Eric Haliwell is a professor at a Miami-area college, specializing in Asian cultures, having worked in Southeast Asia as part of Air America, the CIA-sponsored cover airline that operated there during the Vietnam War with Carlos Escobar. Haliwell also had a sadistic side, being fanatical about "pain and torture", running slide shows of people in agony and lectures spouting off pain and torture propaganda to rows of mannequins with canned applause. In 1989 a rash of hooker killings hit Miami, the bodies carved with a knife in an Asian symbol. Haliwell was brought in to help identify the symbols, but stalled the police while capturing hookers, taking their pictures, torturing and killing them with Carlos' help. Carlos lured Metro-Dade Detective Trudy Joplin into their trap, and Haliwell was