Ryan Wedding ceremony — the previous Olympic snowboarder-turned alleged El Chapo-esque drug trafficker — has been arrested a 12 months after touchdown on the FBI’s most wished listing, the feds introduced Friday.
Wedding ceremony was taken into custody Thursday evening in Mexico — the place he was believed to be hiding out for greater than a decade, evading expenses associated to what the FBI says is a violent multinational drug empire.
“To inform you how dangerous of a man Ryan Wedding ceremony is, he went from an Olympic snowboarder to the biggest narco traffickers in trendy instances,” FBI Director Kash Patel advised reporters on the Ontario Worldwide Airport in Southern California — flanked by US and Canadian brokers.
“He’s a modern-day El Chapo, he’s a modern-day Pablo Escobar and he thought he may evade justice,” he mentioned.
He can be transported again to the US to face expenses, Patel mentioned.
Wedding ceremony was wished by the feds for operating an alleged transnational drug trafficking enterprise, transport huge quantities of cocaine from Colombia to the US and Canada.
Wedding ceremony — whose aliases embrace “El Jefe,” “Large,” “Public Enemy,” “James Conrad King,” and “Jesse King” — can also be accused of involvement in a number of murders.
“Wedding ceremony went from shredding powder on the slopes on the Olympics to distributing powder cocaine on the streets of U.S. cities and in his native Canada,” mentioned Akil Davis, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles Discipline Workplace when he was added to the company’s Most Wished Listing in March.
He was arrested in Mexico Metropolis, though Patel declined to supply further particulars concerning the operation, which was carried out with Mexican, Canadian and native regulation enforcement companions.
Wedding ceremony’s arrest marks the sixth FBI top-ten most wished fugitive captured beneath the Trump administration, in line with Patel.
“This particular person and his group and the Sinaloa cartel poured narcotics into the streets of North America and killed too a lot of our youth and corrupted too a lot of our residents. And that ends as we speak,” Patel mentioned.
Wedding ceremony was added to the FBI’s listing of ten most wished fugitives early final 12 months, with the feds bumping the reward to $15 million in November for info resulting in his arrest and/or prosecution — the best bounty of any suspect on the FBI’s listing.
Wedding ceremony, who competed for Canada as a snowboarder on the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah, allegedly smuggled 60 metric tons of cocaine into the US by Mexico and into southern California, officers mentioned.
In November, he was charged in a superseding indictment with ordering the killing of a federal witness who was scheduled to testify in opposition to him.
The witness was shot useless in a restaurant in Medellin, Colombia, on Jan. 31, in line with the feds, who charged Wedding ceremony with two further counts of witness tampering and intimidation, cash laundering and drug trafficking.
The Thunder Bay, Ontario-born fugitive was believed to be dwelling in Mexico working intently with the Sinaloa Cartel, in line with authorities.
His alleged quantity two, Andrew Clark, 34 — additionally a Canadian citizen — was arrested in October 2024 in Mexico and extradited to the US to face expenses.
Wedding ceremony and Clark allegedly directed the Nov. 2023 murders of two members of a household in Ontario, Canada, in retaliation for a stolen drug cargo that handed by California, in line with officers.
In addition they allegedly ordered the homicide of one other sufferer in Might 2024 over a drug debt, in line with the FBI.
He was arrested for the primary time in California in 2008 and located responsible the next 12 months of conspiring to site visitors cocaine, which landed him behind bars in federal jail for 4 years.
In 2011, a 12 months into his four-year jail sentence, Wedding ceremony obtained married behind bars to an Iranian-born businesswoman from British Columbia, CBC reported.
Canadian investigators had been monitoring Wedding ceremony in his house nation since 2015 however after he fled, the US DOJ joined the trouble to search out him.
They dubbed the case “Operation Large Slalom” — after the race Wedding ceremony competed in on the Salt Lake Metropolis Olympics.
The feds have nabbed not less than 36 males linked to Wedding ceremony’s cocaine empire, Patel mentioned, and are nonetheless in search of a number of extra people.
