Fane Lozman ordered to remove his floating home, fueling talk of conspiracy and an appeal

WEST PALM BEACH — A federal judge ordered Fane Lozman to remove his floating home from the Lake Worth Lagoon this month, dealing yet another blow to the millionaire with dreams of reaping millions more from his underwater land off of Singer Island.

Lozman complied with U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks' order Tuesday but said he plans to appeal the decision. It's a common refrain, and one with real weight, from a man who persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn two previous rulings against him.

Lozman maintains that his only crime was repeatedly embarrassing Riviera Beach in the nation's highest court — a feat he says he's being punished for now.

More: Coming off 2 U.S. Supreme court cases, Fane Lozman takes on Riviera Beach, the state and the feds

The Justice Department tells a different story. Its attorneys sued Lozman in 2021 for obstructing otherwise navigable waters in Riviera Beach with his floating home, a 12,000-pound shipping container outfitted with windows, stairs and a steel rooftop deck. The house sits atop one of three docks tied together with rope, but that sometimes drift hundreds of feet apart.

Multiple times a year, Lozman has had to find the runaway docks, tow them back with his boat and tie them together again. Once, the shipping container beached itself at a public park opposite from Lozman's property. Another time, a dock broke in half.

Though written as a sort of comedy of errors, the attorneys blame real human and environmental consequences on Lozman's setup. They said Darren Doonan, a man Lozman hired in 2021, drowned in the channel while working on the floating home. The attorneys pinned the death of the lagoon's sea grass on Lozman, too.

Prosecutors say floating home is a hazard; Fane Lozman disagrees

Lozman took issue with several points, the utmost being the government's portrayal of how Doonan died. He says Doonan drowned while swimming recreationally on Lozman's property, his blood alcohol content more than three times the legal limit.

Lozman blamed the death of the sea grass on toxic algaecide runoff, not the chains and anchors he tried using to secure the floating home.

And yes, he continued, the docks were held together with rope. But it was "very expensive rope," stronger than the usual kind, and only used because the chain that originally tethered the platforms together was stolen twice — probably at the behest of one of his rivals in local government, he said.

Fane Lozman: Ex-Marine has waged long, obsessive one-man war over city marina, and has no plans to quit

Understanding Lozman's theory about the conspiracy against him means looking at cases years older than this one. Lozman first butted heads with Riviera Beach officials in 2006 when he derailed a multibillion-dollar plan that would have turned the city into an upscale yachting mecca at the expense of marina residents.

The makeup of the Riviera Beach City Council has changed since then, but its longstanding feud with Lozman has only intensified. In 2009, he convinced a judge that the city violated Florida's Sunshine Law by not keeping minutes of agenda meetings, then defeated them in the Supreme Court after they illegally seized and destroyed his houseboat in retaliation.

Council members had him arrested while he spoke about corruption at a City Council meeting, a decision that triggered Lozman's second Supreme Court win against them for violating his civil rights.

Then, in 2020, the city rezoned his property and other submerged land along Singer Island, making the land a preservation area and off-limits to developers. The decision squashed Lozman's bid to turn his share of the lagoon into an upscale community of floating homes and fueled his belief that the city will stop at nothing to see him fail.

Fane Lozman sees conspiracy in Riviera Beach actions. The city denies it.

Andrew Baumann, an attorney representing the city, told The Palm Beach Post last year that the zoning change had nothing to do with Lozman.

"The disputes between the city and owners of this land go back at least 15 years before Mr. Lozman even bought one of these properties," Baumann said. "It's not about Mr. Lozman."

Still, in the crosshairs of a federal lawsuit with no obvious ties to his Riviera Beach opponents, Lozman sees conspiracy. He said his rivals in the city government lobbied the Justice Department and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to file the lawsuit as yet another "intimidation tactic" against him.

Lozman has proven time and again that he won't back down from a fight, though his latest promise to appeal sounded less enthusiastic than it did last year when Middlebrooks struck down his lawsuit against Riviera Beach.

"I shouldn't have to appeal to clean up the error that a district court made," Lozman said Wednesday, pointing to the thousands of dollars in legal fees he's already spent challenging — and beating — other judges' decisions. "They should know better by now."

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Feds beat Fane Lozman in lawsuit over floating home in Lake Worth Lagoon