Bookshop Santa Cruz’s excellent author programming brings another literal bang-banger with investigative journalist Scott Eden, and his latest, A Killing in Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed.
Deep in the mountains of Santa Cruz, there is, and always has been, gigantic movers and dubious shakers who worked inside the world of the marijuana industry. The shadowy realm of gangs, cartels, mafia, and Silicon Valley investors who were looking for their next windfall of cash often operated on the off-road acres of Boulder Creek, and tilled the rich, soiled peak of the Summit.
These growers, laborers, harvesters, and trimmigrants were skirting the law, and maintaining their clandestine and covert activities, until one of them was brutally kidnapped and murdered. He was a high-rolling Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Tushar Atre.
Author Scott Eden was working for ESPN Magazine when his editor got a job at Ink Magazine, a business publication that writes about entrepreneurs. While scouring through crime stories, the Tushar Atre case was uncovered and handed off to Eden.
“I just started making phone calls and kind of knew instantly that it was a much bigger story than just a murder case,” says Eden from his home on the East Coast. “It opened up this door into the cannabis business and the transition from the medical marijuana era to recreational legalization and just the chaos that it created.”
The way Eden lays out the book, each chapter introduces yet another colorful character that could have easily been the one who murdered Atre. Making the read like a cannabis crime thriller and like a stoned Agatha Christie mystery. It is not until the final pages that you know, for sure, who committed the ghastly transgression. The book is a page turner, and if you are familiar with the mountains of Santa Cruz, it becomes a grizzly roadmap, leading to the inevitable murder of Atre.
Atre comes across as a bipolar wannabe billionaire whose extremes are sky-high and depressingly low. But the bubbling enthusiasm that entrepreneur Tushar Atre brings to relationships and intense interest in the marijuana game is evident. Unfortunately, Atre’s Achilles heel is that he treats everyone, eventually, like trash. He is a monster who is not at all in control of his emotional regulation. A regular Weedzilla.
Eden found Atre a sympathetic character. “Yes, I did. In a way, he was like a typical, prototypical Silicon Valley product. A guy who has spent his career in that ethos of disruption. A kind of tyrannical boss that Silicon Valley is famous for. Someone with an aggressive profit motive, and who didn’t treat his employees well at all. But on the other hand, he was also coming from the straight world. Sure, there is an edginess to Silicon Valley. He had that in him too. But he was also a stranger in a strange land when he was getting into weed. He has two sides to his ambitions. A kind of bright side and a dark side. And I think that is typical of where we are, especially in that part of the world in Silicon Valley,” says Eden.
In A Killing in Cannabis, some of the characters made millions, some made billions and some are not going to be around for the sequel. Through the 400-page non-fiction novel, Eden doesn’t make moral judgements; he lets the characters breathe and find root. “I begrudge no one of anything. It’s the American way. There is an anti-capitalist notion to the old-style growers, who were kind of snubbing their nose at the straight world by getting into this business. But profit motive takes over even there, I think,” Eden says.
It’s impossible to say what drives anyone’s ambitions. It’s easy to make educated guesses from the sidelines, but when all is said and done, it’s individual choices that determine futures. Without giving anything away, for Atre, his demise was living a very Santa Cruz lifestyle of going with the flow. But ultimately not understanding that the undertow will drag even the best, and richest, swimmers to the murky bottom.
Eden Scott will be appearing on Wednesday February 11, at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz. The forum will be hosted by one of the previous editors of Good Times, Steve Palopoli. Admission is free.
