Every month in the back room of Forlini’s, an old Italian restaurant just off Canal Street, the members of the Society of Professional Investigators, or SPI (pronounced “spy”), gather to dine on veal parmigiana and cannoli and to swap war stories, advice, and the latest breakthroughs from their never-dull profession. In this video, from “The New Yorker Presents” (Amazon Originals), based on a piece that Zachary Kanin wrote about the group for The New Yorker in 2010, we visit one of their meetings.

The president of SPI, Bruce Sackman, who narrates, arrives first and takes a seat at the head of the table, under the society’s flag. “Justice, Loyalty, Fraternity,” it says. The members start to arrive and, like Sackman, practically every one of them seems to have walked out of the pages of a hardboiled-detective paperback. “I had a really neat case of a neurologist in Pittsburgh who poisoned his wife,” Michael Welner, whom Sackman calls “the George Clooney of forensic psychiatry,” says, his dimples beaming and his eyes twinkling. Charlie Iadanza, a former N.Y.P.D. homicide detective, recounts a case that involved a witness who ate only raw fish and slept in a coffin in the back of a hearse. The investigator Barbara Butcher (“aptly named,” as Sackman says) recalls a grisly scene she was called to on Christmas Eve. The SPI members compare lapel-pin cameras, gasp at one another’s horror stories, and chuckle at clever undercover operations. Then, the dessert and coffee over, they push back the chairs and get back on the case, collecting material for next month.

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