Shaun Richman
At some point, his deportation case gets thrown out also on a technicality, because — in shades of the Trump administration — in their rush to do this they got sloppy. There was a vacancy in the Department of Justice, and that vacancy was not filled by anybody that the Senate vetted. So at some point, the Supreme Court says that any actions taken under that person are null.
So he was going to get off, but then the government turned around and said, wait a second, we had a piece of paper here where he says, “No, I was never a Communist.” We have another piece of paper here where he says, “Actually, yes, I was.”
He’s convicted of perjury in 1951. He appeals, but his appeals run out pretty quickly. He serves a little bit of jail time, but then he agrees to self-deport. He could’ve cut a deal that involved naming names and he might have seen no jail time, but he refused.
So, he went back to Germany. He had some family left there, but it had been decades. He’s this crazy uncle from America who got into some trouble. He winds up in Spain when he dies in 1960. That seems like a really strange place for a Communist to be at that time. But Spain had better hospice care at home, and he needed that at that point.
But the union stuck with him. I find this almost poetic. The union began having these annual Michael J. Obermeier tribute dinner dances. They were raising money for him because he didn’t get a pension. They were trying to raise enough of a nest egg that they could get him an annuity. But he passed a few months later.