“He said how it was hard for him because everything he had, he had to earn on his own.” He talked about “how hard it is for a black man these days to make a living.” He’d been raised by a single mother.

And Seabrook had recently experienced a personal tragedy.

“His dog had passed away,” Rechnitz recalled Friday in testimony during Seabrook’s federal corruption trial. “He showed me a tattoo of his dog, on his chest.”

Jona Rechnitz thought that was the right moment to bring up an idea he’d been trying to plant in the union leader’s mind — that he should steer some of the correction union’s money into a hedge fund partly owned by his friend Murray Huberfeld, who’d grown sick of mercurial private investors and was looking for big institutions to park their money in the fund.

Seabrook was keen on the idea, according to Rechnitz’s telling.

“Yeah, it’s time Norman Seabrook got paid,” the union chief reportedly said.

In more than four hours of testimony Friday, Rechnitz, a real estate investor, admitted loan shark, Ponzi schemer, off-the-books investment broker and occasional diamond and jewelry merchant, laid out a sordid tale of how he’d wined and dined the powerful head of the corrections’ officers’ union and nearly a half dozen other high-ranking law enforcement officials, in pursuit of power and status in his community, plying them with prostitutes, gifts for their children, and trips to Israel and the Dominican Republic. Many of those officers have been indicted in a sprawl of federal corruption cases, with several former high-ranking officials awaiting trial next year.

But it was the hedge fund scheme, in which Rechnitz says he bribed Seabrook for $60,000 to invest $20 million of union money into the risky venture, that brought the corruption charges Seabrook is now answering for in federal court.

Rechnitz said he became intoxicated with the idea of getting close to power. With introductions from his friend Jeremy Reichberg, an expediter and official “police liaison” in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Rechnitz started with police officers, cultivating access to people others couldn’t get close to.

The things he got in exchange weren’t huge favors, but the kinds of perks he could brag about — parking placards that let him park wherever he wanted to, the ability to get friends out of tickets with a phone call, access to the closed off parts of city streets during parades, lights-and-sirens escorts to the airport, and, in one already memorable case, an escort for diamond merchant Lev Leviev from New Jersey to Manhattan, for which the NYPD shut down the entire Lincoln Tunnel.

“It was to gain power, to gain reputation and to build that aspect of my career,” he told a courtroom Friday, describing why he spent the better part of the last decade pursuing close friendships with high-ranking NYPD officers.

The access he gained, after making donations to NYPD charities, thrilled him and his friend Reichberg, he said. Jurors on Friday saw an iPhone video Rechnitz filmed in 2013, while he sat at a conference table with Reichberg in NYPD Chief Philip Banks’s office, as the two men smoked cigars, and chatted. Philip Banks appears in the video’s background, as well as another formerly high-ranking officer, Michael Harrington.

“Jeremy and I were excited we were in there, smoking cigars. We used to film these types of things for our own use,” Rechnitz told the court Friday.

Before he ever got to Norman Seabrook, Rechnitz had worked his way into what he described as Philip Banks’ “inner circle.” He wove a story of how he’d wooed Banks, the highest-ranking uniformed police officer in the NYPD, the country’s largest police force.

“I gave him gifts, I took him to meals, I took him on trips both domestic and international,” Rechnitz said.

He said he eventually took Banks and Seabrook to the Dominican Republic. He took them to Israel. He hired a professional photographer to follow them around, and made Apple Photo albums afterward, showing their adventures. In one exhibit shown to jurors Friday, Banks can be seen floating in his swim trunks, bathed in sunlight in the Dead Sea. The photo is captioned, “Fun in the Dead Sea.” Rechnitz paid for all of it.

In exchange, Banks would “let me park in his private parking space,” Rechnitz recalled. He had Banks’s ear, and he and Reichberg pressured Banks to elevate one of their favorite police officers, a man named James Grant.

