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 returned it to him so he could call his wife .

Julian Gonzalez, who won a federal drug trafficking case in Manhattan in 2016 after a witness disappeared, got his chance Friday when a federal jury in Brooklyn found him guilty of attempting to obstruct justice .

Gonzalez, 49, who served nine years for a drug bust in the 2000s, was once again on the federal government’s radar this year, suspected of transporting kilos of cocaine into Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx. And on March 17, 2023, the FBI likely had reason to search his phone for incriminating evidence.

According to court filings, he struck a $22,000 pound deal with a confidential informant in October 2022, sending details via messages on Signal, an encrypted messaging app that can be set to automatically delete messages. texts.

Gonzalez had landed in New York after a trip to Cancun, Mexico, when a customs agent took him aside, searched his bag and took him to a private room. He had about $5,600 in cash on him, but no drugs.

The FBI agents gave him bad news: they had a warrant to search his phone.

He read the search warrant, sighed and agreed to unlock his phone for agents, although he didn’t give them his password, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Winik told jurors Thursday.

FBI agents found Signal messages showing an exchange with someone trying to unload a large amount of marijuana and a reference to a possible cocaine deal, she said.

“The defendant then asked for his phone, saying he wanted to call his wife,” she said, adding that Gonzalez had been “calm and respectful” until then. “So the officers gave it back to him.”

That’s when Gonzalez threw his phone on the ground and attempted to stomp on it, cracking the screen. Authorities caught him and stopped him from causing further damage, and the FBI still managed to access some additional of the phone’s contents.

“Whether or not the defendant succeeded in destroying his phone is irrelevant,” Winik said. “The attempt is the crime.”

Authorities took his phone and let Gonzalez leave the airport — and he said goodbye to her as he left, Winik said. Instead of returning home to Manhattan, he booked rooms at two separate Yonkers hotels in an effort to “keep a low profile” and avoid the attention of law enforcement, the prosecutor said.

Federal authorities obtained an arrest warrant, and eight days after the phone call, authorities arrested him near one of Yonkers’ hotels on charges of obstructing justice. Inside his car, investigators found a “Hello Kitty”-style teddy bear with a split head and an empty duffel bag containing cocaine residue but no drugs.

Gonzalez said in an affidavit that he first told the officers, “All right, take the phone, it’s yours; there is nothing there that can harm me. He said he then smashed the phone in a fit of “retaliation” because the officers were laughing and elbowing him while they searched him and telling him he was “done.”

In his closing argument to the jury, Gonzalez’s attorney, Patrick Brackley, attempted to sow doubt about whether his client had actually damaged the phone. Airport surveillance cameras captured footage of Gonzalez being led into the private room and showed FBI, Customs and Border Patrol agents reenacting the phone call in a hallway, but federal authorities did not no image of the interior of the room.

“The phone is no longer in his possession and is in the hands of the government,” Brackley said Thursday. “Why then would they take him out of airplane mode, make him vulnerable to some kind of corruption, some kind of erasure, and make him the subject of research? …Why would they give him his phone back?

The jury needed only a day to sort out the case and returned its guilty verdict on Friday.

Judge William Kuntz ordered that Gonzalez, who was free on $500,000 bail while awaiting prosecution, be held without bail while awaiting sentencing at a later date.