The Canadian at the centre of one of the biggest international criminal investigations in the world continues to evade capture thanks in part, the FBI says, to protection from the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel and other criminal entities in Mexico.
Ryan Wedding has been on the run since 2015, wanted in connection to multiple drug and conspiracy crimes, in addition to ordering and orchestrating murder.
That led the U.S. State Department on Wednesday to increase the reward for Wedding’s capture to $15 million US, up from $10 million US.
Here’s what we know about Wedding — how he went from Canadian Olympian to one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives today.
Canadians may have first heard the name Ryan Wedding during the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah.
An avid skier, Wedding started snowboarding in his early teens after his family moved from Ontario to British Columbia. He became a member of the Canadian National Ski Team, and went on to compete in snowboarding at the Olympics in parallel giant slalom.
He didn’t medal.
His snowboarding career ended after that, and in 2008 he was arrested after travelling to California to buy cocaine. At the time, the FBI said it was believed he was working for a B.C. drug lord. Wedding spent about three years in U.S. prisons.
He was next arrested by the RCMP in Montreal in April 2015 as part of a large-scale cocaine trafficking operation, but managed to flee to Mexico.
He’s been on the run ever since.
The U.S. Justice Department believes Wedding, now 44, is living in Mexico, where investigators allege he oversees a massive drug trafficking criminal enterprise, under the protection of the Sinaloa cartel, one of the world’s oldest and most powerful cartels.
But prosecutors have said in the past that they haven’t ruled out the possibilty that he has managed to get out of Mexico undetected. They suggested that he may have been in the U.S., Canada, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, or elsewhere.
‘A modern Pablo Escobar’: FBI director on Canadian fugitive
The FBI says Wedding has managed to evade arrest many times over the past decade.
“He’s being protected by the Sinaloa cartel along with others in the country of Mexico,” Akil Davis, assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles Field Office, said Wednesday in a briefing from Washington.
The Sinaloa cartel has a network of tens of thousands of individuals worldwide connected to its operations. It is heavily armed with military grade weapons and uses extreme violence to elicit terror, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
Law enforcement officials say Wedding has used threats of violence and murder and has been insulated by accomplices who have likely tipped him off about pending arrests and may have moved to different locations around the world over the years as result.
“When you have a $10 million reward and no one is coming forward, it just tells you where he is in the hierarchy with the Mexican cartels,” RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme told the CBC’s Katie Nicholson on Wednesday.
Local Mexican officials have been accused in the past of helping Wedding to evade capture. But CBC News learned in September that Mexican federal agents are now helping to find him.
Duheme told CBC News that he’s met with the equivalent of the minister of public safety to tell him how important it is for them “to have Wedding captured and behind bars.”
The RCMP says Wedding uses several aliases, including “Giant,” “Public Enemy” and “El Jefe.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi described Wedding during the same Washington briefing as “currently the largest distributor of cocaine in Canada” and head of “one of the most prolific and violent” drug trafficking organizations in the world.
“His organization is responsible for importing approximately 60 metric tonnes of cocaine a year into Los Angeles via semi trucks from Mexico,” she said, adding that is about equivalent to the weight of 40 cars.
But Davis, with the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, says it’s not just cocaine.
“He has trafficked record levels of drugs,” he said, including fentanyl, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine.
At Wednesday’s briefing, FBI Director Kash Patel compared him to other notorious drug lords.
“Ryan Wedding is a modern day iteration of Pablo Escobar. He is a modern day iteration of El Chapo Guzman,” said Patel.
The FBI believes Wedding has ordered dozens of murders around the globe, including in the United States, Canada and Latin America.
They say he orchestrated the murder of a U.S. federal witness who was to testify against him, and had him gunned down in a restaurant in Medellin, Colombia, earlier this year.
Bondi says he used a Canadian website to post photos of the witness and his wife in order to locate him, “which ultimately succeeded.”
A Quebec man was arrested Tuesday in connection with that case.
The FBI says Wedding’s “level of co-ordination and ruthlessness” when it comes to planning and carrying out murders has made him “one of the world’s most dangerous fugitives.”
He’s been on the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives since March 2025.
Ten people were arrested Tuesday in connection to the current indictment against Wedding, including seven Canadians, who were apprehended by RCMP and Ontario Provincial Police.
One of the Canadians was Wedding’s lawyer, Deepak Paradkar, according to Bill Essayli, assistant U.S. attorney for the central district of California.
Essayli says Paradkar advised Wedding to kill the witness in Colombia. “He told him, ‘If you kill this witness the case will be dismissed.’
“That lawyer is now in custody and he’ll be extradited and brought to justice here in the United States.”
What we know about the Brampton lawyer arrested in the case of Ryan Wedding
There have been previous arrests connected to Wedding in the past, too.
And the U.S. government vowed Wednesday that Wedding will also be caught.
“No one, not even a former Olympian, is above the law,” said Chris Landberg, a senior official in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement.
