The target was a drug trafficker turned FBI informant who didn’t stand a chance. As he had lunch with friends at a restaurant in Medellín, Colombia, a hit man in a dark hoodie sneaked up behind him and shot him five times in the head.
The man who had ordered the hit quickly received a photograph of the body, authorities said. He reshared it widely — boasting that he had killed “the rat.” The man behind the killing, they said, was Ryan Wedding, a Canadian who rose to fame as an Olympic snowboarder two decades ago, only to become what authorities describe as one of the world’s biggest drug lords. “El Jefe,” as he was known, ran a drug-trafficking empire out of Mexico and was now one of the most wanted fugitives in the world.
The killing in Medellín in January of this year — detailed in a grand jury indictment in the United States, a State Department reward offer and two court documents filed in Canada — was the culmination of months of meticulous work by Wedding, authorities said, to track down a Montreal-born associate who had flipped to become the U.S. government’s star witness in a pending trial.
Wedding placed a $5 million bounty on the turncoat and dispatched an underling to pursue leads from Mecca to Medellín, according to prosecutors. Government lawyers said he obtained key information from a panoply of people — a hit man nicknamed “Kim Jong Un,” a reggaeton DJ in Montreal, a crime blogger in Toronto, the head of a prostitution ring in Colombia and a sex worker in Miami — in exchange for cash payments and even promises of a down payment on a house and breast implants.
But the killing also catapulted Wedding, 44, onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. U.S. and Canadian law enforcement officials stepped up their investigation into Wedding — called “Operation Giant Slalom” — last month with the arrest of 10 associates in Canada, the United States and Colombia.
With a high-ranking Justice Department official saying that the killing of the federal witness “could not and did not go unanswered,” the U.S. government raised the reward for information leading to Wedding’s arrest and conviction to $15 million from $10 million. Wedding is not known to have a lawyer.
But there was even more ominous news for Wedding, who authorities say is believed to be hiding in Mexico under the protection of the Sinaloa cartel, one of the world’s most powerful and feared crime syndicates. Court documents in the United States and Canada strongly suggested that someone even closer was now cooperating with authorities: Wedding’s right-hand man, Andrew Clark, a 34-year-old Canadian known as “The Dictator.”
And on Wednesday, authorities in Mexico announced that they had conducted multiple raids and seized items, including two Olympic medals and 62 motorcycles, belonging to a former Olympian who is among the 10 most wanted fugitives in the United States. (Wedding is the only one on the fugitives list matching that description.)
The FBI recently released a new photo it said was of Wedding — lying in bed, a large tattoo of a lion on his bare chest, his head resting on a pillow, his eyes staring without emotion at the camera. The FBI did not say how it had gotten the photo, but said it appeared to have been taken last summer in Mexico.
By contrast, an older publicly available photo shows Wedding racing downhill at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics — his red uniform against the whiteness of the powder, his youthful face visible under his goggles, his mouth open in excitement.
Wedding began snowboarding in Thunder Bay, a small town in Ontario, on a ski hill owned by his grandparents, according to a document filed in 2008 by his then lawyer in a U.S. court in San Diego where Wedding faced drug charges.
The lawyer, who accused the government of mishandling the case and sought to have it dismissed, emphasized Wedding’s middle-class background. His father was a mechanical engineer with international experience, his mother, a registered nurse active in several charities. Wedding and his two sisters went to good schools and were fluent in English and French. His younger sister was a ballet dancer.
As for Wedding, he had studied business for two years at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and, the lawyer noted, planned “to complete this program in the near future to pursue his career in business.”
He would never get his degree.
His second career began inauspiciously. In 2006, Canadian police raided a vast marijuana farm in British Columbia, shutting down a business that Wedding owned with another snowboarder, according to media reports.
But two years later, when Wedding showed up in San Diego to buy 24 kilograms of cocaine, about 53 pounds, he displayed a ruthlessness and toughness that Brett Kalina, a retired FBI agent, remembers to this day. After Wedding and two associates were arrested in a sting, the associates cooperated with authorities — but not Wedding.
