How Jimmy Buffett and a ragtag band of drug smugglers helped turned St. Barth into celebrities hedonistic paradise

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 ...