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.
When Reed Hastings and 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 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.
He’d grown up in affluent Westchester 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.
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.
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.
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.
Major, now globally famous strains of marijuana–Haze, Blue Dream–were, at least according to legend, first bred by experimental growers on the south-facing slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains above 800 feet, where the marine-layer fogs halt their ascent and ideal growing conditions exist.
It is the story of a battle being waged not just between the legal industry and an incumbent black market, but also between the coming corporate behemoths and the independent underground business people who have defined the industry since the beginning.
Housed in a refurbished warehouse at 211 Fern Street, on the north side of Santa Cruz, the lab was crammed with expensive equipment, the purpose of which was to transform raw cannabis biomass–harvested marijuana flowers and leaves–into the THC-laden oils, resins, waxes, and cakes that are the main ingredients in today’s innumerable marijuana products, including vapes and edibles and beverages and even skin creams. The four contractors were staying in guest suites, semi-separate from the main home, that Atre had built out on the 3034 property.
The extraction and distillation processes, borrowed from the food sciences, had in recent years been advanced by a cadre of THC boffins interested in exploring the unique and seemingly depthless nuances of the cannabis plant.
He had dreams of launching a startup of his own, based on a design he’d developed for a new kind of miniature, subsea nuclear reactor.
He heard someone shout, “Open the safe!” He heard someone shout, “Get on your stomach!” and “Where is it?” and “Where are they?” He heard a male voice like Atre’s say, “How can we make things right?” He heard the same voice shrieking in terror or pain or both.
Later that morning, as cops milled up and down the street, a crowd of worried neighbors came and went from the Point Market, a small food store and café across the road from Atre’s house, speculating about what had happened to him.
At some point after interviewing the houseguests, sheriff’s deputies had made their way to 211 Fern Street, searched the lab, and failed to find Atre or anyone else.
Had Atre done business with anyone dangerous? Years before, he had told more than one of his employees, he’d worked in what he called a “trap lab,” an illegal extraction facility, which, he claimed, occupied a shipping container in some remote California place.
Was this black-market weed? And, if so, why? Why would he put his legit startup at risk by growing illegally? As the day wore on, the houseguests became increasingly agitated, their fears maturing as the hours passed into something closer to panic.
The men who had invaded his posh home in the middle of the night had taken Atre to his secret spot in the forest and murdered him amid his marijuana.
In November 1996, when the state’s residents passed Prop 215, making medical marijuana legal, they had ushered in what came to be known as the 215 era in California cannabis, organized around the concept of the medical collective.
But, soon enough, this lightly regulated market grew and mutated and metastasized.
No one was paying fucking taxes! We were just making money.” Men from Brooklyn would fly in on private jets, do deals in motel rooms, and fly out the next morning with hundreds or even thousands of pounds of bags in the hold, worth $1 million, $2 million, $4 million on the streets of New York City.
This was the situation when, in 2016, California voted yes to Proposition 64, making the state the fifth in the union to legalize recreational marijuana.
The result was an oversupply of such magnitude that by 2018 it had crashed cannabis prices not just in California but throughout the U.S.
And finally, some of the old underground growers and drug dealers decided just to remain drug dealers.
He’d come to Santa Cruz to study geology at the university and started his career in the mining industry, eventually consulting for a copper extractor in Arizona, but the lure of the ocean and the opportunities presented by the coming legal herb industry were impossible to resist.
This had given rise, he said, to an absurd, almost satirical state of affairs in which cannabis businesses were taxed on their taxes, and forced to pay fees levied on the very act of paying still other fees.
A recent study reported that the state’s black market sold an estimated $8.7 billion in weed in 2019, likely a gross underestimate but still triple the sales of the legal industry.
“California is the biggest cannabis economy in the world, and the legal market needs to win,” LoForti said.
Despite a few clever workarounds and a handful of community banks that have stepped into the void, the cannabis business, just like in the old days, is largely conducted in cash–stacks of bills stashed in safes, armored trucks ferrying funds.
The founders soon realize that, with all the taxes, fees, hidden costs, and other frictions, the business is more challenging than they’d realized.
“Even though I fought for legalization, I’m forced to be illegal.” According to the founder of a cannabis manufacturing startup very similar to Cruz Science, who got into the business partly because he believed strongly in ending the war on drugs, “almost every single legal operator has to have some sort of illicit demand network for their product, or there’s simply no way to make a living.” He laughed bitterly, then stopped.
According to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times, an estimated 220 unlicensed dispensaries–outlets that, to the casual eye, were indistinguishable from their legal counterparts–did business in the county in 2019.
Earlier that same day, a much smaller group had made its way to a spot in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains called the Land of Medicine Buddha, a peaceful place with a golden statue of the sage sitting inside a varicolored shrine.
Also in the group at the Medicine Buddha that morning, standing apart and silently observing the ceremony, was a striking young woman.
After college, she’d set out in 2012 for the hippie weed plantations of the Emerald Triangle as a trimmigrant, one of the seasonal migrant workers who harvest the cannabis crop and prepare it for sale, trimming the flowers from the plants.
As the startup took shape, she contributed “funding, contacts, intellectual property, and cannabis business experience” to the startup, “including investment of over $300,000,” according to a lawsuit she filed against the Atre estate after the murder.
