Chicago —

“I was mad at him for a long time,” James Gibson said.

“I didn’t want to talk to him,” Keith Smith said.

Both in their 50s now, they grew up on the same block in Chicago — “across the street, three houses,” Smith said, pointing and counting, on a recent visit.

What drove them apart happened in December 1989, where they were both accused of the murder of two men in their neighborhood.

Police picked up Gibson for the crime, even though he told them he was running an errand on the other side of the neighborhood at the time of the killing.

At the precinct, the officers handcuffed him to a chair. He was kept for days, where he was punched, slapped and kicked. He blacked out at least once while in custody, he told CNN.

Police were interrogating Smith at the same time. He was also getting severely beaten — until finally he made a decision to get himself out of there.

“I’m gonna lie, so they could probably let me go,” Smith said he decided. Police told both men that the other had ratted them out, so he took the opportunity.

To end his captivity, Smith signed a statement that he didn’t write. In it, he claimed he acted as a lookout while Gibson committed the murders.

This statement didn’t end up helping him in the long run, when he was charged with the crime.

Gibson, meanwhile, stuck to his denials. And yet, when he was charged with the crime as well, police told the court that he admitted to being at the scene — and that he said Smith was there too.

What Gibson and Smith didn’t know for years is that the group of officers who tortured them into talki