“He was different than any other subject I’ve ever arrested,” Kalina, 55, who was the lead investigator in that case, said in a phone interview. “He was extremely arrogant. I think he felt he was invincible.”
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“When we arrest someone and they know it’s the FBI, there’s usually some contrition off the bat,” Kalina said.
But Wedding said little and insulted Kalina at times. The former Olympian used his imposing size — 6 feet, 3 inches tall, with a frame that he had sculpted with bodybuilding — to try to intimidate law enforcement officials, puffing out his chest, Kalina said.
In the months he was incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego — a facility housing many foreigners on drug-trafficking charges — Wedding made connections and gained the know-how to establish a serious drug-trafficking operation, said Kalina, who listened to the calls he was making to the outside.
“We did hear comments that he would make about meeting interesting people and learning things,” Kalina said, adding that he was not surprised by Wedding’s trajectory in the drug world.
“He wanted to be the top dog,” Kalina said.
After Wedding was convicted of conspiring to traffic cocaine, he was transferred to a federal prison in Texas. He served a total of about 3 1/2 years and as soon as he gained his freedom in late 2011, Wedding established his trafficking organization, according to a 2025 grand jury indictment. Prosecutors say he operated his drug network out of Montreal and then Mexico.
It was while in prison in Texas, according to the CBC, that Wedding befriended a fellow inmate also serving time for drug trafficking: Jonathan Acebedo-Garcia, a Colombian-Canadian born in Montreal, who would eventually join Wedding. He became one of his most trusted operatives — until he flipped and became an FBI informant, or the “rat” Wedding gloated about killing.
Wedding’s organization grew to eventually generate more than $1 billion in illegal drug proceeds a year, U.S. law enforcement officials said, importing cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and into the United States and becoming what investigators say was the biggest cocaine distributor in Canada.
The investigation into Wedding’s network revealed Canada as an important market for the drug trade, said François Mathieu, a retired criminal intelligence policy expert at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and board member of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a nonprofit.
“This notion that we’re on the periphery, and kind of northern, frozen, sleepy, is not the case,” Mathieu said.
Law enforcement officials in the United States and Canada began their Operation Giant Slalom investigation after persuading Acebedo-Garcia to become a federal witness in 2024, according to U.S. and Canadian documents.
That same year, Wedding and his second-in-command, Clark, were indicted on charges of running a transnational drug trafficking operation and of directing the killing of suspected rivals. Clark — who identified himself as an elevator mechanic and landlord in an interview in Toronto five years ago — worked with Wedding on the organization’s weightiest matters, according to U.S. and Canadian documents.
Shortly after Clark was arrested by authorities in Mexico in October 2024, he and Wedding received counsel from a longtime adviser, a Toronto lawyer named Deepak Paradkar, who once used the Instagram handle @cocaine_lawyer, according to a U.S. indictment.
The lawyer advised them that if the FBI informant, Acebedo-Garcia, was killed, the charges against them and extradition proceedings would be dismissed, the indictment said. Paradkar has also been charged in the Wedding case, including with aiding and abetting a killing, and his legal license was suspended. Paradkar, whose lawyer has said that he intends to contest the charges in the United States, was released on bail Tuesday pending his extradition hearing.
If Wedding bragged about killing “the rat” in January 2025, his peace of mind would be short-lived. Clark was extradited from Mexico to the United States a month later.
U.S. officials declined to comment on Clark’s standing after his arrest. But a close reading of U.S. and Canadian court documents makes clear that Clark was now a “cooperating witness,” who “met multiple times with U.S. authorities” between February and last month, according to an arrest warrant filed in Montreal.
The cooperating witness “had trafficked drugs with Wedding and assisted Wedding with committing multiple murders,” the warrant read, adding that the witness now “agreed to assist U.S. authorities in the investigation of Wedding’s organization.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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