By selling his diary of the sensational crime to the New York World, Bergoff raised the money to fund the company founded with his brother Leo, the Bergoff Brothers Strike Service and Labor Adjusters,[7] which was established in 1907, with offices in the Schubert Building at 39th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.
A 1907 strike of garbage cart drivers resulted in numerous confrontations between strikers and the strikebreakers, even when protected by police escorts.
[8] When longshoremen went on strike in 1907, the steamship companies hired Bergman, who brought in black and Italian immigrant strikebreakers.
"[5] In 1909, the Pressed Steel Car Company at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, fired forty men, and eight thousand employees representing sixteen nationalities walked out under the banner of the Industrial Workers of the World.
[11] Even before the strike was over,[12] and then in more detail in 1911, the strikebreakers appeared before federal panels to describe their own living and working conditions after they were brought to the conflict.
[13] Held inside the plant or in boxcars against their will, fleeced, stolen from, physically threatened, and given rotten food, one hearing witness collapsed and was diagnosed with ptomaine poisoning.
Other testimony indicated that Bergoff's "right-hand man", described as "huge in stature, weighing perhaps 240 pounds", surrounded himself with thirty-five guards who intimidated and fleeced the strikebreakers, locking them into a boxcar prison with no sanitation facilities when they defied orders.
[6] A sympathetic article in the January 1935 Fortune lists a few of the "172 strike jobs" Bergoff's firm had handled, with notes such as "1907, Munson Steamship Line stevedores.
In September 1934, Bergoff was hired in response to a textile workers strike in Georgia and duly took two-hundred men to the South.
Labor leader Walter Reuther credited this examination of Bergoff's practices as a major impetus to the creation of the La Follette Committee.
[6] It also resulted in the federal indictments of James Rand Jr. and Bergoff for violation of the 1936 Byrnes Act prohibiting the movement of strikebreakers across state lines.
With his business model outlawed, and his private detective license subsequently revoked by the state of New York, Bergoff retired from public view.