The Satmar rabbis, with graying beards and long black coats, crowded around a dining room table in Williamsburg that was heavy with fruit and rugelach cookies.
Their guests were the new superintendent of the New York State Police and State Senator Eric Adams, who represents a nearby Brooklyn neighborhood.
The mood was festive, the banter lively, but to the point.
Senator Adams, a Democrat, said he hoped his governor, David A. Paterson, would have the community's support when he runs for election in 2010.
Rabbi Leib Glanz responded for the Satmars, a Hasidic sect. He told the senator that the Satmars had a history of helping elect African-American candidates, citing an instance when they even backed one over a Jew. Then he praised the governor, who he noted had succeeded Eliot Spitzer ''without an election.''
In this, Rabbi Glanz said, he saw the hand of God.
''You know,'' he said, in a voice that blended the inflection of Yiddish with the cadence of Brooklyn, ''God works in mysterious ways.''
The spring 2008 meeting, captured on video, provides a sense of the style and reach of Rabbi Glanz, who resigned last week as a part-time city chaplain after it was revealed he had arranged a lavish six-hour bar mitzvah party in a New York City jail for the son of a prisoner.
To the uninitiated, Rabbi Glanz's ability to pull off such an outlandish event may seem wondrous. Certainly, concern over how the celebration came to be authorized, as it was by top Correction Department officials, has resulted in multiple investigations.
But interviews and city records show that Rabbi Glanz has a long history of access and influence, of seeking favors and performing them, and of acting as a liaison between the insular world of the Satmars and elected officials.
For two decades, he has been something of a Satmar master of ceremonies, arranging official tours of the community, based in Williamsburg, translating Yiddish for political leaders, charming mayors and their aides with gifts, then soliciting money and support for his sect's priorities.
A rumpled 51-year-old who often juggles cellphones and has favored a sport utility vehicle equipped with lights and sirens, Rabbi Glanz was on the tarmac when Bob Dole landed in New York in 1996 as the Republican presidential nominee. He was invited to the V.I.P. suite when Rudolph W. Giuliani was elected mayor — he invited Mr. Giuliani to his Williamsburg home several times — and he once had a standing Friday meeting with Mr. Giuliani's chief of staff.
Rabbi Glanz's star dimmed after the death of the Satmar grand rebbe in 2006, when a split in the Satmar leadership left his role in the community somewhat diminished.
But in the last four months of last year, Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, who handles political relationships for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, met three times with the rabbi, who also found a way to regularly park in the correction commissioner's spot at the Manhattan jail where he worked.
Nothing about Rabbi Glanz and his penchant for favor trading became an issue until this year, when it was disclosed that he had arranged for roughly 60 guests to celebrate, in jail, an important event in the life of an Orthodox prisoner convicted in a $1.7 million fraud. The prisoner, Tuvia Stern, had been a fugitive for nearly two decades, hiding out in South America. Along with the guests, a special feast and a singer made it into the city jail system.
''Pushing the envelope was always his thing, but I don't think he was a guy who intended to cause people any harm,'' said Michael A. Fragin, who worked in Jewish communities for Mr. Bloomberg's 2005 campaign. ''This is the problem: He always erred on the side of helping a little bit too much.''
Indeed, the bar mitzvah celebration seemed to breach not only security, but the sense of equal treatment that jails must maintain to avoid inmate unrest. City investigators and Manhattan prosecutors are reviewing the matter, along with the rabbi's role in the transfer of Jewish prisoners from Rikers Island to the more hospitable Manhattan jail, known as the Tombs, where he worked.
The rabbi, Mr. Fragin said, ''is the type of person who would go anywhere any time to help somebody — I would never question his motivations, even in this case,'' adding that he helped Jews and gentiles alike.
The rabbi, through several intermediaries, and his lawyer, Richard A. Finkel, both declined to be interviewed.
One part of the rabbi's success is his ability to interpret for outsiders a highly ordered world of prayer and study that governs everything from clothing to the separation between men and women.
''If you're going up Everest,'' Mr. Fragin noted, ''you need a guide. If you want to get inside — politically, governmentally — the Hasidic community, you need a guy like Glanz to help you along.''
Rabbi Glanz, several associates said, is known for his warm words and his willingness to show up wherever and whenever to help people in need.
But another core reason for his success is his ability to leverage access into power, to convert his role as a spokesman for the Satmars — the largest Hasidic sect and one known to vote reliably and, some say, uniformly — into a tool of political alliances and favors.
Several current and former Correction Department officials have said the rabbi's ability to win special treatment for Hasidic and other Orthodox inmates was partly rooted in the perception that he had political influence — in the agency and at City Hall — that could help their careers, a perception that they said he went to some lengths to foster.
Many of Rabbi Glanz's associates agree that he is a gifted administrator, a master of logistics. He arranged for ferries that carried 10,000 Satmars from Williamsburg to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for the sect's annual dinner in 1997. His standing in the jail system is, in many ways, a response to the fact that he does things, like hold rooftop barbecues, for correction officers and their superiors.
Rabbi Glanz's route into public life began in the mid-1980s when he ran the bus system for Satmar yeshivas. By 1989, he was running the entire school system, the United Talmudical Academy, a $35 million operation that served 8,000 children in 17 separate buildings.
He was eventually forced out of that job and allied with a less powerful Satmar faction, but one that retains power.
That power was evident in the spring of 2008 at the meeting with the new state police superintendent, recorded by the Yeshiva World News Web site, when Senator Adams asked the Satmar to back Governor Paterson.
''We have to make sure we give him all the support he has so he can stay our governor,'' the senator said. ''As long as he's our governor, and I'm your senator, this community will be blessed.''
The group, including Rabbi Glanz, broke into applause.
