among the Soviet Jews living in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, and with the assistance of his enforcers Emile Puzyretsky and the Nayfeld brothers, Benjamin and Boris, oversaw a lucrative extortion ring in the Russian émigré community, which by 1980 was worth tens of thousands of dollars per week. The victims of Agron's protection racket included doctors, lawyers and shopkeepers who "were scared shitless" of Agron, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent William Moschella.
The public source identifies “Evsei Agron” as russian-American-Jewish mobster (1932-1985). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Evsei, Agron and Russian-American-Jewish.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5418812. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932, 1985, 1971 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Evsei Agron” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.