The United States government announced this Friday (23) that Canadian Ryan Wedding, a former Olympic snowboarder accused of drug trafficking and who was on the FBI’s (American federal police) ten most wanted list, was arrested in Mexico.
In a post on X, FBI director Kash Patel said that this operation was “the result of enormous cooperation and teamwork with the government of Mexico”.
“This is the sixth fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list to capture in a year – fugitives who have been on the run for almost 40 years, put those years together. This is no coincidence. The president [Donald] Trump is allowing good cops to do their jobs and the results speak for themselves,” wrote the FBI director.
In November last year, the United States government had increased the reward for information leading to the Canadian’s capture from US$10 million to US$15 million.
At the time, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said that Wedding was the largest cocaine distributor in Canada and collaborated closely with the feared Sinaloa Cartel, being responsible for trafficking approximately 60 tons of Colombian cocaine to Los Angeles, using trucks from Mexico.
Wedding is accused in the United States of heading a criminal organization, murder and conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
Wedding, 44 years old, represented Canada at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002. In the competition, he achieved a mediocre 24th place. After the Olympics, he abandoned high-performance sports.
In 2004, Wedding left university studies and began working in the real estate market, where he financed his investments by cultivating marijuana.
In 2006, the property where he produced the drug was the target of an operation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP, equivalent to the Federal Police in Brazil), but Wedding was not there at the time of the action and was not charged due to lack of evidence.
Afterwards, the former Olympic athlete began to dedicate himself to cocaine trafficking, which led to him being sentenced by the United States Court to four years in prison in 2010.
After being released after serving part of his sentence and being deported to Canada in 2011, Wedding became an even more dangerous criminal, according to American authorities, by joining the Sinaloa Cartel – an activity for which he earned the nicknames “El Jefe”, “Giant” and “Public Enemy”, among others. In addition to the trafficking itself, he is accused of several murders.
