FBI offers $10M reward for Canadian ex-Olympian accused of running drug empire, ordering murders

The FBI announced Thursday that Canadian erstwhile Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wedding has been added to the agency’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list. Wedding faces respective U.S. charges, including conspiracy to export cocaine, moving a transgression endeavor and murder.

The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs announced it is offering a $10 cardinal reward for accusation that could pb to the 43-year-old’s arrest, alongside the FBI’s existent offering of $50,000 for much accusation connected Wedding.

Wedding’s cause trafficking web allegedly regularly shipped hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, done Mexico and Southern California, to Canada and locations successful the United States. Wedding is besides accused of orchestrating aggregate murders arsenic portion of these cause crimes. He is reportedly known by respective aliases, including “El Jefe,” “Public Enemy” and “Giant.”

At Thursday’s property league successful Los Angeles, officials said Wedding is believed to unrecorded determination successful Mexico, perchance nether the extortion of the Sinaloa cartel.

Cart Weiland, a elder State Department official, told reporters that aft his palmy snowboarding career, Wedding “went downhill — successful a antithetic benignant of way,” the Toronto Star reported.

“He traded snowfall for different benignant of powder,” Weiland said.

Prosecutors successful Toronto tribunal said in a caller letter they judge Wedding has been connected the tally since October erstwhile authorities archetypal identified him arsenic the person of a large transgression endeavor that works with Mexican cartels and ordered aggregate murders successful Ontario.

His alleged second-in-command, chap Canadian Andrew Clark, was arrested by Mexico’s Naval forces successful October. Clark, 34, was among the 29 alleged Mexican cause cartel members who were sent to the United States earlier this twelvemonth successful a wide handover, overseen by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

In summation to the cause trafficking accusations, Wedding and Clark are accused of orchestrating the execution of 4 radical successful Ontario successful November 2023 implicit a stolen cause shipment. Two of the deaths person been described arsenic the effect of a “mistaken individuality shooting.”