Once a Team Canada Olympic snowboarder, Ryan James Wedding has spent more than 10 years on the run from authorities, while allegedly leading a murderous, transnational drug-smuggling empire.
Listed as one of the FBI’s ten most-wanted fugitives since March, the U.S. State Department is offering a $10-million US reward for information leading to his arrest.
So, how has Wedding, 43, evaded capture for so long?
CBC News has spoken with current and former investigators and reviewed court files and public statements by authorities. What emerges is a multi-faceted strategy involving technology, money and high-level connections that appears to have allowed Wedding to consistently remain one step ahead of U.S. and Canadian authorities.
Born into a skiing family in Thunder Bay, Ont., Wedding later moved to Coquitlam, B.C., and appeared destined for a promising career in snowboarding, reaching the 2002 Olympic Games in Utah.
But he soon embarked on a much different career path.
Arrested in a sting operation after he flew to California to buy cocaine in June 2008, Wedding spent more than three years in U.S. prisons.
Sometime after his release, he moved to Montreal, where he was charged by the RCMP in April 2015 as part of a large-scale operation targeting cocaine imports to Canada.
On the run since then, authorities say he relocated to Mexico and now sends mass shipments of fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine across North America.
Wedding’s biggest asset may be his connections to Mexico’s merciless drug cartels, which the U.S. and Canada consider terrorist organizations.
According to the FBI, Wedding may be living under the protection of the notorious Sinaloa cartel, once led by drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
“Wedding, who is wealthy, is dangerous and has connections in very high places,” said Akil Davis, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.
The Sinaloa cartel dominates large swaths of northern and southern Mexico, and has a presence in almost every other part of the country, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
However, the group has been beset by deadly infighting over the past year, with the cartel split into two main, warring factions: Los Chapitos and La Mayiza.
The RCMP declined to say whether Wedding is aligned with either branch.
“We have a pretty strong sense of his linkages within transnational organized crime,” said the RCMP’s director general of international special services, Liam Price. “I wouldn’t want to talk publicly about it, lest it show what we know, and how we know it.”
Wedding may also benefit from ties with the Sinaloa cartel’s main competitor, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known by its Spanish initials, CJNG.
Fellow Canadian Andrew Clark — described by U.S. prosecutors as Wedding’s second-in-command — was arrested last year in Mexico’s Jalisco state. Mexican authorities said Clark acted as a liaison, working with both CJNG and the Sinaloa cartel.
Mexican cartels have been known to use cash and the threat of violence to control government officials. El Chapo’s personal aide even claimed the ex-kingpin once bribed Mexico’s then-president Enrique Peña Nieto to call off a manhunt.
Wedding may be using the same playbook.
“Any time that we’ve gotten close, he can rely on those people watching out for him, to alert him in advance,” F. Cartwright Weiland, a senior U.S. State Department official told CBC News.
Weiland, who leads the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, recently called on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to personally intervene and ensure Wedding’s arrest.
It’s unclear whether authorities have learned of Wedding’s exact whereabouts since he was spotted by the FBI in Mexico City in 2024.
“We’re getting closer,” Weiland said. “But I think the story thus far has been one in which those two facets of society — the cartels and government officials — are working in tandem, to allow for him to evade capture.”
Prosecutors have also acknowledged he could be almost anywhere beyond Mexico.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, investigators “have not ruled out his presence in the U.S., Canada, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, or elsewhere.”
What’s more, the Mounties have said Wedding’s network shipped drugs not only across North America, but “overseas” as well, raising the prospect he may have allies even farther afield.
Indeed, court filings by U.S. prosecutors suggest one of Wedding’s co-defendants, fellow Canadian Gurpreet Singh, has connections in Dubai, including to members of the Kinahan gang.
A notorious drug cartel founded by Irishman Christy Kinahan in the 1990s, U.S. prosecutors describe it as “a well-known, violent organized crime group operating throughout the world.”
Witnesses would be forgiven for thinking twice before speaking to authorities.
Prosecutors have described Wedding’s network as hellbent on eliminating enemies would-be informants — even targeting the families of perceived rivals.
Indeed, the Toronto Star reported that U.S. prosecutors’ key witness — a Canadian-Colombian longtime Wedding associate — was gunned down in broad daylight in Medellín, Colombia, on Jan. 31.
Likewise, an indictment unsealed last year in California outlines how Wedding allegedly ordered co-defendant Nahim Jorge Bonilla to repay a cocaine debt, or else his mother would be killed.
Investigators have publicly linked the network to four murders in Ontario, including the mistaken-identity shootings of a couple visiting from India. Authorities have also suggested the group ordered multiple other killings.
“All of these victims were intentionally shot execution-style, so that their loved ones could see them murdered,” former U.S. attorney Martin Estrada said.
According to court documents, Wedding’s top lieutenant, Clark, provided a Toronto-based hitman last year with a motley list of targets, including a Niagara Falls, Ont., drug trafficker, “a realtor in Van,” “some Arabs” and “‘a Mexi’ who owned a restaurant and his wife.”
What’s more, prosecutors warned Wedding likely still has access to a “network of hitmen” while on the run.
