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 is separately due in state criminal court later this month in Tampa in a dispute over whether the sailboat is legally his. The courthouse is about eight blocks inland from Tampa Bay, which was expecting a storm surge estimated as high as 15 feet from the approaching hurricane.

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. During the same interview, he paused to speak to city officials who insisted he go to a storm shelter on land.

“I have no fear. I don't know what that means,” he said. “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 will become the "storm of the century" and Gov. Ron DeSantis said will become deadly.

He is emblematic of the perceived indifference many in Florida feel toward dangerous hurricanes. But until Wednesday, details of his past remained unexplored.

Local authorities have pleaded with Malinowski – at times in interactions captured on video – to leave his sailboat and come ashore. Thousands of people have backed him with supportive comments online, pledging money for him to find cover.

“I'm getting a lot of prayers,” Malinowski said, “and then I'm getting a lot of ‘rest in peace.’”

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.

Before he was jailed in the case, the deputy took him to be checked at a nearby hospital, where Malinowski told nurses that he wanted deputies to shoot him in the head and shouted that he wanted to die, court records said. In the deputy's cruiser, he announced that he had urinated in the back seat.

Just as he is now planning to survive alone, Malinowski tried unsuccessfully to represent himself in court in the case. A jury convicted him in a trial that lasted less than one day.

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. She said as the argument continued, Malinowski splashed her with gasoline, according to court records. "She feared for her life due to the potential for the gasoline to ignite due to her holding an ignited cigarette," the deputy wrote in his arrest report.

The court records noted that Malinowski was an amputee, and the woman told the deputy she took his crutch to prevent him from running away. 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 was 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 walked past 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.”

Just weeks ago, when Malinowski said he slept through Hurricane Helene, he could see across the dock that people were wading through knee-high water. Storm surges don’t concern him, though: “People keep saying, ‘Aren't you worried about the rising water?’ I'm in a boat and I'm floating. So, if the boat water goes up, I go up with it.”

An estimated 12 people near Tampa died from Helene, a Category 4 storm that was the worst to hit the area in over a century.

Helene and Milton won’t be the only storm Malinowski has braced on his 22-foot Catalina sailboat.

He said he’s survived around five hurricanes, most of which occurred while living in a separate boat in Fort Lauderdale. In the worst of them, he said he used his dinghy to help save other boats that had been pushed around in the water.

Malinowski said, besides the police officers who tried to get him to leave the boat and said they’d arrest him if he didn’t, Mayor Jane Castor reported that he’d gone to a shelter.

Castor has also publicly warned Tampa residents in evacuation zones that if they don’t leave, they will die.

“The police chief told her that gentleman had agreed to go to a shelter, and she thought that meant he was in a shelter,” a spokesperson for the city of Tampa wrote in an email.

But he didn’t leave. And, in a TikTok, he said the only thing that could get him to would be a woman.

“When you're a warrior – a soldier – you do what you’re told,” he said. “And God told me to come here and get a boat. I came here and got a boat. I believe in a lot of TikTok spiritual leaders that I listen to, and I hear messages that are sent from God that he's got his finger on the eye. He's got his finger on the eye of the storm, so I don't have to worry about it.”

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