TLDR
St Barts looks like a billionaire postcard, but one ruined hilltop nightclub, Autour du Rocher, quietly links Jimmy Buffett, David Letterman, sanctioned oligarchs, and a wild history the island can never quite shake.
Today, St Barts is the winter backdrop for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez entertaining Leonardo DiCaprio on a megayacht, and for influencer Alix Earle sparking Tom Brady romance rumors in sunlit selfies. Yet high above the turquoise water sits a charred concrete relic that tells a very different story about how this playground was built.
The ruin is Autour du Rocher, once a jungle-framed hotel and rock club on an 8.5-acre oceanfront spread. It burned under suspicious circumstances in the early 1990s and has stood empty ever since. Still, it remains coveted. As detailed in Daily Mail US excerpts from Michael Gross’s new book “Treasured Island – The Story of St. Barth… and Its Barbarians, Billionaires, and Beauties,” the property has passed through a cast worthy of its own limited series.
Autour began in the 1970s with unlikely hoteliers Bill Bove and Bill Eder. Eder, Gross reports, had been in and out of prison since his teens. His record included a federal case tied to a 1970 antiwar protest and, later, a massive marijuana smuggling bust involving 16.5 tons of weed. When he returned to prison, a lawyer arrived in St Barts and pressured Bove to sell.
The buyer looked glamorous. Tropical rock star Jimmy Buffett had fallen for the island, and casual visitors assumed he owned Autour du Rocher outright. In reality, Gross writes, Buffett was the face of a partnership dominated by two countercultural sailors, Groovy Gray and JJ Walsh. Gray had once crossed the Atlantic alone with a boat full of hashish. Their bohemian finances and smuggler past set the tone for what came next.
By the 1980s, fashion and fame had discovered St Barts. Models, rock bands, and TV stars flocked to the island. At Autour du Rocher, the energy turned feral. Bartender Dylan Doherty told Gross, “I was always taking models down to the bathroom. Want to do some coke?” He said the encounters often moved from lines to liaisons, and remembered that he “got a good rep” as women recommended him to friends. Buffett would later describe the club as “the worst behavior I have ever seen.”
The hotel business withered as the all-night party roared on. Then came the suspicious fire just before Christmas in the early 1990s. Out of the ashes stepped an unlikely new player in the saga: David Letterman. Through a company called FWI Atomic Waste and Leisure Inc, the late-night host quietly bought the ruin from Buffett’s side in the mid-1990s. An intimate described Letterman to Gross as a discreet real estate savant, with trophy properties in Montana, Martha’s Vineyard, Westchester, and St Barts.
Letterman secured a permit to build on the site, which was extended into the mid-2010s, but ultimately chose to keep a different home on the island and opted to sell. That is when the story turns from rock and roll to geopolitics. Officially, the buyer was the French businessman Paco Chanseau, associated with a beachfront club in Biarritz. Local chatter, though, claimed he was fronting for Andry Akimov, a Russian banker who later faced sanctions from the US, the United Kingdom, the EU, and other governments.
Plans for a 24-cottage hotel, then a vast villa reminiscent of a St Tropez beach club, ignited fierce local resistance. According to Gross, protesters saw Autour du Rocher as “a site that has come to symbolize the battles being waged against investment companies that have no regard for the island or its inhabitants.” A proposed sale to Merck pharmaceutical heir Frank Binder reportedly collapsed. The ruin remained, and the community drew a line against another oversized billionaire compound.
Many of the men who shaped Autour’s legend are gone. Bove died broke. Eder died in prison. Gray was killed in a 2003 plane crash. Buffett lost a long fight with skin cancer, leaving behind, among other songs, “Autour du Rocher.” Walsh now struggles with cognitive issues. Chanseau is said to live in Dubai. Akimov, Gross notes, retains an interest in St Barts assets even as sanctions shadow his name.
Meanwhile, new money keeps gliding into Gustavia’s harbor. Bezos, DiCaprio, models, and sports legends dance on deck while, up the hill, Autour du Rocher crumbles. It is the island’s inconvenient mirror. Beneath the filtered vacation shots and discreet PR teams, St Barts is still negotiating what kind of paradise it wants to be, and how much of its history it is willing to bury under the next billionaire build.
Does Autour du Rocher feel like a glamorous relic, a cautionary tale about money and power, or both? Share your take on St Barts’ double life as a billionaire fantasy and a bruised, very real island.
