Florida man bucks long odds: Two trips to Supreme Court

“It’s not like I’m a serial litigant. These cases came to me.” Fane Lozman

WASHINGTON – This is a story about a man, his floating home and his penchant for hauling public officials before the Supreme Court.

Fane Lozman has performed this latter feat not once, but twice — the equivalent of 30 minutes of fame, not a mere 15. While his targets are the same political leaders of Riviera Beach, Fla., with whom he has tangled since 2006, his weapon of choice has morphed from maritime law to the Constitution.

Lozman will be back at the high court Tuesday, five years after winning a legal battle over a floating home — please don’t call it a houseboat — that had justices ruminating about inner tubes, wooden washtubs and plastic dishpans. They ruled the city had no right to call it a vessel, thereby to seize and destroy it.

The 56-year-old bachelor, a former commodities trader and multimillionaire, now bills himself as a “corruption-fighting activist” and a “persistent and tenacious underdog.”

Now he has returned to the high court with a lawsuit born out of his arrest at a 2006 City Council meeting, when he refused a directive to stop complaining about political corruption.

He is a study in contrasts. An exMarine Corps aviator with a love of water, Lozman moved more than a decade ago from the trading floors of Chicago back to Florida, where he could watch manatees “in a nice, warm place where I could have a good time.”

But Hurricane Wilma destroyed the marina in tiny North Bay Village in 2005. After he moved north to a marina in Riviera Beach, officials decided to use eminent domain and redevelop the city’s waterfront.

The result has been a never-ending series of legal battles. Officials tried to evict Lozman, seize his floating home and arrest him. Lozman took them to court at every turn.

Elizabeth Wade, the former city councilwoman who ordered his arrest in 2006, calls him “a rich white boy with nothing to do.”

“It has been a fun game for him,” she says. “He has the money, and he has the time.”

Lozman says they started it. “It’s not like I’m a serial litigant,” he protests. “These cases came to me.”

The case of the floating-home-not-ahouseboat was heard Oct. 1, 2012, and decided three months later. In the 7-2 ruling, Justice Stephen Breyer chastised the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. “Not every floating structure is a ‘vessel,’ ” Breyer wrote. “To state the obvious, a wooden washtub, a plastic dishpan, a swimming platform on pontoons, a large fishing net, a door taken off its hinges, or Pinocchio (when inside the whale) are not ‘vessels,’ even if they are ‘artificial contrivance(s)’ capable of floating, moving under tow, and incidentally carrying even a fair-sized item or two when they do so.”

As that case made its way through the federal courts, a transcript emerged from a closed City Council meeting in 2006 in which officials speculated about having Lozman followed.

“I think it will help to intimidate” him, Wade said at the time.

Thus was the second case filed in 2008. That it also has reached the Supreme Court is almost a mathematical impossibility. Each year, the justices agree to hear about 1% of the petitions that cross their desks. Lozman has avoided the 99% twice.

The case boils down to this: Lozman claims he was arrested out of retaliation for his actions against the city’s redevelopment plan. The city claims it had probable cause to arrest him — not for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, charges that were dropped, but for disturbing a government meeting, a misdemeanor under Florida law.

Lozman may not be done yet. He has purchased 25 acres of submerged land on Singer Island, part of Riviera Beach, and hopes to build homes on stilts for himself and others. Residents of nearby condominiums oppose the plan.

In the meantime, he is basking in the glory of a “Sunshine Award” he received last month from the Florida-based First Amendment Foundation.

Says Lozman: “That’s the honor I’ve ever been given.”