Island Paradise Exposed: Drugs, Scandals, and Secrets

It's the paradise island beloved by the privileged, pretty and plutocratically inclined – a celebrity playground where Alix Earle flirts with , parties with  and  strips off to sunbathe topless in the Caribbean sun.

It's all just an average day on Saint Barthélemy - best known to Americans as St Barts and, to islanders, St Barth.

And if a single property can capture the epic saga of this fabled island where Christie Brinkley met and the Kardashians regularly frolic, then Autour du Rocher (in English, Around the Rock) is it.

This is all the more remarkable because Autour - set on an 8.5-acre oceanfront parcel of land on the north of the island - has been a ruin since it burned down under suspicious circumstances just before 1991.

It is nonetheless still a prized property, changing hands several times since it was bought first by the television talk show icon David Letterman, through the corporate entity FWI [as in French West Indies] Atomic Waste and Leisure Inc (FWIAWL Inc).

Letterman's company acquired it in April 1995 from the tropical rock singer Jimmy Buffett. But that, as I discovered while researching the book Treasured Island, isn't quite true. 

FWIAWL Inc then allegedly sold it to a wealthy Frenchman in 2015. But that sale, too, is questionable. 

All evidence suggests the real buyer was Andry Akimov, a Russian oligarch who was sanctioned in 2018 and who still, according to in-the-know islanders, owns Autour. 

Son of a Soviet military engineer, Akimov was born in St Petersburg when it was still Leningrad, worked as a banker and also, reportedly, for the Communist regime's KGB secret service. With another former KGB man, Vladmir , he helped privatize Soviet industry in the newborn Russian Federation.

Putin rewarded him with the lucrative chairmanship of Russia's third largest bank, Gazprombank, and with his newfound wealth Akimov began buying trophy real estate, often obscuring ownership behind family and associates. 

Among his purchases was a dacha-style house on St Barth's wild southern coast once owned by the ballet star and Soviet defector Rudolph Nureyev.

In 2018, a twenty-something French entrepreneur living on the island, Paco Chanseau, took formal control of Villa Nureyev. 

He's married to a woman a dozen years older, whose father owned a real estate company and a popular beachfront club-restaurant in Biarritz. So, theoretically, Chanseau might have had the €25 million Letterman's company was paid for Autour du Rocher. 

But informed island gossip claims Chanseau was fronting for Akimov when he filed plans to build a 24-cottage hotel on the land.

Those and later proposals, including a massive villa that resembled a St Tropez beach club, were killed by local protests. And in the meantime, public records indicate, a prospective sale to Merck Pharmaceutical heir Frank Binder, a Swiss-born resident of Monte Carlo and trophy real estate collector, fell through.

But all that pales beside Autour du Rocher's sordid past. 

It was conceived by two improbably conservative men for louche St Barth.

'Hal' Haskell had served in the Coast Guard, worked for Nelson Rockefeller and, in 1956, was about to run for Congress from Delaware when he and a fellow Republican sailor Rodney Mustard Layton, a corporate lawyer married to a duPont heiress, discovered the island.

They bought property above the bay of Lorient and built a vacation house of stone, mahogany and terracotta around the rocky outcrop that inspired its name. When they weren't on the island, they rented out rooms. 

A local citizen managed Autour du Rocher and, around 1960, added a restaurant where the specialty was sea turtle steak.

In 1969, Haskell won a term as mayor of Wilmington and the hotel, under that manager, grew squalid, Layton's daughter says. 

Out of office in 1976, Haskell took over Abercrombie & Fitch, and the manager took over the property, though the transfer was so irregular, it would be decades before legal title was clearly established.

Obscured ownership is a St Barth tradition.

Into that limbo strode a womanizing American ne'er-do-well, Bill Bove, who owned a surf-and-turf restaurant at the Mullet Bay resort on nearby Saint Maarten island. 

Bove's partner and financial backer was surely the most notorious character ever to own a Caribbean hotel. A predicate felon, sneak thief, self-styled revolutionary and wholesale drug smuggler, distributor and user - he bragged about his 90 LSD trips - he called himself chic (with a lower case c) Eder: 'chic's the name and smoke's my game.'

Everyone from model Lauren Hutton (photographed) to Fleetwood Mac, Paul Simon and The Rolling Stones were drawn to St Barth like moths to a flame