Scott Eden

Killing in Cannabis

A murder at the nexus of Silicon Valley, California surf culture, and the cannabis gold rush reveals the dark side of the legal weed business in this revelatory and page-turning work of investigative journalism. The grisly abduction and murder of a tech entrepreneur at his multimillion-dollar Santa Cruz home sets off a police investigation for the killers and their motive, and the “persons of interest” list balloons even before the body is found. Santa Cruz is one of the country’s surf meccas and a favored getaway of the Silicon Valley elite, nestled in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Illegal marijuana has been cultivated for decades here, one of the most significant regions in the country for the crop. It’s where Ken Kesey threw his wild parties and where Alfred Hitchcock spent his later, haunted years. And it’s where Tushar Atre, Silicon Valley founder and serial entrepreneur, was brutally murdered. Charismatic, ambitious, arrogant, and rich, Atre was the leader among a clutch of tech execs with a voracious appetite for work and danger, who strove to maximize their personal and professional potential through exhilarating, adrenaline-charged pursuits, riding waves at dawn and going on to work fourteen-hour days. Atre had a vision of “disrupting” the newly legal cannabis business through a series of start-ups, and his brash Silicon Valley approach made him contemptuous of the rules. His plan was to fund the legal start-ups by laundering proceeds from the massive black-market cannabis industry. This risky and illegal pursuit would put him in business with an array of colorful and dangerous characters, many of whom, it turns out, had compelling reason to want him dead. Journalist Scott Eden’s fearless, page-turning investigation keeps pace with—and at times outstrips—the expansive eight-month police investigation into the murder, the largest in decades for the Santa Cruz sheriff’s department, and leads to a shocking, unexpected conclusion. Along the way, Eden presents a panoramic and unprecedented exposé of the legal weed world and its entangled, symbiotic relationship to its vast, deadly, illegal counterpart.