From back East originally, New York City suburbs, but he’d been a Santa Cruz resident for more than twenty years. Well-known figure in the community. Rich. Like so many in Santa Cruz now, he’d made his money in tech. Founder and CEO of x, a private company, a kind of design agency that built websites for other tech companies all over Silicon Valley. He was the charismatic center of a loyal circle of surfing tech-industry friends, all of whom had become practitioners of a kind of heady lifestyle discipline, a philosophy of hyperfocus, first formulated by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1990, called “the flow.” 

Atre had long lived in one or another of several houses near the ocean in Santa Cruz so he could put on his 4/3 wet suit at home and walk down to the rocks beneath the cliffs early each morning, break of dawn, dawn patrol, and paddle out and join the lineup and catch waves in the bracing, often sub-sixty-degree Pacific, where he’d absorb the sea’s mineral vigors and commune with the otters and seals and birds and catch more waves, he and his friends working their minds, bodies, and selves into a kind of adrenal rapture. After surfing, after meditation, the flow state would be achieved. Then Atre and his friends would retire to their desks and go to work, focused, enthralled, relentless — ten, twelve, fourteen hours without pause — applying their energies to their various start-ups and inventions and business ideas. 

Atre had a large personality. He dressed quirkily — he wanted to stand out, but not too much — flat-brimmed trucker hats that he crumpled so the brims were no longer flat, board shorts, hiking sneakers, tech-wool hiking socks that he pulled up to his knees. He often worked late into the night and when he grew tired just fell into bed and slept in his clothes. He had a black, off-kilter sense of humor, was a rabble-rouser, a rogue, and was more fun to be around, his loyal friends believed, than anyone they had ever met in their lives. They begged to hang out with him. Often they brought their kids when they came over to hang out, and the kids loved Tushar, too. He kept a trampoline in his yard and skate-boards, Onewheels, mountain bikes, cruisers, electric bikes, and other expensive vehicular toys. He’d let anyone borrow anything at any time. He kept a local lending library of surfboards (soft tops, fish boards, long-boards, shortboards, guns, for any size person and all levels of ability) in an unlocked storage closet under the ocean-facing deck at his house, for anyone to take out into the breaks beyond. People who knew him described him as “childlike” and “an eager puppy” and “super juiced” and “super fired up” and “shameless” and “pretty ADHD” and “definitely crazy.” 

He had his houses outfitted with hatches and trapdoors, secret passages and lofts, all of it ensconced in shiplap, cozy like the cabin of a yacht made of teak, like a fort. Kids went bananas when they saw these hideaways. It was as though Atre’s life itself was an act of fort building, of cool curation. He was a patron of the local arts. He was a huge Wes Anderson fan. At one time he had a Wes Anderson mood board. Like an Anderson protagonist, he had a restless energy that demanded he always be building something, pursuing some new project. Buying homes and renovating them and flipping them. Converting a van into a surf-safari camper. Learning to play guitar on acoustic instruments handmade by a local luthier. Foraging for edible mushrooms in the redwood forests and then developing recipes around them. He knew wines, California wines, obscure coastal range pinot noirs, and paired them well. He experimented with growing the best weed he could, in small amounts, in his garden, or in a small grow room he fashioned out of a closet, not to sell but to share with his circle of attractive and successful and interesting and unconventional friends, all living their best lives with blue Pacific views in the fizzy coastal air under the golden light of the California sun.

Recently, though, Atre had decided to make a change. Conjuring all his powers for one last big swing, he’d undertaken a major new project. He’d founded a weed company.

In the paperwork it was called Interstitial Systems, but its d/b/a was Cruz Science, one of the hundreds of cannabis start-ups launched in the state between 2017 and 2018 to exploit the opportunities presented by Proposition 64, passed by California voters on November 8, 2016, when weed in the nation’s richest and most populous state was legalized for recreational use, sale, distribution, production, and cultivation. They were calling it the dawn of a new industry. They were calling it an unprecedented opportunity, the beginning of the end of prohibition, and Tushar Atre and his late-stage-capitalist cohort, trained in the most competitiveand fortune-making business environment the world has ever known — Silicon Valley — were coming for cannabis. Silicon Valley interests had, after all, largely bankrolled the later phases of the cannabis legalization effort in California. Sean Parker, the Napster guy, the early-Facebook-investor guy, was the campaign’s biggest donor. Tech entrepreneurs eyeing cannabis resembled the ship captains of the age of exploration. Cannabis, to them, was a resource-rich land inhabited by primitives. If they could position themselves among the first movers, they could come in and conquer and build themselves an empire.

