A convicted drug dealer faces up to 20 years in prison for smashing his cell phone at Kennedy Airport after FBI agents who seized it with a warrant handed it back to him so he could call his wife.
Julian Gonzalez, who beat a Manhattan federal drug dealing case in 2016 after a witness vanished, had his luck run out Friday when a federal jury in Brooklyn found him guilty of attempted obstruction of justice.
Gonzalez, 49, who served nine years for a drug charge in the 2000s, was once again on the feds’ radar this year, suspected of moving kilos of cocaine in Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx. And on March 17, 2023, the FBI had probable cause to search his phone for incriminating evidence.
US District Court Eastern District of New York
Julian Gonzalez’s damaged cell phone after he threw it on the floor.
According to court filings, he made a $22,000 one-kilo deal with a confidential informant in October 2022, sending details via messages on Signal, an encrypted messaging app that can be set to delete texts automatically.
Gonzalez had landed in New York after a trip to Cancun, Mexico, when a customs officer pulled him aside, searched his bag and hustled him into a private room. He had about $5,600 cash on him but no drugs.
FBI agents gave him some unwelcome news: They had a warrant to search his phone.
He read the search warrant, sighed and agreed to unlock his phone for the agents, though he didn’t give them his passcode, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Winik told jurors Thursday.
FBI agents found Signal messages showing a back-and-forth with someone trying to unload a large quantity of marijuana and a reference to a possible cocaine deal, she said.
“The defendant then asked for his phone back, saying he wanted to call his wife,” she said, adding that Gonzalez had been “calm and respectful” up until then. “So the agents gave it back to him.”
That’s when Gonzalez threw his phone on the floor and tried to stomp on it, cracking the screen. The feds grabbed him and kept him from doing further damage, and the FBI still managed to access some more of the phone’s contents.
US District Court Eastern District of New York
Julian Gonzalez had a “Hello Kitty” teddy bear in his car when he was arrested. The stuffed animal had a slit in its head but no drugs inside.
“Whether or not the defendant succeeded in destroying his phone is not relevant,” Winik said. “The attempt is the crime.”
The feds took his phone and let Gonzalez leave the airport — and he waved goodbye as he left, Winik said. Instead of returning home to Manhattan he booked rooms in two separate Yonkers hotels in an attempt to “lay low” and avoid law enforcement attention, the prosecutor said.
The feds got an arrest warrant, and eight days after the phone smash authorities busted him near one of the Yonkers hotels on the obstruction of justice charge. Inside his car, investigators found a stuffed “Hello Kitty”-style teddy bear with a slit in its head and an empty duffel bag with cocaine residue but no drugs.
Gonzalez said in a sworn affidavit that he first told the agents, “Fine, take the phone, it’s yours; there’s nothing there that can hurt me.” He said he then smashed the phone in a fit of “retribution” because the agents were taunting him and elbowing one another as they searched it and told him he was “f—–d.”
In his closing argument to the jury, Gonzalez’s lawyer Patrick Brackley tried to cast doubt on whether his client damaged the phone at all. Surveillance cameras at the airport captured footage of Gonzalez being led into the private room and showed FBI and Customs and Border Patrol agents reenacting the phone toss in a hallway, but the feds have no footage from inside the room.
“The phone is now out of his possession in the hands of the government,” Brackley said Thursday. “Why would they then take it off airplane mode, make it vulnerable to some kind of corruption, some kind of erasure, and hand it back to the subject of the search? … Why would they hand him back his phone?”
The jury needed just a day to sort through the case and handed down its guilty verdict Friday.
Judge William Kuntz ordered Gonzalez, who was free on $500,000 bond as he awaited prosecution, locked up without bail as he awaits sentencing at a later date.
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