John LaRue was professor of herpetology at Louisiana State University when a green anaconda wrapped around him one night at John's previous research place. The LSU professor was rescued by Jacob Gigue, his assistant. Both were guarding the Atchafalaya River Basin from constrictor snakes transported from the Everglades of Florida by a narcissistic criminal parading within academic circles as an international scientist.

The fracas between John and Andre Bennelli began one night six years earlier. Then Bennelli had taunted John unmercifully by fondling his female associate, stomping to death his injured pet laughing seagull, degrading John's truck, and finally hitting John with a triple knotted table napkin. As a result, John gave Bennelli an elbow smash that stumbled him into an antique Coke machine 30-feet across the floor of the Gumbo House restaurant in Saint Martinsville. The narcissistic, double-jointed, and athletic Bennelli never got over losing that fight with John, previously crippled from an accident initiated by a new employee dropping John into a pile of steel girders from a bucket crane of a Shell oil rig located in the Gulf of Mexico.

However, Bennelli, after gaining consciousness, asked John to make a life-for-life sporting bet on which one would die first. Bennelli bet John that he would run him and his wife crazy before he finally killed John and molested Lisa LaFay, John's wife-to-be later. Lisa, a struggling student nurse, had formerly waited tables at Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans and been given much money in gratuities-for favors-to Bennelli's no avail.

To fulfill his narcissistic need for dominance over John and Lisa, Bennelli used techniques taught him by Gypsies passing through Dusseldorf, Germany. Raised north of Paris, France, Andre developed a fetish for snakes when he learned in biology class that snakes had no shoulders.