Befitting his Silicon Valley background, Atre had entered what might be considered cannabis’s high-tech sector, which also happened to be its hardest-core sector: not farming, not retail, but so-called manufacturing. That is, using chemistry to transform raw biomass — pot plant material — into the oils, waxes, butters, crystals, and cakes that contain THC in its purest, most concentrated form, and that serve as the base ingredients in today’s innumerable cannabis products, including vape pens, gum-mies, cookies, beverages, and even skin creams. The process, called extraction, is borrowed partly from food science and partly from petroleum refining and partly from the fluid mechanics of HVAC engineering. It’s also the descendant of the ancient craft of hashish preparation. In the decades before legalization, outlaw engineers had pioneered the techniques of extraction in secrecy. Sometimes they blew themselves to pieces or set themselves aflame or got themselves arrested on felony narcotics-production charges, for the process of decocting the highest-quality elixirs required the use of highly flammable hydrocarbons and thus was more dangerous even than the cooking of meth — and just as illicit.

Tushar Atre had big ambitions. He didn’t just want to take this outlawry into the light. He wanted his company to extract oil from a thousand pounds of biomass per day, which would have made Cruz Science one of the largest cannabis oil manufacturers in California and thus the world. He’d promised as much to his investors, a venture capital outfit specializing in cannabis start-ups, which had injected $4.25 million in a Series A round into Cruz Science earlier in 2019. Atre wanted his company to reside at the cutting edge. He dreamed of establishing a hard-science research institute, an R&D lab that could isolate obscure cannabinoids in order to figure out what they did to the brain and then commercialize them. He began to think of his company as a weed biotech firm. He employed an organic chemist and several students at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In spirited brainstorming sessions, he talked about analyzing cannabis tissue cultures, with the aim of understanding the plant’s DNA. He talked about applying to the Drug Enforcement Administration to be included on its short list of approved suppliers of cannabis products for scientific research. At times his staff had to slow down his febrile Silicon Valley mind.

The Cruz Science lab was housed inside a converted automotive repair shop at 211 Fern Street, in an industrial section of Santa Cruz city. Earlier on the morning of October 1, not long after the 911 call, police officers had rushed to the building and searched it. No one was inside. Instead, they found a gleaming state-of-the-art facility, filled to the rafters with chrome and brass and glass contraptions, giant flasks and beakers, stainless steel explosion-proof rooms, pipes and valves and dials and switches. It was steampunk. It might have been designed by Willy Wonka.

A tall muscular man with swept-back silver hair, expensive sunglasses, and an overall Hollywood air arrived in his Tesla at 211 Fern Street just before 9:00 a.m. His name was Alex Rowland. He was supposed to meet Atre at this address at this time, but instead there was a policeman standing sentry outside. What was going on? Rowland, another Bay Area tech entrepreneur in the legal weed business, was Atre’s trading partner, competitor, and coinvestor in a second cannabis venture that Atre was pursu-ing, this one involving the extraction of CBD from tremendous quantities of hemp. Mr. Atre was missing, the cop finally divulged. The sheriff’s office was investigating. That’s all he was at liberty to say. Rowland’s heart went into his throat. Robberies were a rite of passage in the weed business, he knew, but this was next level — a dramatic escalation were the words that came to mind. Still, it hadn’t yet occurred to him that he might never see his friend and business partner again.

Investigators had been busy in the hours after Atre’s kidnapping. Each of the four people who’d been sleeping inside the house on Pleasure Point Drive that night gave lengthy statements to police. The houseguests were all on the Cruz Science payroll. This was another of Atre’s quirks. First at AtreNet, now at Cruz Science, he had a tendency to hire young people, or those without familial attachments, and put them up at his houses, striving to nurture a convivial, communal, collegial work-life dynamic. The houseguests were all engineers or technicians from out of town. One had been on staff for less than a week. Sheriff’s deputies had also started contacting as many other Cruz Science employees and business associates as they could. Soon they’d hear that one associate, a local weed entrepreneur named Latif Horst, who spoke, incongruously, in a slick British accent, had argued with Atre the day before his disappearance. They would learn about a group of Samoan men who operated an auto repair shop and another business of an ambiguous nature out of one of Atre’s Salinas warehouses. They would learn that Atre had not one, not two, but three disgruntled former partners in Cruz Science. All of these people — the former partners, the Samoans, Latif Horst, the houseguests at the time of the home invasion, Alex Rowland, and many Cruz Science employees — would become persons of interest in the case.

Before the sun had risen in Santa Cruz, a sheriff’s deputy had also placed a call to Atre’s latest girlfriend, or possibly now ex-girlfriend, Rachael Lynch. She was, at any rate, not living in Santa Cruz any longer but in western Massachusetts, and was some kind of marijuana entrepreneur herself. Overcome with anguish at the news of his disappearance, Lynch said she’d been having disturbing premonitions about Atre these last few weeks. But then, over the course of the call, she grew hostile, agitated. She said that she, too, was Atre’s business partner. She started yelling at the deputy, saying the cops needed to search all Tushar’s properties, especially the Summit property, immediately. Why were they wasting time? Here’s the address! Go! Now! In a report, the deputies would later note that Lynch was “not cooperative.” She, too, became a person of interest.

