Tech company turns tables on man who took it, many others to court
William Swaim at the Ocean Ridge Town Commission meeting in May 2025. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
Related: Spanish River, Silver Palm parks are hubs for global communications
By John Pacenti
South Florida, one could argue, is mostly submerged land — filled in, replumbed, developed. A lot of people became rich by turning a mosquito-filled swamp into the metropolis of today. From Miami Beach to Riviera Beach and beyond, developments sit on properties that were once waterlogged.
Enter Delray Beach developer William Swaim. He has been a fixture for more than a decade in Palm Beach and Broward counties, buying up land long forgotten by its owners in the Intracoastal Waterway.
Swaim has pursued litigation against municipalities, property owners, international telecommunications companies and condominium complexes over submerged lands he owns in Boca Raton, Ocean Ridge and Broward County. He has sued property owners, saying they must pay him for the right to access the water or use their docks.
A battle in Boca
Now, Swaim is facing an order by a Palm Beach County judge to turn over his computer and cell phone to determine who has financially backed him. The name of William Boose III, a ghost from Palm Beach County’s “corruption county” days, has resurfaced in a response to Swaim’s lawsuit against a Brazilian telecommunication company.
A criminal contempt case was filed against Swaim on Sept. 30, ordering him to show cause why he didn’t turn over his phone, computer and access to his email in the case involving Globenet Cabos Submarinos America.
Swaim has pleaded not guilty and told the judge he couldn’t afford an attorney. One was appointed for a status check scheduled for Dec. 5.
Swaim has extracted settlements from many of the targets of his lawsuits — including telecommunications companies. But he appears to have met his match with Globenet Cabos Submarinos America. The company has an international footprint with cable landing stations across the Americas, including Brazil, Colombia and Bermuda; its headquarters location is generally cited as Fort Lauderdale.
Swaim filed suit against Globenet in 2018 for running its telecommunications under a sliver of submerged land in the middle of the Intracoastal in Boca Raton south of Palmetto Park Road, across from Silver Palm Park. The complaint starts, “This is a story of unbridled corporate greed, gross negligence, malfeasance, and arrogance.”
Just to the north is another 4-acre parcel off Northeast Eighth Avenue that Swaim put on the market for $43 million. That is the same parcel for which Boca Raton City Council members in June rejected a recommendation from a special magistrate and refused to allow Swaim to develop it.
Swaim sought from Globenet $250 million and named 100 “John Does” — who were later identified as big tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Microsoft — that he said paid Globenet to use its fiber optic cables.
Globenet — unlike some targets of Swaim lawsuits — didn’t settle. It is represented by powerhouse Florida law firm Greenberg Traurig and its bulldog attorney, Robert R. “Bobby” Kane III.
Kane sought sanctions against Swaim. On May 1, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge John J. Parnofiello agreed, citing discovery violations for failing to turn over his phone and computer as ordered, setting the stage for the misdemeanor charge of indirect criminal contempt.
Years of litigation
Kane, through extensive discovery, was determined to identify Swaim’s financial backers. Boose is named in court documents as a third-party defendant.
Boose was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to two years in prison in a pay-for-play scandal that led to the downfall of multiple elected officials in Palm Beach County. He was also the town attorney for Ocean Ridge in the mid-1970s.
Globenet says it has definitive proof that Boose was the financial backer of Swaim’s business venture into submerged lands — providing stake money to buy the property, investing millions of dollars. Kane said that two single-purpose LLCs were used to mask ownership — a fact he said he learned through extensive discovery.
“On the part of Greenberg and Globenet, they are doing everything they can to deliberately drain me of all financial resources,” Swaim told The Coastal Star.
“There is no endgame except the personal vengeance of Bobby Kane against me personally.”
After six years of protracted litigation, Parnofiello granted summary judgment in January for Globenet against Swaim’s South Spanish Trail LLC, which its attorneys say will set a precedent for future cases involving sovereign submerged lands in Florida.
Another Palm Beach County circuit judge, James Nutt, determined that Swaim’s sovereign submerged lands were actually held in trust for the people of Florida. “The properties are not subject to the plaintiff's private claims of ownership,” Nutt said.
Kane said he and his team have handled multiple cases involving Swaim.
In an August 2024 pleading in an associated case involving another telecommunications defendant, Kane described Swaim as a serial plaintiff who “purports to purchase tracts of land that are entirely submerged underwater and then makes unreasonable demands to the individuals and entities.”
He goes on to say in the pleading that defendants (namely, dock owners and telecommunications companies) have long been utilizing those submerged lands via valid government permits or easements. Swaim then threatens to sue them “unless they pay his ransom.”
Attorney Jack Goldberger, whose past clients include disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, has been assigned to prosecute the contempt case along with Kane.
Globenet is just one of a long list of litigants that have been sued by Swaim.
Ocean Ridge dispute
Jeffrey and Amanda Eder own a home directly north of the Ocean Ridge Town Hall along the neighborhood known as McCormick Mile, named after a renowned publisher of the Chicago Tribune who owned land there at one time. The Intracoastal creates a little bay or lagoon for single-family homes and condominiums along the stretch.
In 2015, Swaim’s Waterfront ICW Properties bought the nearly 3.4 acres of submerged land that runs from the 50-unit Wellington Arms condominium complex to a mangrove island for $25,000, records show. He then started filing lawsuits — against property owners like the Eders, as well as the town of Ocean Ridge and the condominium.
