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The U.S. Case vs. El Chapo: 10,000 Pages and Recordings

Emma Coronel Aispuro after a hearing in the case against her husband, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, in federal court in Brooklyn on Friday.Credit...Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It has been assumed for months that the prosecution of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, would be an undertaking of major proportions.

At the news conference in January when the charges against him were announced, federal prosecutors described a Shakespearean cast of more than 40 witnesses who would testify that, over three decades, Mr. Guzmán had built the world’s biggest drug empire, employing an army of assassins and earning billions of dollars by trafficking his product with a rotating fleet of trucks, planes, fishing boats, submersibles and yachts.

But on Friday, the true scope of the case came into view, and the details suggest it is going to be enormous. At a hearing in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, prosecutors said that Mr. Guzmán’s trial could last three months and include up to 1,500 audio recordings of the defendant and his allies alongside nearly 10,000 pages of documents. The presiding judge, Brian M. Cogan, set what he called an “aspirational” trial date: April 2018.

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Mr. Guzmán, who is known as El Chapo.Credit...Tomas Bravo/Reuters

The sweeping nature of the case, which will track Mr. Guzmán’s rise from a teenage marijuana farmer to an international kingpin who carried a diamond-encrusted pistol, is matched by his outsize reputation. The United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn has portrayed him not only as the world’s most sophisticated drug dealer, but also as a coldblooded killer who ordered the deaths of thousands of people during Mexico’s brutal drug wars.

Mr. Guzmán is still considered something of a folk hero in his homeland, not least for having twice escaped from high-security prisons there, the first time in a laundry cart and later by way of a mile-long tunnel dug into the shower of his cell.

It was hard to reconcile either of those images with the unimposing figure that Mr. Guzmán cut in court on Friday. He is a small man — El Chapo means Shorty in Spanish — and spent much of the hourlong hearing staring into space while following a translation of the proceedings through headphones.

Only two things seemed to engage his distracted attention: his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, a former beauty queen who sat in the gallery in a crisp white blazer, and the numerous court security guards, at whom he occasionally cast fleeting glances.

The primary subject of the hearing was an argument over whether Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers, the federal defenders Michelle Gelernt and Michael Schneider, could continue to represent him. The government has said the two have a conflict of interest because other lawyers in their office had, in the past, briefly represented two prosecution witnesses who were preparing to testify at trial.

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Michelle Gelernt, one of the federal defenders representing Mr. Guzmán, speaking to reporters outside court on Friday.Credit...Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Judge Cogan, saying the matter was “barely an issue,” ruled that the lawyers could remain in place.

Ms. Gelernt and Mr. Schneider have argued for several weeks that Mr. Guzmán is suffering the ill effects of being held in almost constant isolation in what is known as 10 South, the most secure wing of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal jail in Lower Manhattan across the river from the Brooklyn court.

On Thursday, Judge Cogan issued an order rejecting nearly all of the defense’s requests to ease the restrictions that have been imposed on Mr. Guzmán. The measures were necessary, the judge wrote, to keep the defendant from running his former operation, the Sinaloa drug cartel, while he was being held.

The judge’s decision did not stop Ms. Gelernt from complaining again on Friday that the terms of Mr. Guzmán’s confinement had made it almost impossible to prepare him for trial. She told Judge Cogan that she and Mr. Schneider were not, for instance, allowed to be in the same room at the jail as their client. If they wanted to show him a document, she said, they had to hold it up to a plexiglass window between them.

This appeared to disturb Judge Cogan, who called the process “cumbersome.” Looking down from his bench, he asked the prosecutors, “How are we going to get this case ready for trial if they have to do that?”

When the prosecutors could not provide a response, Judge Cogan offered his own: A junior judge would be sent to 10 South to investigate more efficient options. He added that “in the interest of moving things along,” this would happen soon.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: The U.S. Case vs. El Chapo: 10,000 Pages and Recordings. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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