Chicken Lovers

In the many hours of audio recordings that United States prosecutors have on defendants in their world-soccer corruption case, Juan Ángel Napout, a FIFA executive arrested in December, speaks precious few words.

In Spanish, he offers a greeting in an elevator and discusses grabbing a coffee, but says little else.

On Tuesday, in a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn, lawyers for Mr. Napout, of Paraguay, were eager to fight the array of criminal conspiracy charges brought against him last year.

“I don’t think there’s much evidence in this case, which is why we’re insisting on going to trial,” John Pappalardo, a lawyer for Mr. Napout, told Judge Raymond J. Dearie of Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Wanting to see the case move along, Judge Dearie told the prosecutors and defense lawyers before him that he planned to schedule a trial at their next hearing, on April 13.

Sixteen of 42 defendants in the government’s FIFA case, which was announced last May, have pleaded guilty. Nine other people — including Mr. Napout — have pleaded not guilty, while 17 others have not answered to the charges against them and remain in countries that range from Argentina to Trinidad and Tobago.

As foreign governments rule on requests from the United States to extradite those people, some have sought further information on the charges.

This month, the Supreme Court of Peru indicated that it needed more evidence from the United States Justice Department before it could order the extradition of Manuel Burga, a former president of the Peruvian soccer federation.

Along with Mr. Napout, Mr. Burga is accused of having received “annual six-figure bribe payments” from Alejandro Burzaco, a businessman who has pleaded guilty in the case but has not yet been sentenced and could be asked to testify at a trial.

Commercial bribery is not illegal in Peru, however, and extradition requests must address offenses that are crimes in both countries. Nanci Clarence, a white-collar defense lawyer in California, said the United States would need to focus on “broad-brush fraud charges” to make an effective request.

“It raises legal issues that can slow things down,” Ms. Clarence said.

Acknowledging the possibility for such delays, Judge Dearie said of the defendants who remained abroad on Tuesday: “I’m not waiting for them. We’re going forward.”

Prosecutors estimated that a trial would take “well over one month” and emphasized to the judge that information in the government’s continuing investigation was still streaming in from other countries.

“The disconnect here is that it is a voluminous case — a 24-year racketeering enterprise,” said Evan M. Norris, an assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Mr. Napout’s lawyers pointed out the government’s advantage in combing through 30,000 pages of documents that prosecutors said they had recently shared with defendants in the case.

“The government had significant time to investigate this case before they indicted our client,” Silvia B. Piñera-Vazquez, another lawyer for Mr. Napout, told the judge. “Years.”

The first related charges in the case, which were not made public until last year, were filed in 2013.

Although Mr. Napout was arrested in December, his lawyers said Tuesday that they had first communicated with prosecutors days after the FIFA case was announced in May. Despite that early dialogue, Mr. Napout was apprehended in a surprise predawn raid in Switzerland six months after the case had been made public.

“The classic criminal defense conundrum is whether to proactively strike a deal or hope the evidence shapes up favorably for you,” Ms. Clarence, the California lawyer, said.

She noted that conspiracy charges, such as those against Mr. Napout, allowed prosecutors to admit evidence with more leeway and to simplify a case, without having to prove, for example, elaborate bank transactions.

“You just have to prove an agreement and an illegal purpose,” Ms. Clarence said.

As the logistics of information sharing were debated on Tuesday, Judge Dearie repeated his eagerness to move forward. “I can’t bear these,” the judge said of the procedural deliberations. “We have a case to try here.”