Swaim’s company wanted to build a bridge out to the submerged land and construct a sea wall, which Ocean Ridge refused to allow. Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Donald Hafele eventually ruled in 2022 that he didn’t believe the developer really had any firm intention of filling in the land and building.
“He’s never actually built anything on any of these properties, but he’s got litigation on all of them, and he’s just essentially trying to extort money out of people,” Jeffrey Eder said.
Eder said Swaim’s LLC tried to get access through the environmentally sensitive mangroves behind his home. “He claimed he was planning to build a home for himself initially, and that morphed into any number of things,” Eder said. “We prevented him from plowing down an acre and a half of mangroves to build the driveway to a submerged piece of property.”
Eder said that settling with Swaim was out of the question. “We didn’t want to be the people who turned over the keys to the bulldozers that knocked down the rain forest,” he said.
Still, the litigation took its toll. “We went through three different judges before we finally got a judge that would actually hear our case,” he said. “It festered in the courts for years.”
Waterfront ICW Properties sued the Eders and two other property owners again, this time claiming they were trespassing when they boated over the submerged parcel. If successful, Swaim would have prevented the Eders from accessing the Intracoastal from their home.
But the courts in September ruled against Swaim and his “heavy-handed demands.”
“Swaim’s methods of acquiring submerged lands and leveraging neighbors to purchase an easement have drawn the strong condemnation from several other Florida judges, one of whom found that Swaim’s conduct ‘shocked the conscience of the court’ and was ‘just plain and simply wrong,’” Palm Beach Senior Circuit Judge Richard Oftedal ruled on Sept. 4.
Ocean Ridge and Palm Beach County own the land behind Town Hall. Recently, the town received a $1 million grant to buy a private parcel with plans to possibly put a kayak trail around the mangroves. “There’s a lot of wildlife back there,” Commissioner Carolyn Cassidy said back in January.
Villain or victim?
Boca Raton real estate broker Larry Mastropieri wondered earlier this year on his YouTube channel @DiscoverSouthFlorida if Swaim could be “the Lex Luthor of real estate,” referring to the Superman nemesis.
He said clients buying on the water are wary of the developer.
“I’ve had questions, like ‘Hey, is Swaim messing around with the water rights right in front of this property? Do you know anything about it?’” Mastropieri recalled. “So is he like, you know, a super villain? Maybe. I’d say people probably perceive him that way.”
Swaim says he is no villain — a victim, maybe.
He never planned the litigation against Globenet, saying he learned about the telecommunications company boring underneath the Intracoastal after he purchased the property. Swaim said his LLCs have been buying deeds since 2015 and have amassed about 40.
Swaim’s strategy typically involves properties owned by out-of-state family members. “People, basically, they’ve inherited it, and they don’t know what to do with it. Sometimes they don’t even know they own it,” he said.
Eder said Swaim’s basic MO is to get the last surviving member of some 50-year-old defunct Florida corporation to sign a quitclaim deed to submerged property and then create an LLC around that piece of property.
“That’s his business model,” Eder said.
In Ocean Ridge, Swaim said it was discovered after he purchased the property that the state of Florida had leased it to the homeowners’ association at Wellington Arms to build docks. He sued the state and won a victory when a court ruled in 2019 that the Spanish Creek lagoon that runs along McCormick Mile was man-made and could be developed — but he later lost the war with Hafele’s decision on intent.
Private or public?
Open water is considered “sovereign land” belonging to the state of Florida, according to the state statutes. Property owners have “riparian rights” to use the water in a “reasonable” manner for swimming, boating, drinking, and allowing cattle to quench their thirst. Such water must have been navigable at the time of Florida’s statehood in 1845 or developed that way naturally.
Artificial bodies of water, however, may be privately owned and landowners do not have riparian rights.
Swaim appeared at the Ocean Ridge Town Commission meeting in May to speak during public comments with “some concerns” regarding the town’s proposed sea wall ordinance.
“The Intracoastal is a privately owned piece of property with an easement for the Army Corps of Engineers to operate a canal line for navigational purposes,” he said.
Swaim comes across as an Encyclopedia Britannica on the Intracoastal. He said the Florida East Coast Canal Company operated as a tollway until Henry Flagler’s railroad put it out of business. The Army Corps really only has an easement to operate in a 125-foot navigational center channel, he said.
“That’s it. So the underlying owners can do whatever they want to do with their property,” he said. “Sell easements, sell density rights, sell dockage rights, whatever, as long as they don’t obstruct the navigation of the Intracoastal,” Swaim explained.
Competing accusations
Regarding the 4-acre Boca Raton parcel, a special magistrate for the city in May found Boca Raton had acted inappropriately in stopping Swaim from developing the property at 3000 NE Eighth Ave. But the City Council rejected the recommendation.
Kane, Globenet’s attorney, said Swaim targets neighboring property owners and companies illegitimately.
“These are not bona fide property disputes; they constitute a deliberate scheme to devalue the assets of the affected parties and extract exorbitant payments through the threat of prolonged litigation,” he said.
Swaim says his current legal predicament, with him facing a misdemeanor criminal contempt, is the result of a personal vendetta by Kane to put him behind bars.
“I would look up civil conspiracy to arrest and intimidate, and it’s exactly what Greenberg and Bobby Kane and the rest of the attorneys for Globenet are doing,” he said
Kane, though, said his motivation is simple:
“The court’s rulings have squarely rejected Swaim’s attempts to take sovereign lands that belong to our children and future generations of Floridians,” he said. “Our work strengthens the constitutional framework of Florida’s Public Trust Doctrine, ensuring the protection of the state’s waterways for decades to come.”
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