Most people who met Gary Johnson found him a quiet but polite neighbor who worked in human resources and had two cats. They had no idea that, to others, he was Mike Caine, Jody Eagle, or Chris Buck—an undercover hit man for hire.
Johnson’s actual career as a fake contract killer in Harris County, Texas, receives a stylish twist in the new Netflix movie Hit Man. The movie stars Glen Powell as a fictionalized version of Johnson as he navigates both his mysterious job and a budding romance with one of his prospective “clients.”
While Powell’s hired gun is portrayed as a master of eccentric disguises, the real Johnson, who died in 2022, was a no-nonsense investigator who used his beguiling charm to help authorities in and around Houston make dozens of arrests related to murder solicitation.
Johnson had a long career in law enforcement
Long before his detective work became fodder for a big screen adaptation, Johnson lived a quiet life in rural Louisiana. Born in 1947, he grew up on a farm with his father, a carpenter, and mother, a housewife.
According to a 2001 Texas Monthly article by journalist Skip Hollandsworth, which largely inspired the new movie, Johnson spent a year in Vietnam as a military policeman overseeing convoys. Upon his return to the United States, Johnson embarked on a domestic law enforcement career, starting as a sheriff’s deputy in Louisiana in the 1970s and performing undercover work related to drug busts.
Despite his experience, his desired career path was actually teaching college psychology. He moved to Houston in 1981, hoping to attend the psychology doctoral program at the city’s namesake university but was rejected.
Instead, he took a job as an investigator for the district attorney’s office. While his time there was relatively uneventful to start, he was assigned a case in 1989 that would change his life. Police received a tip that Kathy Scott, a 37-year-old lab technician at a paper company, was plotting “an elimination” of her husband after a four-month marriage.
Johnson, tasked with extracting a confession, dressed as a biker with a fake name and met Scott at a bowling alley. She confided in him fully, offering a $100 down payment for her husband’s proposed killing. She was eventually sentenced to 80 years in prison.
The sting was the first of many for Johnson.
Johnson wasn’t an actual hit man
Actors Glen Powell and Adria Arjona in a scene from Hit Man, which fictionalizes the life of late police investigator Gary Johnson.
Johnson investigated hundreds of murder-for-hire allegations and helped facilitate dozens of arrests through his undercover examinations. But contrary to what he suggested to potential clients, he never actually killed anyone.
According to Texas Monthly, Johnson received case tips via a black telephone inside his home. The vast majority of requests he investigated weren’t from experienced criminals. “My people have spent their lives living within the law. A lot of them have never even gotten a traffic ticket,” Johnson explained. “Yet they have developed such a frustration with their place in the world that they think they have no other option but to eliminate whomever is causing their frustration. They are all looking for the quick fix, which has become the American way.”
His work wasn’t entirely done out in the field and incognito. Johnson spent much of his time at the district attorney’s office, working with recording equipment to improve or make duplications of tapes for prosecutors to use at trials.
Away from work, he tried to blend in
Johnson maintained an unassuming demeanor when he wasn’t on a case, spending time at his home gardening and meditating. In addition to his cats, Id and Ego, he kept goldfish as pets in a small pond. He never lost his passion for teaching, serving as a human sexuality and general psychology professor two nights per week at a nearby college.
“It’s still amazing to me that he can turn on this other personality that makes people think he is a vicious killer,” Johnson’s second wife, Sunny, told Texas Monthly.
Still, Gary admitted the job provided “a rather depressing outlook on the human condition,” and he struggled to sustain long-term relationships, having been married and divorced three times. “I think it would be fair to say that I don’t let many people get too close,” he said.
Watch Hit Man on Netflix
While Hit Man is based on the real Gary Johnson, the movie’s larger plot twists and much of Powell’s antics are completely fictional, according to director Richard Linklater. “The real Gary did slight disguises but not the extent that we see in the film. I was like, ‘Should we really do a Russian accent?’ But Glen just pushed all of that to the max, and I love how it came out,” Linklater told Netflix.
That said, Linklater and star Glen Powell did utilized recordings and police briefings while conducting their research for Johnson’s portrayal in the movie. Johnson wasn’t involved in the production of Hit Man, which began streaming on June 7.
Catch Powell as Johnson and all his complex personas now on Netflix. The movie also stars Adria Arjona as his love interest, Maddy Masters.
Tyler Piccotti
News and Culture Editor, Biography.com
Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusem*nt park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.
