Who is Ryan Wedding? Olympian turned alleged murderous drug kingpin and top FBI target
The FBI’s newest Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitive was an Olympic snowboarder during another chapter in his life. Now he’s on the run as an alleged drug kingpin and murderer.
Former Canadian Olympian Ryan Wedding was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list, and the agency is offering $10 million to whomever turns him in. Wedding is alleged to have run a transnational drug trafficking ring that shipped hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and Southern California to Canada and other locations in the U.S.
He’s also alleged to have orchestrated and attempted multiple murders.
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He even reportedly got an ex-wife involved in trouble along the way.
Here’s a look at how the former snowboarder became one of the world’s most dangerous criminals.
Childhood
Wedding was born in 1981 in the town of Thunder Bay, Ontario.
It was a town once known for shipping lumber and grain via boats and railroads, but its shipping industry diminished in the ‘70s and ’80s around the time Wedding was born due to Canada’s development of highways that enabled trucking.
The town has since become one of the more crime-ridden towns in the country. From 2012 to 2014, and again from 2016 to 2019, Thunder Bay had the highest per-capita rate of homicide among Canadian cities, according to the nation’s census.
Wedding came from a family of skiers. His father, Rene, an engineer, skied in college. His mother, Karen, had a brother who skied on the Canadian national team. Wedding’s grandparents even ran a small ski hill in the town.
And when Wedding pursued winter sports, he quickly exhibited a trait often necessary for both competitive athletes and relentless criminals.
“He had no fear,” former national champion ski racer Bobby Allison told Rolling Stone writer Jesse Hyde of Wedding in 2009.
“A lot of kids, they say they want to go fast, but they don’t really want to go fast. They hold something back because there’s a little bit of fear there of falling. Ryan had none of that.”
Early athletic career
Around 1991, Wedding’s family relocated from Thunder Bay to the Pacific coast, in Coquitlam, British Columbia, less than an hour away from Vancouver. Coquitlam is a town with lower-than-average crime rates in Canada. However, the town’s biggest crime issue is “people using or dealing drugs” with a rate of 40.85 out of 120, according to Numbeo.
There, Wedding quickly excelled at snowboarding, winning the first race he competed in at age 12. Just three years later, he was part of the Canadian national snowboarding team at age 15 and began to regularly travel the world for competitions. Rene Wedding paid all the expenses for Ryan’s participation on the team, spending around $40,000, according to Rolling Stone.
The young snowboarder reportedly “obsessed” over perfecting his snowboarding technique and also employed his dad’s engineering skills to try modifications to his boots and snowboards for an advantage.
The Olympics
After missing out on the 1998 Winter Olympics, Wedding qualified for his first and only Olympic Games in 2002 in Salt Lake City.
But Wedding’s natural talent, fearlessness and obsession weren’t enough to get him to the podium.
In his only event, the men’s parallel giant slalom, Wedding finished in 24th place. Switzerland’s Philipp Schoch won gold, Sweden’s Richard Rikardsson won silver and Chris Klug of the U.S. took bronze.
With a bronze medal, Klug launched his own foundation dedicated “to promoting lifesaving organ and tissue donation and improving the quality of life for those touched by donation.”
With no medal in hand, Wedding went down a very different path after Salt Lake City.
Early criminal activity
After the Olympics, Wedding enrolled at Simon and Frasier University in Vancouver.
In the early 2000s, Vancouver was ascending as one of the world’s illegal marijuana capitals. The drug was not legalized but was also a low priority for law enforcement, resulting in an influx of “grey area” cannabis stores, official businesses that sold marijuana illegally under the guise of another purpose.
Gang activity related to the drug reportedly rose in the city from 2002-09. Gangs known as the “Red Scorpions,” the “Independent Soldiers” and the “Wolfpack Alliance” emerged, according to multiple reports, and dealing marijuana was a suspected top activity and form of income for the gangs.
Wedding was first linked to criminal activity in 2006. He and another competitive snowboarder were named in a search warrant for a house in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, that was investigated for growing large quantities of marijuana, according to The Vancouver Sun.
Police seized 6,800 marijuana plants from that house, but no one was charged.
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First prison sentence and mysterious marriage
Wedding was arrested for the first time in 2009 in the U.S. after traveling with two friends from Vancouver to California to allegedly buy 24 kilograms of Colombian cocaine.
The FBI determined Wedding was working for a drug lord in Vancouver at the time.
That year, the city had devolved into a gang war with multiple shootings related to gang violence, according to multiple reports. The alleged gangs involved included the Independent Soldiers, the Sanghera Crime Family, the Buttar Crime Family, the United Nations Gang, the Red Scorpions and the Vancouver chapters of the Hells Angels, The Vancouver Sun reported.
That year, police responded to reports of more than 30 shootings.
“Lets not kid ourselves. There’s a gang war and it’s brutal,” Jim Chu, Vancouver’s police chief at the time, told CBC.
When Wedding was tried, he claimed he was volunteering for several cancer agencies, was doing real estate investing and was training for the 2010 Olympics. But the Canadian Snowboard Federation said he had not competed in years, according to The Vancouver Sun.
Wedding served a four-year jail sentence after agreeing to forfeit more than $121,000 seized during an airport sting and agreeing to drop an appeal of his conviction.
Just over a year into his sentence, Wedding had a wedding of his own behind bars. He got married to an Iranian-born businesswoman from British Columbia at Reeves County Detention Center in West Texas, according to CBC.
The woman, who has not been named, said Wedding insisted he was convicted because he was “at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I don’t want to be associated with these people,” she said, according to CBC.
The woman has since been named in multiple money laundering and kidnapping investigations. While she has denied any involvement in criminal activity, her name has surfaced in an alleged international money laundering scheme tied to Mexican drug cartels.
Wedding and the woman are no longer together. She says they haven’t spoken in recent years and that she has since remarried, per CBC.
Becoming a kingpin
If wasn’t long after Wedding was released from prison before authorities cracked down on him again.
In 2015, he was charged with new drug offenses in Nova Scotia. That time, police never caught him. He has been on the run as a fugitive ever since.
U.S. investigators believe Wedding has been protected by the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico and resumed trafficking soon after he was released from prison. Federal authorities first issued an arrest warrant for Wedding in September 2024, but he has still not been apprehended.
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Wedding is believed to also go by the aliases “El Jefe,” “Giant,” “Public Enemy,” “James Conrad King” and “Jesse King” and is estimated to have transported over $1 billion in cocaine.
Wedding and alleged accomplice Andrew Clark, who was apprehended in October and extradited last week, are accused of coordinating the murder of an Ontario family “in retaliation for a stolen drug shipment that passed through Southern California.”
The FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police allege Wedding and Clark coordinated a November 2023 double homicide in Ontario involving an innocent couple in a mistaken-identity killing, according to the FBI.
Wedding and Clark are also accused of coordinating the murder of another person in May over a drug debt.
FBI Los Angeles chief Akil Davis said at a news conference Thursday that Wedding’s alleged trafficking ring “routinely shipped hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, through Mexico and Southern California, to Canada and other locations in the United States, and for orchestrating multiple murders and an attempted murder in furtherance of these drug crimes.
“The alleged murders of his competitors make Wedding a very dangerous man, and his addition to the list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, coupled with a major reward offer by the State Department, will make the public our partner so that we can catch up with him before he puts anyone else in danger,” Davis added.
Investigators believe Wedding is living in Mexico but have not ruled out him being in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica or elsewhere.
The murder and criminal enterprise charges against Wedding carry a mandatory minimum penalty of life in a federal prison.