How Jimmy Buffett helped turned St. Barth into celeb paradise

Although St. Barth has been generally known as a tropical playground for the wealthy and well-known for a number of many years, it’s not so way back that the Caribbean island was a scruffy, even tough nook of paradise attracting hard-living ex-pat dropouts who fancied themselves as fashionable pirates. If that feels like a Jimmy Buffett tune, that’s as a result of the late musician was closely influenced by that world after he moved to Saint Barthélemy within the Seventies. In an excerpt from his e book “Treasured Island: The Story of St. Barth . . . and Its Barbarians, Billionaires, and Beauties” (Harper, June 16), writer Michael Gross seems again on the scene — together with a infamous resort and nightclub that Buffett owned within the island city of Lorient.

David Wegman from Fort Wayne, Ind., was probably the primary member of St. Barth’s second era of smugglers — trafficking in medication rather than liquor, fragrance and electronics — to reach in Gustavia. A self- taught artist and musician who’d raced a dragster on the East Coast within the Sixties, he traded it in to stay on a ship off Key West in 1971.

He first visited St. Barth three years later, rowing ashore from his newest sailboat, “The African Queen III,” looking for gas for its range; a bottle of overproof rum did the trick. A couple of years later, he lived above a bar on Duval Street in Key West the place Jimmy Buffett, a failed nation songwriter who’d simply arrived from Nashville, performed for suggestions, and Wegman painted an indication promoting his reveals. J.J. Walsh labored in a restaurant simply up the road, and he and Wegman grew to become associates, too.

By 1979, Buffett had fallen in love with St. Barth, too, and signed on as a minority associate when Walsh and one other pal, Larry “Groovy” Gray, who’d smuggled weed with Walsh, purchased a resort/restaurant known as Autour du Rocher on the island. That yr, Wegman was one among eight crew members arrested on “Olaug,” a 189-foot Liberian ship off the coast of Sandy Hook, NJ.

In its maintain had been 480 burlap baggage containing interior tubes full of cannabis — 42,000 kilos of it with a road worth of $40 million — which a US lawyer described as the biggest seizure of cannabis in US historical past. The ship had sailed from Trinidad, the place the crew boarded, to Lebanon, the place the medication had been loaded, in an operation run by what was described in courtroom as a big felony group with large money assets. 

Wegman confirms he’d labored for the Mafia. “In ’79, there was knock on my door,” he says. “Want to?”

After first pleading harmless, 5 of the “Olaug” crew, together with Wegman, admitted their guilt and had been sentenced to 18 months in jail. 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 well-known “Cheeseburger in Paradise” signal that has adorned the bar and numerous T- shirts ever since. (The phrase was a favourite of Groovy Gray’s.)

Wegman began spending time at Autour du Rocher, which he’d generally known as an excellent restaurant in an earlier incarnation, however had rapidly turn out to be, together with PLM, the place 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 desk and a jewellery boutique, and mounted a present of a half dozen Wegman pastels, bought all of them, and paid him $5,000. So he began making Autour du Rocher T-shirts, too. “It was all connected,” Wegman says.

Buffett’s account of shopping for Autour du Rocher is, like his music, sunny. He was impressed, he’s written, by Herman Wouk’s comedian novel “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” in regards to the ill-fated adventures of a New York press agent who buys a Caribbean resort on an island the place many share the identical surnames.

Buffett would later name 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 solely that, he settled in, promoting his sailboat, “Euphoria II,” at Le Sélect in 1979 and shopping for a home above Saint- Jean.

It wasn’t all clean flying. A Rolling Stone profile of Buffett simply earlier than Autour du Rocher modified fingers 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,” the place, by night time, they might “slip their boats out into the opalescent waters to take care of business.”

That was a critical 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 movie star central, principally attributable to Buffett’s involvement. Its nighttime circuit began at Le Sélect, per Rolling Stone author 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 daybreak 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 till 1 a.m., it then full of clients seeking to hold the night time going and the locals who labored in eating places and had been simply beginning theirs. Alongside them had been younger American guests, moths to the flame.

“It was drug city and it was wild and it was fun,” says early St. Barth home-owner Kent Fuller. Adds one other, 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 membership’s teenaged disc jockey, Dylan Doherty was knee deep in it. The smugglers “looked like a bunch of electricians,” he says, however “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 younger smuggler who arrived in 1980. “I went on a three-week vacation” to go to one other 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 whereas most of these round him “were into green,” he progressed “into the cloud: cocaine world.”

X-rated scenes pour from McKee’s reminiscence. “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 time ever?

He pauses. “Probably not.”