A federal grand jury indictment unsealed in Los Angeles last year describes the inner workings of a sprawling criminal operation involving Wedding, Clark and 14 other co-defendants, including drug smugglers and the alleged contract killer known as “Mr. Perfect.”
Estrada said the network would source their product from “cocaine kitchens” in Colombia, then move the drugs to Southern California stash houses, via Mexico. Big rig drivers would then deliver the cocaine — an estimated 60 tonnes a year — to U.S. and Canadian cities.
Wedding “tried to insulate himself from a lot of this criminal activity,” Estrada said at a news conference last year. “It took a great deal of investigative effort to actually trace all of these acts to him personally.”
If Wedding is ever arrested, he faces eight felony charges in California, including murder, leading a continuing criminal enterprise and conspiracy to export cocaine.
Alleged drug kingpin Ryan Wedding believed to be in Mexico, FBI says
Wedding’s network, said to have made $1 billion US a year, allegedly hides its money by using multiple cryptocurrency wallets, making it harder to follow.
While the U.S. Attorney’s Office said last fall that investigators had seized cocaine with a street value of roughly $25 million US, plus $255,400 US in cash, those amounts may only be a tiny fraction of the profits Wedding and his associates were pocketing.
“Just on one day, we were able to see one of those crypto wallets and it contained $3 million [US],” Estrada said. “And that’s just one of the wallets.”
He says investigators established that the Wedding organization laundered $250 million US through cryptocurrency between April and September 2024 alone.
Of that amount, authorities only managed to seize about $3.2 million.
Prior to his first arrest in 2008, Wedding had used the “cultural” money-laundering network of an Iranian-Canadian co-defendant to move $100,000 for a cocaine purchase, according to evidence at trial.
“Obviously,” Wedding said of the drug money on an FBI recording, “I didn’t put it in my f-cking suitcase.”
The U.S. indictment unsealed last October lists no fewer than 18 aliases for the six-foot, three-inch Wedding, including Giant, Grande, Buddy, El Jefe (“The Boss”), El Toro (“The Bull”), James Conrad King and Jesse King.
Authorities have not said how they became aware of some of the aliases. But court records suggest Wedding and his associates all used aliases while communicating on the encrypted messaging app Threema.
According to the indictment, Clark’s listed aliases include “The Dictator” and “El Niño Problemático” (“The Problem Child.”)
Wedding also went by “Public Enemy” or simply “PE.”
“‘Public Enemy’ suggests that… he loves the fact that he’s been able to get away with his crimes,”‘ Weiland, of the U.S. State Department, said.
Encrypted messaging has for years been a hallmark of Wedding’s alleged criminal operations.
A decade ago, RCMP found Wedding’s co-accused — in the case targeting cocaine imports to Canada — were strictly communicating face to face, or via encrypted BlackBerry chats.
They used an off-shore server beyond the reach of police, according to court documents.
Wedding and his associates are now said to prefer Threema. The Switzerland-based app boasts its “users can communicate freely without worrying about their privacy or security.”
So the FBI instead struck a deal with a longtime drug trafficker — who’d previously worked with Wedding — to help infiltrate their Threema communications.
Prosecutors underlined in a court filing earlier this year how such apps remain a simple and crucial tool to the network.
“Wedding needs no more than access to encrypted communications to continue to accomplish these ends,” assistant U.S. attorneys Maria Jhai and Lyndsi Allsop wrote.
Ryan Wedding’s path from Olympian to most-wanted fugitive
When FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brett Kalina arrested Wedding outside a Hampton Inn in San Diego in 2008, he said the Canadian didn’t act kind and innocent as suspects usually do.
“Wedding was the opposite,” Kalina recounted in an interview, and showed overwhelming confidence in himself.
“More than any person that I’ve ever dealt with after arresting, he wanted to assert his dominance over everybody around him.”
Matthew Allen, special agent in charge of the DEA’s L.A. division, described the Wedding as “unremitting, callous and greed-driven.”
Kalina said Wedding made deep underworld connections while behind bars in the U.S.
But when it came time for him to address the judge in May 2010 after his drug conviction, a trial transcript shows Wedding pleaded for a lenient sentence and a “second chance.”
“Your Honour,” Wedding said, “what I did was completely out of character for me, and it is a personal mission of mine to rebuild my reputation.”
The judge handed him a four-year sentence — a shorter term than he had previously considered. Even the prosecutor assured him, “Mr. Wedding’s not a kingpin… he is a person who was trying to break into the drug trade, and it didn’t work out.”
Since the FBI announced last fall it was hunting Wedding, the agency released three pictures of the fugitive in which he sports very different looks.
The first, taken from a 2013 Canadian driver’s licence, shows him with a slimmer build and long, curly hair — seemingly balding on top.
In the two more recent pictures — both taken somewhere, sometime in 2024 — the long hair has been cut short, while Wedding appears bulkier.
“It’s possible for Wedding’s weight to have fluctuated or him to have altered his appearance a little bit, which is normal in fugitive investigations,” said Davis, of the FBI’s L.A. office
“Our chances of catching him with the public support remain very high.”
CBC News senior reporter Thomas Daigle has extensively covered the search for Ryan Wedding. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
