WASHINGTON — Ryan Wedding, a former Canadian Olympic snowboarder on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list has been arrested in Mexico, according to top Justice Department officials
As The Trucker previously reported, Wedding allegedly used bigs rigs to smuggle drugs, running a transnational drug enterprise and ordering several murders. He was added to the 10 Most Wanted list in 2025.
A Decade of Deception and Hiding
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed Wedding’s arrest in social media posts. Patel said Wedding was being transported to the U.S. after being apprehended Thursday night in Mexico, where U.S. authorities believe the former Olympian has been hiding for more than a decade.
“This is a huge day for a safer North America, and the world and a message that those who break our laws and harm our citizens will be brought to justice,” Patel said in a social media post.
Background
Wedding, whose aliases include “El Jefe,” “Giant,” “Public Enemy,” “James Conrad King,” and “Jesse King,” was born in Thunder Bay, Canada, and competed in the Giant Slalom snowboarding competition during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Wedding allegedly ran a transnational drug trafficking network that routinely shipped hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, through Mexico and Southern California, to Canada and other locations in the United States, and for orchestrating multiple murders and an attempted murder in furtherance of these drug crimes, according to an FBI media release.
In June 2024, Wedding and his second-in-command Andrew Clark, also Canadian, were charged in an indictment out of the Central District of California with running a continuing criminal enterprise, committing murder in connection with a continuing criminal enterprise and assorted drug crimes and conspiring to possess, distribute and export cocaine. Clark was arrested in October 2024 by Mexican authorities.
Using Semis for Smuggling
In September 2024, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles returned a superseding indictment naming 14 additional defendants and including, among other counts, an attempted murder charge against Wedding and Clark. The superseding indictment alleges that Wedding, Clark, and others conspired to ship bulk quantities of cocaine—weighing hundreds of kilograms—from Southern California to Canada through a Canada-based drug transportation network run by Hardeep Ratte and Gurpreet Singh, both of Ontario, Canada, from approximately January 2024 to August 2024. The cocaine shipments were transported from Mexico to the Los Angeles area, where the cocaine trafficking organization’s operatives stored the cocaine in stash houses, before delivering it to the transportation network couriers for delivery to Canada using long-haul semi-trucks.
$40M in Assets Seized
As the investigation and search for Wedding continued, investigators found over $40 million in assets allegedly attached to Wedding and the operation. To read more from The Trucker about those discoveries and see photos of the rare cars and motorcycles click here and here.
Dana Guthrie is an award-winning journalist who has been featured in multiple newspapers, books and magazines across the globe. She is currently based in the Atlanta, Georgia, area.
