Former Olympic snowboarder and alleged drug kingpin Ryan Wedding has been arrested after nearly a year on the FBI’s most wanted list, Bureau Director Kash Patel announced Friday.
Wedding was taken into custody Thursday night in Mexico — where he was believed to be hiding out for more than a decade evading authorities seeking to bring him to justice for running his violent drug empire, officials said.
He is being transported back to Ontario, California to face charges, Patel said.
Wedding was wanted by the feds for running a transnational drug trafficking enterprise, shipping massive amounts of cocaine from Colombia to the US and Canada.
Wedding — whose aliases include “El Jefe,” “Giant,” “Public Enemy,” “James Conrad King,” and “Jesse King” — is also accused of involvement in several murders.
Wedding was added to the FBI’s list of ten most wanted fugitives early last year, with the feds bumping the reward to $15 million in November for information leading to his arrest and/or prosecution — the highest bounty of any on the FBI’s list.
Wedding, who competed for Canada as a snowboarder at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah, allegedly smuggled 60 metric tons of cocaine into the US through Mexico and into southern California, officials said.
“Wedding went from shredding powder on the slopes at the Olympics to distributing powder cocaine on the streets of U.S. cities and in his native Canada,” said Akil Davis, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office when he was added to the agency’s Most Wanted List in March.
In November, he was charged in a superseding indictment with ordering the killing of a federal witness who was scheduled to testify against him.
The witness was shot dead in a restaurant in Medellin, Colombia, on Jan. 31, according to the feds, who charged Wedding with two additional counts of witness tampering and intimidation, money laundering and drug trafficking.
”He controls one of the most prolific and violent drug trafficking organizations in this world,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said when announcing the charges.
The Thunder Bay, Ontario-born fugitive was believed to be living in Mexico working closely with the Sinaloa Cartel, according to authorities.
His alleged number two, Andrew Clark, 34 — also a Canadian citizen — was arrested in October 2024 in Mexico and extradited to the US to face charges.
Wedding and Clark allegedly directed the Nov. 2023 murders of two members of a family in Ontario, Canada, in retaliation for a stolen drug shipment that passed through California, according to officials.
They also allegedly ordered the murder of another victim in May 2024 over a drug debt, according to the FBI.
He was arrested for the first time in California in 2008 and found guilty the following year of conspiring to traffic cocaine, which landed him behind bars in federal prison for four years.
In 2011, a year into his four-year prison sentence, Wedding got married behind bars to an Iranian-born businesswoman from British Columbia, CBC reported.
Canadian investigators had been tracking Wedding in his home country since 2015 but after he fled, the US DOJ joined the effort to find him.
The feds have nabbed at least a dozen men connected to Wedding’s cocaine empire, including Clark.
https://nypost.com/2026/01/23/us-news/canadian-snowboarder-turned-drug-kingpin-ryan-wedding-arrested-after-months-on-the-run-report/
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