The ghost vessel discovered on Fort Lauderdale beach appeared intact and seaworthy to a Sea Tow captain who motored through four-foot waves toward it in the predawn darkness on Wednesday.

The T.T. Zion, a 31-foot yacht tender, had washed onto the sand near East Las Olas Boulevard. Its twin outboard engines were running and the boat’s lights were on, but there was no trace of its multimillionaire owner, Guma Aguiar, 35, of Fort Lauderdale.

Aguiar made his fortune in the oil and gas business and is known for his charitable gifts. The family of the missing Brazilian-born businessman, a father of four young children, is “completely devastated,” said Rabbi Moshe Meir Lipszyc of Chabad Lubavitch of Fort Lauderdale.

“They are all very, very worried about him,” Lipszyc said. “We are hoping and praying for a miracle. We are hoping if he fell off the boat, that he was able to swim to shore. He is massively special and with God’s help and all our prayers, we hope he will be OK.”

Aguiar was last seen around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday getting into the Jupiter center console fishing boat that — along with his 5-year-old, 77-foot motor vessel Zion — is normally docked at his home in the 1500 block of Southeast 10th Street, Fort Lauderdale Police said.
The empty tender grounded on the beach around 1:15 a.m. Wednesday, Fort Lauderdale police said.

Nearly five hours later, a salvage worker inspected the white hull, raised its twin outboards out of the sand and swam with tow lines to connect it to Sea Tow Captain John See’s high-powered inflatable vessel that was idling just offshore.

See didn’t observe any blood, bait or fishing gear aboard the T.T. Zion, but noticed the tie bar connecting its outboard engines had been broken.
If the tie bar broke and the engines became unattached, See said, “The second engine could turn sharply and pitch a boater overboard, or it could be difficult for its captain to steer.”

The T.T. Zion was towed Wednesday morning to the 15th Street boat ramp and driven to a Fort Lauderdale warehouse for police inspection, See said.

Aguiar’s wife, Jaime Aguiar, told Fort Lauderdale Police that she is concerned for her husband’s safety, Detective Travis Mandell said Wednesday.

She arrived home Tuesday and believed her husband was in his home office, Mandell said. She told investigators an employee of the couple told her that her husband went out on his boat around 7:30 that night.

The Coast Guard and marine units from the Broward Sheriff’s Officeand Fort Lauderdale Police are searching area waterways and three miles offshore, between Lauderdale-by-the-Sea and Port Everglades, officials said.

Fort Lauderdale Police also searched the beach aboard ATVs, and were puzzled about why Aguiar would go boating at night.

“It’s extremely odd that Mr. Aguiar would venture out in such tumultous seas and rip currents and impending bad weather conditions that were unfavorable for boating, even for the most seasoned captain,” Mandell said.

One of Aguiar’s attorneys, Fred Haddad, said his client is knowledgeable about boats.

“I’m just kind of dumbfounded,” said Haddad. “I really like the guy. He’s as nice as they come.”

In 2009, Aguiar became a fixture of Israeli sports pages after he briefly became the main sponsor of an Israeli Premier League soccer team, Beitar Jerusalem.

Last summer, he reportedly purchased a share of the Hapoel Jerusalem professional basketball team.

“He gave the management the power to do what they liked with the team, and when he was in Israel, he was courtside,” Sports 5 reporter Roey Gladstone said by phone from that country.

Aguiar is a charitable benefactor who made an $8 million gift to Nefesh b’Nefesh, an organization that helps Jews move to Israel.

Despite his success, in January 2010, Aguiar was forcibly admitted to an Israeli psychiatric hospital after claiming he had visited a soldier who had been abducted by Hamas fighters, according to Israeli media reports.

Court documents also indicate that in 2011, Aguiar’s wife and mother successfully petitioned a Miami-Dade judge to appoint an emergency guardian for him.

Since 2009, Aguiar and his uncle, Thomas Kaplan, have been locked in contentious litigation resulting from the $2.55 billion sale of an energy company they co-founded, Leor Exploration & Production LLC, which tapped a massive natural gas field in Texas.

Kaplan accused his nephew in a January 2009 lawsuit of believing he was the Messiah. Aguiar said he never made such claims, but felt remarkably blessed for his good fortune.

“People have said what an amazing accomplishment it was that I started a company at 26 from nothing, and built it up to be so successful,” Aguiar told the Sun Sentinel in 2009. “When I sold the company, I gave credit to God.”

Also that year, Aguiar claimed Broward sheriff’s deputies beat him after a traffic stop and made anti-Semitic remarks, comments an agency spokesman called “ludicrous.”

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