The itinerant, heavily tattooed amputee sailor who captured the world’s attention this week insisting he will ride out Hurricane Milton aboard his small sailboat in Tampa Bay served nearly six months behind bars in Florida recently for punching a police officer and last year was arrested over allegations he tried to set a woman on fire with gasoline.
Joseph John Malinowski, 54, of Tampa, survived Milton’s landfall on his boat Wednesday night, local media outlets reported. “Right now I’m doing fine,” he said on a video posted on TikTok shortly before midnight, looking around at the low water level in Tamp . “I’m stuck here. I can’t go anywhere.”
He is separately due in state criminal court later this month in Tampa in a dispute over whether the sailboat is legally his. The same sailor also ran into trouble with the law last year for sinking another sailboat on Florida’s east coast.
Malinowski made international headlines with appearances this week on CNN and a televised conversation with Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel. He said in a new interview Wednesday he was adamant he would survive Hurricane Milton aboard his sailboat.
“I have no fear. I don’t know what that means,” he said in advance of the storm’s arrival. “I’m not scared about what happens. I have no aftermath planned. If the boat starts to sink, I’m going to swim away.”
Malinowski is known online as Joe Sea and Lieutenant Dan, after the character in Forrest Gump he is said to resemble with his tan complexion and amputated leg below the knee. He said he lost part of his leg in a scooter crash 38 years ago.
This week, he became famous – and infamous – for his refusal to heed reasonable evacuation warnings for his safety in the face of a historic hurricane that President Joe Biden predicted from the White House would become the “storm of the century.”
He is emblematic of the perceived indifference many in Florida feel toward dangerous hurricanes. But until Wednesday, details of his past remained unexplored.
Malinowski, whose name is sometimes spelled Malinoyski in Florida criminal court records, was released in April 2022 after a one-year prison sentence in a felony case over punching a police officer in the nose. The manager of the Irish Brigade Bar in Lake Worth Beach, on Florida’s east coast, asked him to leave the bar because he was screaming and breaking glasses.
As a responding sheriff’s deputy tried to handcuff him, he punched the deputy, who punched him back, according to court records.
Last year, in a separate case, a Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy arrested Malinowski on suspicion of aggravated battery after a woman said that during an argument he doused a park bench with gasoline and set it on fire. Malinowski said he was burning an unspecified residue off the bench and denied intentionally splashing gas on the woman.
Prosecutors dropped the case a month later without explanation, according to court records.
Also last year, prosecutors in Palm Beach County charged Malinowski under an obscure Florida law against abandoning a sunken boat, after his 26-foot sailboat, the Roan Inish, was found on its side and sunk against a seawall near the Ocean Avenue Bridge in Lantana. Malinowski had bought the boat for $1. That was a different boat than the one where Malinowski is living in Tampa Bay. Prosecutors agreed not to move forward in court under a plea deal.
Malinowski garnered a following through a University of Tampa student, Terrence Concannon, who met Malinowski walking home one day before Hurricane Helene arrived.
Concannon, 23, said Malinowski was calling for help because he’d been stuck under a bridge. He learned about Malinowski’s plan to live on his boat during Helene and documented it to his growing TikTok audience of nearly 500,000 followers. He’s since started a GoFundMe that’s raised almost $23,000 for Malinowski to purchase a bigger boat.
“[Malinowski] knows that as soon as he goes into a hotel room that it’s over for him,” Concannon said. “The hype dies down and it’s sad, but he said he almost has nothing else to live for.”
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. Reporter Lauren Brensel, a former intern for the Orlando Sentinel, can be reached at lauren.brensel@ufl.edu.