At Utah’s last Olympics in 2002, Ryan Wedding competed for his native Canada as a snowboarder. Now he’s on the FBI’s most wanted list.
Wedding is being sought by U.S. authorities for allegedly running a transnational drug trafficking network the FBI said “routinely shipped hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, through Mexico and Southern California, to Canada and other locations in the United States.”
The 43-year-old is also accused of having orchestrated “multiple murders and an attempted murder,” according to the FBI, which announced a $10 million reward for information leading to Wedding’s arrest and conviction has been authorized by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“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,” Akil Davis, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, said at a Los Angeles press conference Thursday.
“The alleged murders of his competitors make Wedding a very dangerous man,” Davis said.
Adding him to the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, coupled with what Davis said is a major award “Will make the public our partner so that we can catch up with him before he puts anyone else in danger.”
Wedding, whose aliases include “El Jefe,” “Giant,” “Public Enemy,” “James Conrad King,” and “Jesse King,” was born in Thunder Bay, Canada. He is believed to be in Mexico but authorities say he also could be in the U.S., Canada, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, or elsewhere.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that a cross-border investigation that led to last year’s indictments of Wedding and 15 alleged accomplices by a federal grand jury in California was called “Operation Giant Slalom, as a nod to Wedding’s previous career.”
As a member of the Canadian Olympic team in 2002, Wedding finished 24th in parallel giant slalom at Salt Lake City’s Winter Games, four years after snowboarding made its Olympic debut at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan.
His biography on the International Olympic Committee’s website doesn’t mention the manhunt, but says he allegedly was named in a 2006 search warrant connected to an investigation into the growth of “large quantities of marijuana but he was never charged.”
The Olympics.com website, which lists the 2002 Winter Games as Wedding’s only Olympic participation, also says “in May 2010 he was convicted of attempting to buy cocaine from a US government agent in 2008, and was sentenced to four years in prison.”