They have heard from admitted drug dealers who said they had worked for him.
They have listened to an angry former girlfriend - the mother of two of his children - who said he had given her money to buy him a Mercedes-Benz and a Cadillac Escalade and to finance the purchase of their home in South Jersey.
They were shown photos and videos and were played hundreds of wiretapped conversations that depicted his high-flying lifestyle and the alleged drug dealing that supported it.
Now the jurors in the federal narcotics trafficking trial of Alton "Ace Capone" Coles are scheduled to hear from Coles himself.
The Southwest Philadelphia rap-music impresario and reputed drug kingpin is expected to take the stand tomorrow as the trial against him and five codefendants enters its fifth week.
Coles, 34, is accused of using his company, Take Down Records, as a front for a $25 million cocaine-trafficking network.
"Alton wants the chance to tell the jury his side of the story," said his lawyer, Christopher Warren.
In an interview from prison in November, Coles denied the charges against him. "I'm not the guy they allege me to be," he said.
Smooth-talking and street-smart, Coles will get his chance to sway the jury during what is likely to be a full day of testimony, his lawyer said. His appearance on the stand opens the defense phase of the case.
Coles, not surprisingly, is expected to put a decidedly different spin on what jurors have heard and seen to date.
He will be pressed to refute the wiretapped conversations that seem to put him in the middle of drug deals, the testimony that appears to tie him to the drug underworld, and the financial records and bank statements that indicate he had access to tens of thousands of dollars in cash despite little documented income.
Personal photos seized during a series of raids in August 2005 enhance the picture that federal prosecutors Richard Lloret and Michael Bresnick have painted during their four-week presentation.
It is one thing to offer the jurors charts and graphs of money flowing into and out of accounts controlled by Coles and his live-in girlfriend and codefendant, Aysa Richardson, as the prosecutors have done.
It is something else to show those jurors a photo of Richardson, 27, smiling on a couch with a wad of $50 and $100 bills fanned out like a deck of cards in her hand and more cash strewn over her lap.
