Although St. Barth has been known as a tropical playground for the rich and famous for several decades, it’s not so long ago that the Caribbean island was a scruffy, even rough corner of paradise attracting hard-living ex-pat dropouts who fancied themselves as modern pirates. If that sounds like a Jimmy Buffett song, that’s because the late musician was heavily influenced by that world after he moved to Saint Barthélemy in the 1970s. In an excerpt from his book “Treasured Island: The Story of St. Barth . . . and Its Barbarians, Billionaires, and Beauties” (Harper, June 16), author Michael Gross looks back at the scene — including a notorious hotel and nightclub that Buffett owned in the island’s capital of Gustavia.
David Wegman from Fort Wayne, Ind., was likely the first member of St. Barth’s second generation of smugglers — trafficking in drugs in place of liquor, perfume and electronics — to arrive in Gustavia. A self- taught artist and musician who’d raced a dragster on the East Coast in the 1960s, he traded it in to live on a boat off Key West in 1971.
He first visited St. Barth three years later, rowing ashore from his latest sailboat, “The African Queen III,” seeking fuel for its stove; a bottle of overproof rum did the trick. A few years later, he lived above a bar on Duval Street in Key West where Jimmy Buffett, a failed country songwriter who’d just arrived from Nashville, played for tips, and Wegman painted a sign advertising his shows. J.J. Walsh worked in a restaurant just up the street, and he and Wegman became friends, too.
By 1979, Buffett had fallen in love with St. Barth, too, and signed on as a minority partner when Walsh and another pal, Larry “Groovy” Gray, who’d smuggled weed with Walsh, bought a hotel/restaurant called Autour du Rocher on the island. That year, Wegman was one of eight crew members arrested on “Olaug,” a 189-foot Liberian ship off the coast of Sandy Hook, NJ.
In its hold were 480 burlap bags containing inner tubes stuffed with hashish — 42,000 pounds of it with a street value of $40 million — which a US attorney described as the largest seizure of hashish in US history. The ship had sailed from Trinidad, where the crew boarded, to Lebanon, where the drugs were loaded, in an operation run by what was described in court as a large criminal organization with huge cash resources.
Wegman confirms he’d worked for the Mafia. “In ’79, there was knock on my door,” he says. “Want to?”
After first pleading innocent, five of the “Olaug” crew, including Wegman, admitted their guilt and were sentenced to 18 months in prison. Just out in 1981, “I got my old boat back and anchored in St. Barth’s Saint-Jean Bay next to Les Riley’s boat,” Wegman says. Riley, too, was a weed smuggler …
Wegman painted the famous “Cheeseburger in Paradise” sign that has adorned the bar and countless T- shirts ever since. (The phrase was a favorite of Groovy Gray’s.)
Wegman started spending time at Autour du Rocher, which he’d known as a good restaurant in an earlier incarnation, but had quickly become, along with PLM, where Billy Joel met Christie Brinkley, a late-night joint and “the only two places to go” [in the town]. Walsh and Gray had added a pool table and a jewelry boutique, and mounted a show of a half dozen Wegman pastels, sold them all, and paid him $5,000. So he started making Autour du Rocher T-shirts, too. “It was all connected,” Wegman says.
Buffett’s account of buying Autour du Rocher is, like his music, sunny. He was inspired, he’s written, by Herman Wouk’s comic novel “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” about the ill-fated adventures of a New York press agent who buys a Caribbean hotel on an island where many share the same surnames.
Buffett would later call Autour du Rocher “the biggest damn financial nightmare — a great, dumb, stupid, wonderful thing to own. I’ve yet to see a dime come out of it, but I bought it truly for no other reason than to be able to sit on a stool and tell whoever I’m talking to that I own part of a bar in the Caribbean.”
Not only that, he settled in, selling his sailboat, “Euphoria II,” at Le Sélect in 1979 and buying a house above Saint- Jean.
It wasn’t all smooth flying. A Rolling Stone profile of Buffett just before Autour du Rocher changed hands ruffled feathers on St. Barth by noting that Buffett “used to run a little marijuana through the islands himself,” and that St. Barth was “a smuggler’s haven,” where, by night, they would “slip their boats out into the opalescent waters to take care of business.”
That was a serious breach of the smuggler code. “A lot of people were pissed off,” Wegman says. “Jimmy talked about smugglers and they told him, ‘Keep your mouth shut if you want to stay on St. Barth.’ Because he was Jimmy Buffett and he’d play for free, he smoothed it over — but barely.”
That’s when St. Barth first emerged as celebrity central, mostly due to Buffett’s involvement. Its nighttime circuit started at Le Sélect, per Rolling Stone writer Chet Flippo “a real crossroads for smugglers and other exotic charlatans . . . a tawdry open- air, whitewashed-stone joint with outhouses that would make a sewer rat gag . . . Naked hippie children crawl across the floor, hard-eyed hippies whisper conspiratorially in English, French and Spanish at the bar, dogs wander in and out.”
Nightcrawlers ended up greeting the dawn at Autour du Rocher, “our dream hotel,” Buffett later wrote. “The place was the staging ground for some of the worst behavior I have ever seen.”
Empty until 1 a.m., it then filled with customers looking to keep the night going and the locals who worked in restaurants and were just starting theirs. Alongside them were young American visitors, moths to the flame.
“It was drug city and it was wild and it was fun,” says early St. Barth homeowner Kent Fuller. Adds another, Charlie Biddle, “I went there as an underage kid, I learned a ton of stuff and I saw a lot of s–t I shouldn’t have seen but I am all the better for it.”
As the club’s teenaged disc jockey, Dylan Doherty was knee deep in it. The smugglers “looked like a bunch of electricians,” he says, but “they’d just throw money around. They’d come in waves, a lot of them. I embraced them so they liked me. I’d go on boats to fix a mast and there would be thirty bales of marijuana. Another day, I was working on a boat and found a duffel bag full of bricks of cash. They’d give me a bag of coke and say hold it. Then they’d come to my house. ‘Hey Dylan, where’s that bag?’ ”
“It was f–kin’ wild as hell,” agrees Brett McKee, a young smuggler who arrived in 1980. “I went on a three-week vacation” to visit another drug runner “and stayed four years,” he says. “I was young, I wanted to have fun and get p–sy and I fell in with the right people or the wrong people. There was no intent. It progressed into madness.”
At first, he indulged in “drink and weed.” But while most of those around him “were into green,” he progressed “into the cloud: cocaine world.”
X-rated scenes pour from McKee’s memory. “Spending the day on a boat . . . Then, [retired tennis pro] Yannick Noah’s place at sunset, then PLM or parties or orgies at Groovy’s. By the time you got to Autour du Rocher, it was the end of the night and brain matter wasn’t all there. Banging a chick with everyone looking in the window. Going down the hill to get party favors and crashing my pickup. Getting busy was the goal every night. Where’s the next piece of candy and there’s plenty to be had. There was no loyalty with women with any of us. I was banging a Canadian in one room, giving everyone blow out the window. I finish and she [hooks up with] another girl. Two of them on the pool table and they’re passing a tray of blow around.”
Was that the wildest night ever?
He pauses. “Probably not.”
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