Biography
Sidney Steinberg was a Communist Party organizer indicted in the 1951 second-string New York Smith Act case who went underground rather than face trial. After about two years as a fugitive he was captured by the FBI on August 27, 1953 at a secluded cabin near Twain Harte, California, together with the fugitive Smith Act leader Robert G. Thompson, Shirley Kremen, Samuel Coleman and Carl Ross. Steinberg was convicted of relieving and harboring Thompson and of conspiracy, but the Supreme Court reversed the convictions in Kremen v. United States, 353 U.S. 346 (1957), holding that the FBI’s wholesale seizure of the cabin’s entire contents was an illegal search.
Contemporary identity and pre-arrest status
The August 9, 1951 Gorman Progress, page 3, reproduced an FBI wanted notice identifying Sidney Steinberg, also called Sid Stein, born September 16, 1914 in Lithuania. It identifies his Communist Party labor-organizing and New Jersey party work, including New Jersey chairmanship in 1945, and March 1938 naturalization in New York City. The notice says he was indicted by a New York federal grand jury on June 20, 1951 and remained a fugitive when it was written. The indictment and this historical wanted notice are not evidence of physical jail admission on June 20. The later arrest, imprisonment and reversal already recorded here remain unchanged.
The Gorman Progress, August 9, 1951, page 3, contemporary FBI notice reproduced by the newspaper.
