Continue Reading Below Advertisement

"The officer with the pump shotgun played Russian [Roulette] on me, showing me a shotgun shell, then turning his back to me, saying, 'Listen Nigger,' and all I could see was his back, and not the shotgun or the shell, and I heard two clicks of the shotgun being [loaded]. Then he turned to face me, forcing the barrel into my mouth, saying, 'Nigger! Are you going to tell us where A.D. is?'"

Darrell also alleges that they repeatedly shocked his testicles with a cattle prod. If you've seen The Deer Hunter, all of this may sound dismally familiar. There may be a reason for that: Chief Burge had been an intelligence officer in Vietnam, which is generally thought to have had some bearing on his tactics. If you ignore all the horrifying civil rights violations, the whole situation sounds like the setup for six seasons of HBO gold. You've got a military veteran cop who comes back home to a city in the grip of a terrifying, powerful new gang. Legal methods can't stop them, so he turns to the skills he learned fighting America's enemies. This time, the war is personal.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

But alas, we live in the real world. Justice was not done. Instead, Chicago wound up with a secret torture program that would've made the CIA proud. It was clear to Darrell that the whole process was so practiced that it was almost professional. "These people were very good at what they did. These people had -- John Burge had been trained, he worked at POW camps, and he knew how to extract information -- whether it be true or false -- from VCs when he was in the Army. And he took these same torture tactics back to Chicago, and he got on the police department, and he applied that. He got an all-white crew who believed like he believed, that niggers had no rights, and whatever they wanted to do to us was fair game."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Science is pretty clear that torture doesn't work for obtaining actual useful information. But it does a great job of making people say whatever you want them to say. "First of all, you have to understand one thing: The human body is only able to take so much before you'll do anything to stop what is happening to you at the time ... There is no one who can withstand total torture in the matter of which I did without at some point breaking down. Nobody."