Erased iPhone Gets a Mother in Trouble

Eileen Lagala, a Staten Island resident for 55 of her 60 years, and a mother of three sons and four daughters, added two new titles in the past year - one when she became a grandmother and the other when she began serving a year's probation after her guilty plea in criminal court last month.

"My best friend said to me, 'It's an honor to know the matriarch of a crime family,'" she said with a bitter laugh in a recent telephone interview.

Her crime, as she told it, began with two sentences she spoke to her son in phone calls that were being recorded on his end, behind bars in jail. Two sentences containing a total of nine words:

"What is your password?" and "We wiped your phone out." She says those last five words were later misunderstood.

Her son Anthony Lagala Jr., 28, was arrested with several other people in October 2013 and charged with using a barbershop called Beyond Styles as a base of operations for selling drugs and guns. The police spent 10 months investigating the barbershop, and undercover officers bought oxycodone, cocaine and guns, including an Uzi, before arresting Anthony Lagala and others.

But then something strange happened in the precinct house after Lagala's arrest - specifically, in the room where evidence was stored. No one broke into the room, strictly speaking, but a trespasser of sorts, sometime between Oct. 17 and Oct. 25, 2013, managed to erase the contents of his iPhone while it was locked away.

The investigation into the erasing led to Eileen Lagala and her son's girlfriend at the time, Stephanie Gabriell. Both were charged with tampering with physical evidence and computer trespass by "causing the deletion of the digital contents of said iPhone," according to the indictment against the women.

Eileen Lagala said she couldn't cause the deletion of the digital contents of her own phone, much less one in some other building. "I don't know how to change the picture on my Facebook page," she said. "That's how much of a computer hacker I am."

She said a friend explained to her later how this sort of thing could have been done. "What do they call it - something in the sky? The iCloud," she said.

It was just days after her son's arrest, and her house was crowded with relatives and well-wishers, she said. The police had returned several of her son's belongings to her but not his phone.

"I didn't know who, if anybody, was using it," she said. "I didn't know where it was." So she wanted to shut off the service.

Her son called from Rikers Island. He said the last he saw of his phone, the police were putting it in a plastic bag.

"I asked him for the password," she said. "That was a mistake."

He told her. "I wrote it on a piece of paper, and I pushed it on the side and went to another room so I could hear," she said. "I didn't care about any stupid phone."

The next day, she said, her son's girlfriend, Gabrielle, told her, "The phone is taken care of." When Eileen Lagala spoke to her son, she told him, "We wiped your phone out." This week she said that she had simply meant it had been shut off.

In November, officers - "like 17 cops," she said - arrived at her house while she was alone and arrested her.

"Computer tampering?" she said. "I just get hysterical." She said her children make fun of the way she yells at her computer screen.

The arrest made her a hero to some. "U go mom," someone posted online beneath a story about her case. "Mama bear looking out for her cubs no matter what."

Eileen Lagala, who is married to a police officer, said she would "not do something illegal to help someone who did something illegal."

Whatever happened to the phone, it did not affect the case against her son, who pleaded guilty to criminal sale of a controlled substance.

The charges against Gabrielle were dismissed, her lawyer, Joseph Sorrentino, said. It became clear she did not know what had been done to the information on the phone, he said.

Eileen Lagala, however, pleaded guilty to trespassing, a misdemeanor. She said the pressure of her son's fate, and the expense of mounting her defense, wore her down, and when she realized she would not go to jail, she entered the plea.

By the way, she was asked this week, what was the password?

She said she couldn't remember.

© 2014 New York Times News Service