A ship with no home: The sad but colorful (and now very...

After almost a century on Bay Area waters, the Sherman, a former Army troop transport in World War II, Alcatraz escape vessel and repeat restaurant failure, is being picked for parts at a dry dock on Vallejo’s Mare Island.

The 144-foot steamer has been evicted from three Northern California ports in the last five years. The latest failed business venture was a costly one, forcing the city of Vallejo to shell out about $500,000 to remove the dilapidated ship from its municipal harbor, with tugboats dragging the three-story vessel across the Mare Island Strait in November.

It’s an ignominious end to the Sherman’s colorful, if checkered, past.

“It had such a glorious, glamorous life,” Christina Snyder, executive vice president of Mare Island Dry Dock, said on a recent day as a giant crane lifted wood panels off the Sherman’s deck. “She was a war vessel, a fancy restaurant. Just to see this kind of end is sad. But all good things must come to an end.”

The Sherman’s final chapter has been a nightmare for all involved, particularly Vallejo. In the spring of 2017, the boat owners signed a berthing agreement with the city. The group Sacramento River Resort Inc. told staffers at the municipal marina that the vessel would be there temporarily and then removed after rehabilitation, according to a letter from the city to the owners.

That July, after Vallejo issued a 30-day notice of termination for the docking, the city was informed that Liu Melk had sold the Sherman to Anji Redi, records show. Redi informed the city he had obtained insurance for the ship and planned to relocate it soon, but by the end of that year he told officials he had actually never bought the vessel, according to the city.

Neither Redi nor Melk responded to emails seeking comment.

At the harbor, the Sherman developed large holes in its sides, took on water and damaged the dock. It eventually got stuck in the mud and crept into the harbor entrance, trapping some of the larger vessels.

When the city sued the purported owners in March 2018, neither defendant responded to the lawsuit. So, in September 2018, Solano County Superior Court Judge Michael Mattice entered a default judgment declaring that the Sherman was a public nuisance, marine debris and abandoned property. Redi was said to be the legal owner.

The judge said he had 30 days to remove the vessel or the city could remove it and charge him. He also ordered Redi to pay almost $100,000 in damages. But Vallejo Public Works Director Terrance Davis said the city hasn’t seen a dime.

“Essentially, the handlers of the boat ... misrepresented themselves to our staff and said they’d get the boat worked on in the area and they just needed a temporary place to dock the boat,” Davis said. “That was a ruse, we learned ... and we were left there holding the bag.”

The city tried to no avail to sell the boat, or donate it to a nonprofit group, before giving up and having it towed to Mare Island.

Snyder, the dry dock official, said her company had expected to salvage a commercial kitchen from the carcass, but someone had stripped it out in the days before it was tugged over. Her employees did pull out some old dishware, a wooden wine list, stationery and dozens of old menus, featuring Atlantic salmon served with forbidden rice.

Perhaps Vallejo should have feared the worst, given the arc of the boat’s history.

The ship launched in 1922 as the Gen. Frank M. Coxe, an Army transport ship built to ferry soldiers between the Bay Area’s military bases, before highways or bridges were built. It was active from 1922 to 1947, before being sold as surplus after World War II.

On July 31, 1945, the steamer was being used as a shuttle between San Francisco’s Fort Mason, Alcatraz and Angel Island. That’s when 50-year-old John Giles, who was serving time on Alcatraz for holding up a mail train after escaping from an Oregon prison, stole an Army uniform from the prison laundry.

As he worked his dock duty, he sneaked through a freight hatchway below deck on the Coxe. The warden would call Giles a “shrewd, scheming fellow” in a front page Chronicle article on the escape attempt.

When the Coxe docked at Angel Island, an officer noticed something amiss with Giles’ uniform and, eventually, realized he was a prisoner. Upon his capture, Giles told a guard he “had his chance to get away — and had nothing to lose.”

After being decommissioned, the Coxe was bought by the Golden Gate Scenic Steamship Line, which now operates as the Red & White Fleet. Roast beef sandwiches sold for 50 cents apiece as it ferried tourists across the bay.

But, by the 1950s, it had been sold to a private owner, who sent it up through the delta to Stockton’s downtown waterway, where it became the Showboat Restaurant & Wheelhouse Lounge. Later, in the 1960s and ’70s, it would operate in Oakland’s Jack London Square.

By the late 1970s and ’80s, it was named the Pattaya Princess and operated as a Thai restaurant in Burlingame, just south of San Francisco International Airport.

In 1978, James “Jim” Katsaras, the owner of Diamond Jim’s Showboat, was shot to death on the ship by a disgruntled business partner. After stabbing a legal researcher at a law office with a pen knife, police said at the time, Giacomo Messina boarded the vessel and shot Katsaras five times at close range with a shotgun. Detectives told the San Mateo Times that Messina had been a partner on the boat venture — and wanted out.

Messina would later be acquitted for reasons of insanity, according to the Stockton Record.

The same year of the killing, architect Robert Sherman spotted the vessel as he ate lunch at a nearby restaurant, said Martha May, 97, a co-founder of the Burlingame Historical Society, who befriended Sherman and later chronicled the ship’s history.

He bought it and refurbished it, setting the stage for 11 different restaurants to open and close on the ship. Despite the flurry of changes, the vessel remained the Coxe until shortly after Sherman sold it to a San Francisco contractor in 2006. The new owner renamed it the Sherman, but eventually drove it to bankruptcy, May said.

In 2014, the Sherman returned to Stockton, where new owners envisioned a floating seafood restaurant and oyster bar, but it went into foreclosure, with a bank paying $3,000 a month in rent as water hyacinth surrounded the aging vessel. Squatters took residence, while the city struggled to ward off graffiti and broken windows.

By 2017, the Sherman had again outlived its welcome and got tugged to Vallejo.

With promises broken and dreams of resurrection abandoned, the Sherman limped across the strait one last time. The city and dry dock company tried to find museums or military buffs to salvage ship parts, but there were no takers.

Years earlier, May said her group was able to save parts and ephemera from the ship’s Army years and donate them to the National Park Service, which put them in the archives at the Presidio. She’s saddened the remaining vessel is being scrapped, but also realistic.

“Its hull was getting thinner and thinner,” she said. “Many ships have come to that same end.”

Matthias Gafni is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: matthias.gafni@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mgafni