“Jeremy and I spoke to Phil Banks on a regular basis about promoting him and transferring him to our own precinct.” Banks made it happen, and let Rechnitz make the phone call to deliver the good news to him.

“I was known as one of the close guys in his inner circle, it opened doors for me,” Rechnitz said.

Any cop that he’d call, they “understood we were close” with Philip Banks, he said. “It carried weight.”

He and Reichberg plied Grant, part of their growing coterie of officers, with gifts and favors.

“When James went on a family trip with his wife and kids to Italy, I paid for his hotel stay,” Rechnitz said, adding he “gave his family gifts on holidays,” and “treated him to a trip to Las Vegas.”

He gave a piece of jewelry to Grant’s wife. He let Grant come along with Reichberg and another police officer, when he chartered a $50,000 private plane to Las Vegas for the Superbowl. He took pains to be discreet when he awoke from a nap on the private jet to find the officers in flagrante delicto with a prostitute they’d brought along for the journey.

“I saw that the cops were not fully clothed in the back of the plane with the prostitute,” Rechnitz recalled. “I didn’t want to embarrass them.”

Rechnitz said he closed his eyes and pretended not to hear.

He paid for a group of cops to go to Florida, to watch a sporting event in a private suite.

”I paid for...A to Z on that trip,” Rechnitz said.

A federal prosecutor asked Rechnitz Friday if he paid for “entertainment” on the trip to Florida. “Yes,” Rechnitz replied.

“What was the nature of that entertainment?”

“Prostitutes.”

Often, Norman Seabrook was with them.

Meeting the head of the corrections union was thrilling for Rechnitz, he said.

“This was yet another chapter in my life, another thing that I felt no one had access too,” he told jurors Friday.

His partner Reichberg “was very excited too,” Rechnitz said. He thought the pair could become chaplains in New York’s prisons through their connection to Seabrook. They weren’t rabbis or spiritual leaders. The special designation just came with a parking placard — a perk that would allow them to park wherever they wanted to.

“Norman told me he was very close with Ray Kelly,” Rechnitz said. That impressed him. “He was a powerful man.”

The day after they met, on October 17, 2013, Jona emailed Seabrook with an enticing offer. He asked him to come to a “police appreciation” holiday — essentially Rechnitz and Reichberg renting a suite at MetLife Stadium for the Jets vs. Patriots game, showering their police friends with awards and paying for the whole thing.

Seabrook replied, “I will be happy to attend with (you my newfound brother).”

Rechnitz was enamored of Seabrook, and testified Friday that he’d told a number of lies “to impress” the union chief, telling him he owned multiple buildings downtown, and inviting him for a trip on a yacht he said he owned, which was actually a boat that he’d rented for the occasion. He bought him elaborate gifts, including a pair of “crocodile dress shoes” from Salvatore Ferragamo, which he believed was Seabrook’s favorite designer.

Seabrook was an important friend for Rechnitz financially too — because of the money he controlled through the union. Rechnitz’s friend and mentor Murray Huberfeld, a man with important connections in the Orthodox Jewish community, was looking to diversify Platinum Partners, his hedge fund. In the weeks leading up to Rechnitz’s trip to the Dominican Republic, Rechnitz said Huberfeld pressured him for help identifying institutional investors, unions, pension funds, willing to deposit their money in Platinum. By December, Rechnitz had talked to Huberfeld about his new friend Norman.

Huberfeld told Rechnitz that he “should go try to raise as much as I could from him.”

That the union ultimately deposited $20 million of its funds in Platinum Partners is not a fact in dispute. Neither is the fact that the union’s members lost millions of dollars worth of investments when Platinum, considered one of the largest Ponzi schemes since Madoff,declared Chapter 15 bankruptcy in October of 2016, leaving behind a $1 billion fraud.

What’s in question is whether the jury believes the story Rechnitz is weaving about how that investment happened, and whether the “time Norman Seabrook got paid” ever actually came.

Rechnitz’s testimony is set to continue next week.