More than a year before the Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera pulled off one of the most notorious prison breaks in history, he got word to his associates of how he planned to escape through an unlikely source: his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro.

The strategy that Mr. Guzmán crafted — and Ms. Coronel passed on — was as daring as it was ingenious: Laborers staged near the prison would dig a mile-long tunnel into his cell. To pinpoint his exact location, someone would sneak a watch with a GPS transmitter past the guards and into the crime lord’s hands.

Like Mr. Guzmán’s flight from the authorities in 2014 through a secret tunnel hidden under his bathtub, the audacious escape from the Altiplano prison in Almoloya, Mexico, one year later is one of those almost unbelievable tales that have helped transform him into the criminal figure known as El Chapo. And as with other legends surrounding him, this was one was told again on Wednesday — with astonishing new details — at his trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.

The most important revelation emerging from Wednesday’s testimony was that Ms. Coronel, then 26 years old, was neck deep in planning the Houdini-like escape. The witness who implicated her, Dámaso López Núñez, also testified that she had been part of another effort to break her husband out of prison after he had been recaptured (or rather, re-recaptured) the following year.

In what has become a familiar sight, Ms. Coronel was sitting in the courtroom as Mr. López, one of El Chapo’s former lieutenants, calmly told jurors that she had ferried messages from her husband ordering his aides — including his own four sons — to buy land near the prison and then obtain a cache of weapons and an armored pickup truck.

Mr. López never said Ms. Coronel had been the one who had slipped the watch with GPS past the prison’s guards, but he did recount that she was one of only two people who regularly visited the kingpin behind bars.

It was not the first time that evidence at the trial has suggested that Ms. Coronel aided and abetted her husband’s myriad crimes.

Two weeks ago, prosecutors introduced text messages between the couple showing Ms. Coronel handing her cellphone to her father, Inés Coronel Barreras, who then hashed out the details of a major cocaine deal with Mr. Guzmán. In other messages, Ms. Coronel agreed to hide her husband’s guns, fearing the police were at their door, and planned with him to place the deed to their sprawling new mansion in the names of their twin baby daughters.

In court on Wednesday morning, Ms. Coronel declined to comment on the prison break allegations, as did Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Brooklyn, which has led the prosecution of the kingpin, also declined to comment on whether she had committed any crimes.

Now 29, Ms. Coronel lives in Mexico, but has attended the trial nearly every day since it started in November. Most mornings she waves to Mr. Guzmán, making it clear that she is standing by him. Just before Christmas, in a move that seemed designed to catch the jury’s eye, she brought their 7-year-old twin daughters, dressed in matching bows and sweaters, to the trial to see their father.

On Tuesday, she took part in a strange sartorial stunt with Mr. Guzmán. Both dressed in identical garnet velvet smoking jackets in what appeared to be a symbolic snub of the kingpin’s mistress, who, in prison garb, was on the witness stand testifying against him.

Despite her constant presence at the trial, Ms. Coronel has largely remained inscrutable. She rarely betrays emotion, and even when witnesses have mentioned her by name, she has often done no more than chew her gum and play with her hair.

Ms. Coronel had no reaction on Wednesday, sitting in the courtroom still and silent as Mr. López described the details of the prison break that he said she helped plan.

On July 11, 2015, he said, the tunnel diggers reached their destination, breaking through the shower floor of Mr. Guzmán’s cell. Descending into the darkness, Mr. López said, the kingpin was met by an accomplice on a motorcycle attached to a pulley system.

After they were hauled to safety, Mr. Guzmán exited the tunnel, hopped aboard an all-terrain vehicle and rode it to an airstrip. There, Mr. López said, the kingpin boarded a plane, which flew him to a hide-out deep in the Sierra Madre mountains called The Sky.

But in the constant game of cat-and-mouse that is Mr. Guzmán’s life, he was arrested — again — six months later and immediately sent to a different prison, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Not long after the arrest, Mr. López met with Ms. Coronel who, he said, informed him that her husband wanted to escape again. His plan was to be transferred back to Altiplano and have another tunnel dug. According to Ms. Coronel, Mr. López said, to ensure the transfer happened, Mr. Guzmán paid a $2 million bribe to the chief of Mexico’s prison system.

All of this sounded so incredible that on cross-examination, one of Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers, A. Eduardo Balarezo, wondered if it really happened. A tunnel? An A.T.V.? A plane that whisked the kingpin to the mountains?

“It’s pretty spectacular, right?” Mr. Balarezo asked.

Mr. López was unfazed.

“It is very real,” he said.

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