In two interlinked corruption trials over the past six months, prosecutors have described a web of financial schemes that they say propelled the state’s most vaunted economic development projects. What has also emerged is a portrait of the culture that fueled those projects — one in which state officials, lobbyists and businessmen, driven by a potent mix of ambition and fear, vied to satisfy a governor’s office hungry for results.

In the ongoing trial of Dr. Kaloyeros, who is charged with wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy, prosecutors say he was so worried about his standing with Mr. Cuomo that he hired a lobbyist with longstanding ties to the governor, and worked with that lobbyist to rig lucrative state contracts for the benefit of two firms — LPCiminelli of Buffalo and COR Development of Syracuse — whose executives had donated generously to Mr. Cuomo’s campaigns.

“Kaloyeros used to have a rocky relationship with the governor’s office. In fact, Kaloyeros was worried that he was going to lose his position as the head of that state college,” David Zhou, a prosecutor in Federal District Court in Manhattan, told jurors in his opening arguments last month. But after Dr. Kaloyeros hired the lobbyist, Todd R. Howe, Mr. Zhou continued, “that turned everything around.”

The governor has not been accused of any wrongdoing, in either the Kaloyeros trial or the trial earlier this year of Joseph Percoco, once one of Mr. Cuomo’s closest aides. (Mr. Percoco was convicted in March of soliciting and accepting more than $300,000 in bribes). But both trials have cast an unflattering spotlight on how the state went about awarding some of the contracts at the heart of the governor’s economic development efforts, including his flagship Buffalo Billion project.

By all accounts, Dr. Kaloyeros was loath to take orders from anybody. “Volatile,” “pugnacious” and “acerbic” were among the words used to describe him in court. He had worked for several governors as a star researcher, funding magnet and one of the state’s highest-paid employees — and, according to his lawyer, Reid Weingarten, had done so with “enormous discretion, enormous latitude.”