Who he is

Joseph J. Frohnhoefer III is the CEO of Sea Tow Services International, the Southold, New York company his late father founded in 1983. He runs it today alongside his sister, President Kristen Frohnhoefer, and the company’s long-serving general counsel, Mitchell A. Stein. A point of ship’s discipline we never relax: Joe 3 is not Joe 2. His father — Joseph J. Frohnhoefer Jr., the founder — received the New York Attorney General’s 1988 franchise investigation and personally signed the 1989 Assurance of Discontinuance. The son inherited the company, and, as far as we can tell from the public record, the question that came with it.

The question he inherited

That question is simple to state and has now consumed six years of federal litigation: is the Sea Tow network a franchise? Sea Tow publicly markets “franchise” opportunities, yet the public record shows no New York Franchise Sales Act registration in the company’s four decades of operation — which is why we affectionately call the arrangement a Frochise™: a franchise what acts more like a noose than a partnership. In September 2022, Judge Joanna Seybert ruled that the fee structure alleged by the Jaegers “fits comfortably within” the statutory definition of a franchise fee ECF No. 216. That ruling belongs to Judge Seybert — the case now sits before Judge William F. Kuntz II for the next round.

The Tampa Bay decision

It was on this CEO’s watch that Sea Tow took back the Tampa Bay territory from Erich and Abigail Jaeger in 2019 and then sued them in the Eastern District of New York in June 2020, demanding $1.5 million from a family renting their home. The Jaegers answered with counterclaims under the NYFSA and third-party claims naming both Frohnhoefer III and Stein. Those counterclaims largely survive. Whether the decision to sue a family that, by all appearances, could not afford to defend itself was strategy or miscalculation is a question we leave for sworn testimony — but six years on, the two claims Sea Tow has left standing amount to sixty days of billing disputes and a paint job.

The Florida ledger

Florida corporate records add texture: H2FRO, Inc. (filed February 2022, Frohnhoefer III as President/Secretary, Kristen Frohnhoefer as VP/Treasurer) and KJF, LLC (filed July 2021, both siblings as managers) share an address in Gibsonton, Florida, and H2FRO appears as a co-plaintiff in the 2025 Suffolk County state action. According to the sworn declarations filed in the Middle District of Florida, it was Frohnhoefer III and his sister who personally pitched Dr. Russell L’Hommedieu — a family friend of nearly thirty years — on the Tampa Bay “franchise opportunity,” in documents that, per those declarations, explicitly used the word franchise M.D. Fla. Doc. 12 (mc-00008). What Sea Tow told the L’Hommedieus, and what it tells federal judges, are two accounts the record has not yet reconciled.