UPDATE: Ryan Wedding Arrested in Mexico, Transported to U.S. Under FBI “Foreign Terrorist Organization Coordination” Process

WASHINGTON — Ryan James Wedding, accused of being a Sinaloa Cartel operative who became “the largest narco trafficker in modern times,” was arrested late Thursday in Mexico City and is being transported to the United States through the FBI’s Foreign Terrorist Organization coordination process, Director Kash Patel announced Friday morning.

At a press conference, pointing to a high-consequence joint military–law-enforcement operation in Mexico City, Patel thanked President Claudia Sheinbaum, “and the military and law-enforcement officers of Mexico working hand in glove with our teams on the ground there.”

Wedding, a Canadian former Olympic snowboarder accused by U.S. investigators of leading a violent transnational narco pipeline by consolidating domestic gangs across Canada to traffic and transship cocaine and methamphetamine from Latin American cartels while ordering numerous murders tied to his alleged drug enterprise, will now face prosecution in the United States.

“Just to tell you how bad of a guy Ryan Wedding is, he went from an Olympic snowboarder to the largest narco trafficker in modern times,” Patel said at a press conference this morning. “He’s a modern day El Chapo. He is a modern day Pablo Escobar. [Wedding] and his organization and the Sinaloa Cartel poured narcotics into the streets of North America and killed too many of our youth and corrupted too many of our citizens.”

Patel said Wedding was believed to have been hiding in Mexico for over a decade.

The 44-year-old former Olympic snowboarder, who competed at the Salt Lake Games in 2002, was added to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in March 2025.

U.S. authorities allege Wedding’s organization routinely moved hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, through Mexico and Southern California, to Canada and other U.S. destinations, using stash houses and long-haul semi-trucks as part of a bulk-shipment pipeline.

The Bureau’s American law-enforcement sources argue that Wedding’s success involved leveraging cross-border trucking enterprises captured by Indo-Canadian mafia networks, and that Canada’s police and judicial response failed to counter the threat.

While Wedding himself isn’t accused of any fentanyl trafficking activities, his ties to hybrid transnational gangs like the Wolfpack — a collaboration between Canadian bikers, Latin cartels, and Middle Eastern gangsters — tie his associates to known fentanyl labs, one senior U.S. investigator asserted, pointing to the notorious Falkland “super lab” in British Columbia.

“Over the last three or four years there’ve been Canadians killed in the Yucatán. And we all know they’re tied to drug trafficking — Greater Toronto and Montreal,” the U.S. investigator told The Bureau for an exclusive report last year, on the improbable rise of a Canadian to the heights of Mexico’s most powerful cartel. “A fair number of Quebecers too — bikers. They all work in Mexico. But somehow Ryan Wedding got all these people to work together.”

The source described the Cancún area as a “haven for Canadian organized crime — mid- to high-level drug dealers coordinating with Mexican counterparts to bring stuff into Canada.”

“I think he just rose above all of that,” the investigator said. “Whether it was through violence or just the people he knew, Wedding became the single point of contact for any Canadian who wanted to bring drugs back up into Canada from Mexico.”

In a superseding indictment unsealed in October 2024, federal prosecutors charged Wedding with multiple felonies, including drug-trafficking conspiracies, conspiracy to export cocaine, leading a continuing criminal enterprise, and murder and attempted-murder counts connected to the alleged enterprise.

In November 2025, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed additional charges tied to the January 31, 2025 killing of a federal witness in Colombia and announced arrests of multiple alleged associates in what officials described as “Operation Giant Slalom.”

A Toronto lawyer and other Canadians were implicated in the killing, according to the FBI.

Investigators said Wedding and co-conspirators used a Canadian website called “The Dirty News” to post a photograph of the witness so he could be identified and killed. The U.S. government’s key cooperating witness — a Canadian-Colombian named Jonathan Acebedo-García, who had reportedly served a sentence for fentanyl trafficking in Quebec and moved large quantities of synthetic narcotics into New York State via First Nations land crossings — was killed by sicarios while dining in Colombia.

The assassins reportedly sped away on a high-powered motorcycle after striking Acebedo-García multiple times in the back of the head with a silenced weapon.

In November, announcing the new federal-witness murder conspiracy charges, the FBI said the reward for Wedding had been raised to $15 million and that officials had compared him to Chapo Guzmán, a previous leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, and Pablo Escobar, the Medellín cartel leader killed in an arrest operation.