He went from speeding down the snow to distributing it. As an athlete, he achieved glory. As a criminal, he ran into the FBI. The former Canadian Olympic athlete Ryan James Wedding He was arrested for allegedly committing several drug trafficking and murder crimes.
“This individual, his organization and the Sinaloa Cartel flooded the streets of North America with narcotics“They murdered too many young people and corrupted too many citizens,” said Kash Patel, the director of the FBI. “That ends today,” he added, according to the publication. Reuters.
Wedding competed in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake (Utah, USA). But it was not successful. The day he competed representing Canada, the track was icy, he misjudged the turns and, in the end, he didn’t make it onto the podium.
After this Olympic failure, he took a radical turn in his life, according to reports The Guardian. The former athlete worked as a nightclub bouncer and continued to build his body in the gym.
Murder charges
He snowboarder led a “notorious” drug trafficking network which, according to US authorities, raked in $1 billion in cocaine sales a year. Continuing along this criminal line, Wedding ordered the deaths of numerous people that got in the way of his plot.
And for this reason, FBI agents arrested him last Friday. The Boss, The Giant o The Public Enemy, as he was known in drug circles, remained hidden for more than a decade in Mexico.
However, Its beginnings were of the most modestaway from flashy cars, drugs and international persecutions. His grandparents owned a modest ski resort. It was there that he forged himself as a master of snowboarding.
In the center of the image, FBI Director Kash Patel announces Wedding’s arrest during a press conference in Ontario, California.
The first conviction came in 2006, when he was sentenced to four years in prison for his link to a cocaine distribution network. He tried to buy drugs from a United States Government agent.
This imprisonment prevented him from participating in a competition local in Vancouver, when it hosted the Winter Olympics in 2010.
Investigators say that this time Wedding spent in prison helped him forge key relationships with drug traffickers, thus expanding his network of contacts. In the future, having woven this network of drug links gave results.
exposed network
Everything blew up when three months ago killed Jonathan Acebedo-Garcíaa Canadian citizen murdered in Medellín. According to publication CBC NewsAcebedo-García established a friendship with Wedding behind bars in a Texas prison.
Once the Canadian was released from prison, he began working for Wedding. Later, Acebedo-García became an FBI informant. For the Olympian, this would later be a rata.
Wedding created a website, called The Dirty Newz, in order to find the location of the snitch. He posted an image of Acebedo-García with the following text: “This guy, single-handedly, dismantled one of the most powerful underworld networks this world has ever seen. It is very likely that they will never find it again“. And so it was.
Poster released by the FBI of Ryan Wedding.
Three months after this publication, Acebedo-García’s body was found. He had been living in the exclusive neighborhood of El Poblado for a year. While eating at a well-known restaurant chain, a man armed entered the establishment and shot up to five times in the back of the head. The shooter then fled on a motorcycle.
It is believed that the Olympian He sent a pearl necklace to the gunman and distributed the photo of the corpse to his associates as a warning for disloyalty.
Bought lawyer
The murder of Acebedo-García, described as “cheeky” for crudeness and because it was committed in broad daylight, it was the first in a long list of commissions.
In 2023, several armed men attacked a home in Ontario, Canada. They were chasing some criminals who had stolen a shipment of drugs. They murdered three people, including a girl who was shot 13 times.
A year later, another young man was murdered in front of his house in what is assumed to have been by a reckoning related to drugs.
On December 5, the Ontario Bar Association suspended the license of a lawyer who, according to the FBI, advised Wedding to murder a key witness.
The Canadian Escobar
For ten years, Wedding remained hidden in Mexico. He managed to avoid international authorities thanks to the protection provided by the Sinaloa Cartel.
In November, the reward for any information that shed light on Wedding’s whereabouts was set at 15 million dollarsa price comparable to the heads of the most famous cartels in Mexico.
“Let it be clear, Ryan Wedding is the modern version of Pablo Escobar“said FBI Director Patel. “He is the modern version of El Chapo Guzmán.”
But security experts in Mexico did not support that nickname. “There is no indication that (Wedding) controls territorynor that he is leading an armed militia, nor that he is an important political actor,” said Stephen Woodman, a security analyst in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Wedding making snow.
And although US authorities claim that the Wedding trafficked 60 tons of cocaine a yearthat figure does not appear in the indictment, which only mentions specific cases in which a few hundred kilos were moved at a time.
“I would say that this is a very reformative (U.S.) administration that likes to put a face to the problem of international drug trafficking,” Woodman added. “And you can expect that films and documentaries are made about this subject“he concluded.