Biography
Charles Lesse, an IWW member, received a one- to fourteen-year sentence, which he served in San Quentin from January 23, 1920, to May 1922. After his release, Lesse was deported to Finland.
From Kenyon Zimmer's Red Scare Deportees index (kenyonzimmer.com, compiled from INS deportation case files): Left Germany at age fourteen and later joined the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. In San Francisco in 1916 he joined the IWW and became a delegate. Arrested in February 1919 as “likely to become a public charge,” he was released on bail but rearrested in Arcata, California, in November 1919 for violating the state criminal syndicalism law. Convicted and sentenced to one to fourteen years, he was imprisoned at San Quentin from January 1920 to May 1922, then deported March 4, 1922.
In Germany he briefly joined the syndicalist Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands, then joined the Communist Party of German and worked as an underground agent for the Communist International’s Department of International Communications (OMS) in Europe and Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s.