According to Emerlye, this was part of her and Atre’s grand plan–to prepare for federal legalization by creating a bicoastal cannabis operation.
THE SANTA CRUZ COUNTY Sheriff’s Office occupies a four-story building right off the Pacific Coast Highway, down the street from the Ding Pro surfboard repair shop, and around the corner from a supplier of equipment for the cultivation of hydroponic marijuana.
Eventually, it would evolve into the most comprehensive murder investigation, as measured by manhours, in Santa Cruz County in 20 years.
Atre “went out of his way to start fights with people.” He was a “hot head” who “left a trail of people who are pissed off with him.” Atre, in other words, had made enemies.
According to multiple people familiar with the business at the time, Atre and his partner eventually constructed and operated a lab inside a shipping container inside a warehouse Atre had bought near the town of Castroville, in Monterey County.
And so here was another surreal byproduct of the transition from prohibition to legalization: entrepreneurs feeling forced to skirt the law in preparation for operating in accordance with the law.
Meanwhile, Atre bought the structure at 211 Fern Street, which he and his partner planned to turn into the company’s flagship licensed lab.
It was, everyone realized, classic Silicon Valley, a place where the entrepreneur, the job-creating maverick, is held in exaltation, and where Atre’s behavior was standard operating procedure.
“We hope you don’t make these same mistakes with the next people you work with,” someone said, according to a person who was there.
By early 2019, Atre, a master pitchman, had persuaded an Ohio VC fund called OWC Ventures to invest a sum eventually amounting to $4.25 million in Interstitial Systems, valuing the startup at $10 million.
In a lawsuit filed by OWC after the murder–the fund is seeking control of the startup and its assets–OWC alleges that Atre engaged in “black-market activities” when he “grew and cultivated marijuana and cannabis, under the guise of a research license, that he and others attempted to sell on the open market.” Whatever the case, Atre expressed to multiple people in the weeks leading up to his murder that he’d undertaken to plant and harvest a cannabis crop at the Summit as a way to win back Emerlye’s heart.
In increasing desperation, Atre’s friends staked larger and larger sums in reward money for information leading to a conviction–$25,000, $150,000, and then $200,000.
All of the accused shared a part of their upbringing in Lancaster, a dusty working-class exurb of Los Angeles about an hour’s drive northeast of downtown, basically in the Mojave.
Instead, according to the sheriff’s office, it had been some kind of inside job: Two of the accused had worked for Atre at the cannabis startup: Kaleb Charters, the 19-year-old, and Lindsay, 22, the brother-in-law.
Kaleb Charters and his siblings had grown up in a village in Russia and then in a village in El Salvador with their parents, who were fundamentalist evangelical Christian missionaries.
Then one day, in a seemingly insignificant moment that would reverberate catastrophically, Charters and Lindsay misplaced a key to one of Atre’s trucks, enraging their boss, who refused to pay them their salary.
After the lost-key incident, Charters and Lindsay disappeared for a few days, according to co-workers, and then returned to Fern Street to confront Atre.
But the prosecution has alleged, on the basis of the series of events presented in its case, that the plot was likely hatched in North Las Vegas–a place almost identical to Lancaster in its beige stucco sprawl of subdivisions and strip malls laid out like circuitry on the flat desert plain.
One could imagine Charters and Lindsay thinking that here finally was a great opportunity–a way, on the ground level, into an exciting and explosively growing new industry in which, just maybe, they could rise and thrive.
Three times they drove the more than 300 miles back and forth to Humboldt County in a box truck, ferrying almost 900 seedlings from the Emerald Triangle to the Summit property.
As Charters and Lindsay had asked one former co-worker, why not maybe start a legal weed delivery business in Sin City? But things apparently did not go as planned.
Go to the rich man’s house late at night–they knew the simple four-digit passcode, had overheard Atre saying it one time to another employee–and take some of the wads of cash he seemed to have always around, had to have always around.
How could anyone grow angry enough at a boss–no matter how allegedly tyrannical–in the space of just a few weeks to carry out such a sinister act? It is as though something more profound is required to explain the violent extinguishing of such an extraordinary life.
There will possibly come a time when one or more of the four pleads guilty and testifies against the others, but as of presstime, all four have pleaded not guilty.
If there’s one thing connecting all the main characters in this drama, it’s that each of them–founder, partner, investor, worker, lover–was chasing, in their own way, the same dream.
The birth of a legal industry; a thrilling product of historic import, now at last a commodity to be bought and sold on the lighted marketplace–these are the conditions that foment ambition.
Kaleb Charters, at the wheel of the Camry, dropped the other three off at one end of Pleasure Point Drive at about 2:45 a.m., and then headed to the Summit property, a 20-minute drive away, where he would await his partners.
It would be, they believed, according to the defense, an almost victimless heist; they did not believe, for whatever reason, that Atre would be at home.
Somehow he was able to spit out the sock and get out of the house and onto the street, sprinting now, in all likelihood screaming, a banshee, to wake up neighbors, but apparently no one in the other houses could hear him above the surf’s roar, and one of the men–according to the police and prosecutors, Lindsay the football star–blazed down the street and tackled Atre headlong and allegedly stabbed him in the side–repeatedly.
Then there was the crack of gunfire, and Tushar Atre, his mountaintop garden just on the other side of these mighty evergreens that groan and sigh with the wind from the sea, fell to the ground of his final ambition.