The FBI were surveilling a Starbucks in Mexico City in January of last year when Ryan Wedding hovered into view for the first time in a decade. The most recent photograph they had of him was a Quebec driving licence from 2013. The hair was shorter now but there was a definite facial resemblance, and this burly man certainly clocked in at the required 6ft 3in.
Their suspicions were confirmed when the barista wanted a name for the order and he replied, confidently, “Ryan”. No need to deploy his preferred aliases of James or Jesse here, a measure of how comfortable he is living under the protection of the Sinaloa cartel.
The agents eavesdropped that interaction and a whole lot more because Wedding was sipping coffee with Jonathan Acebedo-Garcia, an old buddy from a long-ago prison stretch in Texas, a key figure in his drug trafficking operation, and somebody who was, helpfully, wearing a wire to the meet.
The tape caught the duo and Andrew Clark, another trusted lieutenant in the organisation, discussing plans to truck 3,000kg of cocaine per month from South America through California and up to Canada. They went into great detail about the role to be played by a Toronto freight company and the fees due to those transporting the contraband.
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Within a year of that encounter, Clark was arrested by the Mexican navy in Guadalajara, while Acebedo-Garcia, freshly rumbled for his double-dealing subterfuge, took a bullet to the head in a restaurant in Medellín, Colombia, and Wedding, as is his wont, disappeared off the radar. Where he has remained even as the FBI announced last month it had arrested a raft of his associates, ranked the 44-year-old Canadian in its top 10 most wanted fugitives, and placed a reward of $15 million (€12.8 million) on his head.
Wedding’s pre-smuggling CV included a snowboarding career during which he represented Canada at the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, a sporting achievement that lent a convenient name to the investigation of his transnational crime syndicate.
“Ryan Wedding’s athletic drive snowballed into a life of violence and, instead of conquering mountains, he mastered a deadly drug distribution enterprise and will continue to order murders while he enjoys protection by his cartel associates and others,” said Akil Davis, the assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office. “Operation Giant Slalom is a dynamic international investigation ... with the shared goal of capturing Wedding, finding justice for several murder victims and ridding communities in North America of deadly drugs.”
Wedding grew up in the maw of wealth and privilege in Thunder Bay, Ontario, the son of an engineer and a nurse. His grandparents owned the local Mount Baldy resort, and an uncle ran a ski school when not coaching Canada’s alpine women’s team. Having dabbled in rugby, motocross and dirt-biking, the adventurous kid eventually found his true calling on the slopes where, at just 15, he made the national snowboarding team for the first time. Five years later, his 24th-place finish in the men’s parallel giant slalom at the Olympics in Utah was such a disappointment he stopped competing and went completely off-piste.
After dropping out of Simon Fraser University after just two years, he had stints as a bodybuilder, a bouncer and a property speculator, with a lucrative side hustle in marijuana farming. All of that somehow led him towards the day in 2008 when he fetched up in a seedy California hotel to buy cocaine from a Russian mobster and wandered right into an FBI sting. Staring down a possible 10-year sentence for conspiring to distribute 24kg of cocaine, he recited a sporting-themed act of contrition for the judge.
“I allowed myself to be lured by the idea of easy money, and the sad thing is I really didn’t need money that bad,” said Wedding. “In the past 24 months I’ve spent in custody, I’ve had an opportunity to see first-hand what drugs do to people, and honestly, I’m ashamed that I became a part of the problem for years. As an athlete, I was always taught that there are no second chances, and, well, I’m here asking for exactly that.”
Sentenced to a rather light four years (with two already served), he took his second chance in some style. Using connections made with cartel members while in prison, he morphed from apparent wannabe player in the international drug trade to somebody so important his Sinaloa associates affectionately nicknamed him “Public Enemy”.
Having narrowly escaped arrest in Montreal in 2015, it’s believed he then decamped to Mexico from where he has allegedly been responsible for trafficking huge amounts of cocaine from Colombia to Los Angeles and all points north, and allegedly ordering the elimination of characters like Acebedo-Garcia who threaten to get in his way.
As a callow 12-year-old, Wedding won the first race he ever entered and caught the eye of Bob Allison, then charged with training the next generation of Canadian snowboarding prospects. The tyro was still so innocent when he joined that elite squad he brought a teddy bear to sleep with him on trips to compete everywhere from the Andes to the Alps. He won a lot more until the Olympics when, failing to realise conditions underfoot had changed, he messed up his run by coming out of the gate too aggressively and carving his board way too deep in the snow.
Story of his life since.
