Jennifer Sellitti is a New Jersey public defender by day and a shipwreck diver by choice. For more than a decade, she explored the North Atlantic’s sunken vessels alongside her partner, Joe Mazraani, aboard their boat, D/V Tenacious, helping locate several long-lost wrecks off the Eastern Seaboard. After Mazraani died during a deep-sea dive in 2025, Sellitti took command of their company, Atlantic Wreck Salvage, continuing the dangerous search for lost ships that the two of them once shared.
From the courtroom to deep sea: Jennifer Sellitti’s path into shipwreck diving
Sellitti graduated from Boston University in 1996 and built a career as a criminal defence attorney and public defender in New Jersey. She had never gone diving until she met Joe Mazraani in 2015, a fellow criminal defence lawyer who had been wreck diving off the Northeast coast since the mid-1990s. Mazraani, who was born in Lebanon and immigrated to the United States at 15, introduced her to his obsession with the roughly 5,400 shipwrecks resting on the Atlantic’s floor. Sellitti quickly took to the sport, training as a diver and eventually earning a US Coast Guard captain’s license alongside her legal career.
Jennifer Sellitti’s shipwreck discoveries aboard D/V Tenacious
As stated in the archives of The Atlantic Wreck Salvage, Sellitti and Mazraani co-captained D/V Tenacious, a former fishing boat Mazraani had repurposed for deep-sea salvage after founding Atlantic Wreck Salvage in 2010. Together they led crews to several previously undocumented wrecks, including the WWI troopship SS West Point and the bow of the MV Stockholm, the ship that collided with the SS Andrea Doria off Nantucket in 1956. In 2016, Sellitti took on her own project, searching for Le Lyonnais, a French passenger steamship that sank in 1856. The wreck was finally located by the Tenacious team in 2024, a discovery she later chronicled in her book, The Adriatic Affair.
The dive that took Jennifer Sellitti’s partner, Joe Mazraani
According to The Guardian, on July 29, 2025, Mazraani suffered a medical emergency while diving to an unidentified wreck the team called the “Big Engine Steamer,” roughly 200 miles off the Massachusetts coast on Georges Bank. Sellitti was aboard Tenacious that day. The crew brought him back to the boat and attempted CPR, but could not revive him. Speaking on behalf of Atlantic Wreck Salvage, Sellitti said there was no reason to suspect diver error or equipment failure, and that a full investigation was underway. She has said she still finds it difficult to discuss the loss of the man who introduced her to shipwreck diving.
Joe Mazraani (Image: Jennifer Sellitti 2021)
Jennifer Sellitti now leads Atlantic Wreck Salvage and D/V Tenacious
Since Mazraani’s death, Sellitti has taken the helm of Atlantic Wreck Salvage and D/V Tenacious, continuing the expeditions they once ran together. As Managing Member, she leads dives, conducts historical research, oversees side-scan sonar surveys, and works to educate the public about shipwreck discovery and responsible salvage. She is an associate member of the Boston Sea Rovers and a trustee of the New Jersey Maritime Museum. When she is not at sea, she works as a criminal defence attorney. Her first book, The Adriatic Affair: A Maritime Hit-And-Run Off the Coast of Nantucket, tells the story of the sinking of the Nineteenth-century passenger steamship, Le Lyonnais. “All I know is,” she told The Guardian while remembering Joe, “that the further from shore I am, the closer I am to him.”