A KILLING IN CANNABIS
THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF Pleasure Point stands on cliffs overlooking one of the more famous surf breaks in California, a menacing swell that locals call Sewers. Some four miles from the Santa Cruz boardwalk, the break takes its name from an old underwater pipe that once disgorged the town’s sewage into Monterey Bay. Today, the Sewers can draw a rugged crowd, and woe betide the newcomer who does not pay the proper deference to those locals, for the surfers of Santa Cruz have earned a reputation for being as hostile as they are skilled.
A stretch of opulent oceanfront villas also looks out over the surf at Pleasure Point. Ever since San Francisco first got rich—more than 170 years ago, from the California gold rush—the city’s elite has treated Santa Cruz as its favored beach resort. But in the past two decades, there has been a wealth invasion unlike any before. Just on the other side of the Santa Cruz Mountains, an easy commuter’s drive away, sprawls Silicon Valley. From there, the tech titans have come. When Reed Hastings and (rumor has it) Mark Zuckerburg bought glamorous pads in the Santa Cruz area, their hirelings at Netflix and Facebook began snapping up nearby properties in aspirational emulation. The pattern repeated with other tech barons, and other hirelings, until today the median price for a single-family home in Santa Cruz is $1.3 million.
The villa at 3034 Pleasure Point Drive has a multilevel deck that’s built out over the cliffs. The view from there is a panorama of changeable seas and histrionic sunsets, with the Monterey Peninsula hovering on the horizon like a blue-green mystery. On the night of September 30, 2019, the owner of the home slept alone in his master suite. There and throughout the house, the ocean’s waves were soporifically audible, rumbling against the rocks and sliding back again in their lunar rhythms.
Two months earlier, the villa’s owner, Tushar Atre, had turned 50, though he looked decades younger. He had a beaming, youthful smile and an infectious vitality that charmed almost everyone he met. A keen surfer, mountain biker, and wild-edibles forager, he was in top physical condition. He was also rich. He’d grown up in affluent West-chester County, New York, the son of Indian immigrants, had studied at NYU, and had come west in 1996 in pursuit of the dot-com dream.
This, by all appearances, he had unconditionally achieved. The founder of AtreNet, an early corporate webdesign firm, Atre, who had never married or had children, was now at the charismatic center of a circle of prosperous friends, many of them Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and executives. The group had become practitioners of a kind of heady lifestyle discipline, a philosophy of hyperfocus, first popularized by the late Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, called “the flow.” For Atre and his circle, this often meant intense sessions of early-morning surfing, when they would strive to work their minds and bodies into a kind of adrenal rapture. “There was this voracious appetite for work and danger,” says a family friend. After surfing, perhaps after meditation, the flow state would be achieved. Then they would retire to their desks and go to work, focused, relentless—hour after hour, without pause—applying their energies to their various business ideas.
For his part, Atre had recently shifted his primary focus from AtreNet and turned his ambition toward a fresh field, one he believed held immense potential. One he felt was ripe for disruption. One whose growth opportunities in recent years had lured myriad entrepreneurs to stake their claim—with more than 38,000 U.S. licenses issued, per cannabis data firm Whitney Economics. By the fall of 2019, he’d spent more than a million of his own dollars on the new business and had raised millions more from investors. Atre was building a cannabis startup.
At 2:48 on the morning of October 1, 2019, according to the time stamp on surveillance footage captured by a camera on a neighboring home, three men entered the house at Pleasure Point Drive. They appeared to be wearing gloves, baseball caps, and N95-style facemasks. One carried an assault rifle. There were no signs of forced entry; Atre had either let them inside or they knew the passcode. But there was a struggle. At one point, the entrepreneur escaped. The same footage shows a figure running down Pleasure Point Drive, a normally quiet lane ensconced in the force field of its own affluence, his wrists apparently cuffed behind his back. In the video, a man gives chase and brings the figure violently to the ground. An SUV then pulls up beside them, and two men quickly bundle their victim into the passenger seat. Then the vehicle speeds off, disappearing into the night.
lies not just on the Pacific, but also in the shadow of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a secluded hinterland of redwood forest and fern canyons, unpaved switchbacks, and remote homesteads. The mountains harbor a swath of rural isolation right at the edge of the Bay Area megalopolis, and it was here that California’s counter-culture found one of its first bucolic, dharma-bum milieus. Ken Kesey
