He arrived in New York in September 1965 on a cargo ship, an elderly man with a trunk of his own printed volumes and very little money. He chanted in Tompkins Square Park in the Lower East Side in 1966, attracted a first group of followers from the counterculture then forming there, and registered the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in July of that year. Within eleven years there were temples on several continents, farm communities, restaurants, a publishing house and large temple projects in India at Vrindavan and Mayapur.
The pace created a governance problem that he addressed while alive. In 1970 he established a Governing Body Commission, a standing collective authority intended to manage the society's affairs, on the reasoning that an institution should not depend on a single person. He did not name one successor. Shortly before his death in 1977 he authorised a group of senior disciples to initiate, and how far that authorisation extended became the central dispute of the following decade.
What followed was contested and in places painful. Several of the initiating gurus fell from their positions, authority was repeatedly reorganised, and the society has publicly acknowledged serious failures in the residential schools it ran for children in that period and acted on them. E. Burke Rochford's sociological study of the movement across three decades documents the sequence in detail.
The books outlasted the crises. They remain the movement's working scripture, and their distribution, which he treated as the primary activity rather than as fundraising, is still the measure it applies to itself.