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.
