John “Jack” Bielak drove a sporty black Ford coupe with red racing stripes and red wire wheels. Gregarious and likeable, he had come to Detroit from Toledo in the late 1920s, quickly meeting and marrying Wanda Wadelik. Soon after they had a daughter, Dolores. Wanda adored Jack, but he had trouble holding a job and too freely gambled away their money. She found that she couldn’t live with him, so they separated but remained friendly. She still cared for him. So did her parents, who liked that he was Polish, a fact he disguised at the Hudson plant, where they knew him as Bailey.
By March 1934 Bielak, twenty-seven, had matured, and he and Wanda, a waitress, had reconciled. She appreciated that he had kept his job at the Gratiot factory, risen to be head of the metal finishers, successfully pushed for a wage increase for his department, and gotten his younger brother Joe a job there too. All of these signs pointed to a brighter future. Bielak acted almost giddy about his success in persuading co-workers to join the union local. One week he gathered ninety membership applications. Just recently, the men at the plant had stood with him, threatening to walk off the job when higher-ups tried to fire him for his union activities.
He and Wanda picked out a house along Six Mile Road, a little place with a yard for their four-year-old daughter. They planned to move in together. On the evening of Thursday, March 15, Bielak met her for dinner at her parents’ place in Hamtramck. He discussed their future with her father, who approved of the reunion. That night, all of the Wadeliks thought John Bielak sweet. But he had rushed off early to meet his plant foreman. En route, he stopped to talk with his best friend about a developing strike action at the plant. His bosses knew him to be an organizer. Not long ago one of his friends had gotten a job at the factory, only to be fired the same day he was seen laughing and joking with Bielak.
After Bielak picked up his foreman, the man asked to be dropped off at a political meeting. It was being held less than a half mile from the Jefferson Avenue apartment that Bielak shared with his brother. Both places were close to the union hall. The meeting turned out to be a gathering of the Black Legion.
Later that night, thirty-seven miles south along a rural road in a small town near Monroe, a driver saw two cars stop abruptly. He braked and then heard the repeated pop of a gun and saw the flash of a shot. He grabbed his crankshaft, thinking he might be next. But the two cars fled past, leaving the scene silent, save for the mournful whistle of a train. Bielak’s body—badly beaten and shot through both arms, the chest, and head—was discovered along the road, a union application tucked beneath his bloody head and fifty blank memberships cards stuffed in his pockets. A card for the Wolverine Republican League was also found on him. Bielak’s foreman convinced Detroit Police that the killing had been committed by communists as part of an intra-party squabble.
Mystery solved. Case closed.