To fulfill these requests, the government says, Mr. Reichberg relied on a stable of pliant police officials. Among them, prosecutors claim, was Mr. Grant, who at that point ran the 72nd Precinct nearby in Sunset Park, and Michael Harrington, an inspector assigned to a larger unit, Patrol Borough Brooklyn South. Mr. Reichberg also had connections, the government says, to a former commander of Borough Park’s 66th Precinct who had left the department to become the police commissioner in Floral Park, N.Y. Court papers say that he had similar relationships in the Westchester County Police Department and the New York courts.

“He had all these connections to police,” Mr. Rechnitz testified. “I didn’t know many people that had connections with police, growing up in Los Angeles, and I thought this would be an awesome tool for me personally and for my business.”

Not long after the football dinner, Lev Leviev, the head of Africa Israel, came to New York on a business trip. Wanting to impress him, Mr. Rechnitz called Mr. Reichberg, who, he said, offered to have the police escort Mr. Leviev from his private plane at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey through the Lincoln Tunnel into the city. Prosecutors say that at Mr. Reichberg’s behest, the police shut down one of the tunnel’s lanes so that Mr. Leviev could sail through on his own. “This is good,” Mr. Rechnitz remembered thinking at the time. “This will earn me a lot of points.”

In the months that followed, Mr. Rechnitz said, he started joining Mr. Reichberg for expensive dinners at which they entertained police officials and were rewarded with little perks like getting invited behind security lines at the New York City Marathon and the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. The two men developed a dynamic based on their money and connections. “Jeremy would deal with more of the details, if something needed to be done,” Mr. Rechnitz later said, “and I would be the guy to basically pay for it.”

In 2011, at age 29, Mr. Rechnitz left Africa Israel and opened JSR Capital. In his later testimony, he claimed to have owned as much as $100 million in holdings at one point. He bought the old Mount Hope Medical Center in the Bronx and, not long after, a building at 238 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. He also owned two townhouses in the East Village and a sprawling complex called Solomon’s Plaza in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

But even if his properties were something less than glamorous, JSR gave Mr. Rechnitz a pool of capital to spend on his new friends, and his expenditures were eventually legion. On the witness stand, he testified that during this period he regularly racked up credit card bills of $1 million a year. As one lawyer involved in the case later claimed in court, Mr. Rechnitz often spent more on New York Knicks tickets — one of his favorite gifts — than he did on his taxes.

By early 2013, the government says, the two men’s ties to the police had widened. They struck up friendships with four deputy chiefs in top commands across the city, including David Colon, who ran the department’s Housing Bureau. In a bit of coincidence, Deputy Chief Colon was friends with Mr. Peralta and an occassional patron of the Hudson River Cafe. (Though none of these officials were ultimately charged, most of them either retired or were transferred from their posts.)