When the deputies arrived at Atre’s mountain property, they prepared themselves for a number of possible outcomes: a hostage situation, a rescue mission, a gunfight? The footage from the security cameras on the neighboring houses would show three men walking down the sidewalk of Pleasure Point Drive at 3:00 a.m. wearing gloves, hoodies, baseball caps, and N95-style face masks. One of them carried an assault rifle, later determined to be an AR-15, its strap slung high across his chest. Another carried a black duffel bag. The suspects appeared to have tactical experience. The active theory was that the assailants were career burglars or career thugs or worse. It wasn’t a leap to consider the possibility that Atre was taken out by a professional hit.

The sheriff’s office certainly knew that an enormous marijuana black market — orders of magnitude larger than its aboveboard counterpart — still thrived in California, despite legalization or maybe because of it. Taxes and other costs were so high for legal operators that they often sold their products into the black market just to stay in business. Weed remained federally illegal, which meant that interstate commerce in weed remained federally illegal, a statutory incoherence that spawned certain financial opportunities. The prices for weed and its derivatives in states (and nations) that had yet to legalize were far higher than in California, sometimes by a factor of ten or more. The black market existed expressly to exploit these market inefficiencies. And the cannabis black market, a diverse shadow economy of long standing, still included elements of violent organized crime. Had Tushar Atre ever done business with anyone dangerous? Already the sheriffs had called in for support: A no-fly zone for commercial andprivate aircraft had been established overhead, and a team of militarized SWAT guys in black body armor were on their way.

Leading the approach to the BMW was a young, skinny deputy named Daniel Robbins, whose father had made his name as the county’s top narcotics cop during the years of full-scale weed prohibition. In the 1980s and 1990s, the elder Robbins and other officers created havoc among Santa Cruz’s pot smugglers and dealers and growers, of which there were many, for the region had long been a hub of the weed and illicit drugs trade. Here, in the rugged, remote Santa Cruz Mountains, one of California’s coastal ranges, the counterculture had found one of its first bucolic, dharma-bum milieus. In the mid 1960s, the novelist Ken Kesey kept his famous writing cabin in La Honda, in the northwest part of the range, where he threw his wild hallucinogenic parties and incubated the Merry Pranksters and its house band, the Grateful Dead. With Kesey’s crowd providing the initial demand, some of the earliest commercial marijuana crops in the U.S. were planted in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Nestled in these cloistered reaches, hippie spiritual communes proliferated, along with their secret gardens. Hillbilly hippies with dreadlock beards buried safes in the woods containing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. In the hills, in the hollows, up the draws and the old dirt logging roads, hidden in the chaparral above the fog line, growing and selling weed became a way of life, woven into the community and its economy. It was a dynamic analogous to deep Appalachia, with its moonshiners and revenuers and don’t-tread-on-me pride. To generations of people in the weed business in Santa Cruz, there was no greater enemy than the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office.

Now, crouched behind a Ford Interceptor, Robbins took in the property. In addition to the white BMW there were four other vehicles parked in close proximity: two classic Jeep Wagoneers from the 1990s and two Toyota Tacomas — including one that Atre had reported stolen back in December. Rising around them in all directions were stands of towering redwoods. The cars were situated on a little plateau, almost a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by downward sloping terrain. At the back of the peninsula, near a cluster of redwoods, stood a giant tepee, at least twenty feet high. Elsewhere there was a large yurt and a well-built out-door kitchen framed in redwood timbers. The place had Wes Anderson vibes. You could have glamped there. But it also meant there were many places for assailants to hide.

One by one, Robbins and his team peeled away from their redoubt behind the Interceptor and cleared the pickups and the Wagoneers. They were on the lookout for bodies, cop speak not for corpses but live human beings, armed and dangerous. They carefully approached the BMW. The driver’s side window was partially open. Robbins looked inside. Empty. Along the length of the passenger door, however, he saw what appeared to be blood. A dark reddish splotch, possibly a palm print, stood out like graffiti against the BMW’s gleaming white finish, just above the gas cap. And along the length of the passenger door was a reddish-brown hori-zontal smear.

Robbins noticed something else, something he hadn’t observed on a previous visit to the property a year earlier, when he’d come to investigate the theft of the Tacoma. On the other side of a shallow gully shrouded by large trees was a clearing several football fields in size, like a meadow. But the meadow was planted with a crop, hundreds of plants, it looked like, in swollen October bloom, tall gangly stalks with colas blossoming from their branches. This property was not the site of a state-licensed cannabis cultivation. Atre, it seemed, was growing black market weed on a commercial scale.

Robbins heard a shout from one of his deputies, who directed the others’ attention down a slope about ten yards from the plateau. Amid the underbrush and atop the pine straw duff and in sight of the marijuana, they saw a flash of bright red. Not blood. It was a pair of athletic shorts. And legs with black socks pulled up to the knees, no shoes on the feet. And an olive-colored sweatshirt on the torso of a man lying on his side, his hands bound behind his back with plastic flex-cuffs. There was blood and matter on the duff around his clean-shaven head, which was turned toward the ground so you couldn’t fully see his face, just part of his profile, the crown of his skull almost touching the trunk of a young redwood tree. No need to bring in the paramedics. As Robbins would later say in court, “He was clearly, clearly deceased.”