Numerous rivals, allies and underlings, along with cartel experts and law enforcement officers, are expected to recount how Mr. Guzmán rose from a poor teenage laborer who got his start in crime by farming marijuana in rural Sinaloa to become the Al Capone of the international drug trade who Forbes magazine once placed on its annual list of billionaires.

It is a testament to the scope of Mr. Guzmán’s operation that before his extradition he was already under indictment in six separate federal judicial districts, among them San Diego, Miami, Chicago and El Paso.

This trial will be held in Brooklyn on the orders of Loretta Lynch, the former United States attorney general who also once served as Brooklyn’s top federal prosecutor.

The Brooklyn indictment, originally filed in 2009, stems from a series of obscure contract killings that occurred in New York in the early 1990s, according to three current and former law enforcement officials. Federal agents investigating the contract killings tied them to a Colombian trafficker from the Norte Valle drug cartel: Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, known as Chupeta, Spanish slang for Lollipop.

Despite altering his face with plastic surgery, Mr. Ramírez was arrested in Brazil in 2007 (in the company of his bodybuilder lover) and was sent to Brooklyn where his case was handled by some of the same prosecutors who will be trying Mr. Guzmán. Mr. Ramírez later became a government informant, helping the authorities prosecute Alfredo Beltrán-Leyva, one of Mr. Guzmán’s closest allies. Mr. Ramírez may also appear as a witness at the Guzmán trial.

Indeed, as part of their case, prosecutors are expected to present a thumbnail history of the Latin American drug trade and will show how Mr. Guzmán worked hand in hand with the Colombian cartels throughout the 1990s. But within a decade, the government has said, the Colombians abandoned their American distribution routes as the country passed new extradition laws that put traffickers at risk for prosecution in the United States.