Olympian Turned Alleged Drug Kingpin Ryan Wedding Arrested
About a week ago, a mysterious Instagram account appeared. The profile was named bossryanw, as in Ryan Wedding, the former Canadian Olympian turned alleged narco kingpin.
The page featured pictures of motorcycles, expensive watches, a jewel-encrusted pendant of a snowboarder on a chain, and a mustachioed man who looked a lot like Wedding getting into a helicopter. “What I like about being a boss,” the caption read.
The FBI wouldn’t comment on whether they believed the account was operated by Wedding, and it seemed unlikely, and perhaps insane, that someone on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List would suddenly start posting pictures of his life to a public Instagram account. Unless, perhaps, Wedding knew his days were numbered and felt like he had nothing to lose.
On Thursday night, a global manhunt that spanned one year and roughly three months came to an end, when Wedding turned himself in to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. FBI director Kash Patel announced the arrest Friday morning in Los Angeles, standing on the tarmac of a small regional airport in Ontario, California, which is about 35 miles east of downtown L.A. Patel had flown Wedding to the United States this morning, and had been on the same plane. He said Wedding would make his initial appearance in court Monday.
“We told you in November we would find Mr. Wedding, and today that day has arrived,” said Akil Davis, the assistant director in charge of the FBI Field Office in L.A., at Friday morning’s press conference.
Patel and Davis offered scant details on the details of the arrest, other than to say that Patel was already in Mexico City for previously scheduled meetings when it happened. Omar Harfuch, Mexico’s top security official, posted pictures of the meeting to X on Friday and said that Patel had left Mexico that morning with Wedding and one other suspect on the FBI’s Most Wanted list who had been hiding out in Mexico, a man named Alejandro Rosales Castillo, who’s been wanted on murder charges since 2016.
Wedding, who competed for Canada in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, was first convicted on federal drug trafficking charges in 2009. He was extradited to Canada in 2011 and released shortly thereafter.
As Rolling Stone has previously reported, law enforcement believe Wedding used that time in U.S. federal prison to expand contacts in the drug world, and in 2015, his name surfaced in a major drug trafficking case in Canada, called Operation Harrington, but Wedding was never arrested in that case.
Roughly a decade later, in October 2024, federal prosecutors indicted Wedding on drug trafficking and murder charges and the FBI, the DEA, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been hunting him ever since. Wedding was allegedly under the protection of the Sinaloa Cartel and a figure known as “The General,” a former cop who prosecutors say used his contacts in Mexican law enforcement to protect Wedding.
This past November, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced nine additional charges against Wedding, including two counts of witness tampering and intimidation, money laundering, drug trafficking, and murder, as well as the arrest of 10 more members of Wedding’s organization. While an indictment listing the new charges did not name the murder victim, it did say the victim was a longtime associate of Wedding who had agreed to work with the U.S. government as a cooperating witness. Earlier this month, Rolling Stone detailed the events leading up to that murder and the likelihood, according to government sources, that Wedding’s days were numbered.
On Dec. 24, police in Mexico announced that they had raided four properties in Mexico City and the surrounding state of Mexico belonging to Wedding. They seized 62 motorcycles worth a reported $40 million, what they described as “works of art,” marijuana, meth, and two Olympic medals (it is unclear who won the medals; Wedding placed 24th at the Salt Lake Winter Games in 2002).
The bossryanw Instagram account seemed to make several references to that raid. The first post, made on Jan. 14, was a picture of a gleaming statue of Daffy Duck, wearing what appears to be an Olympic medal (during my earlier reporting on Wedding’s 2009 federal drug trafficking charges, a friend of his from high school told me Wedding loved Donald Duck and liked watching cartoons). The caption on that post read, “The one I managed to rescue.”
The next post appeared the following day: a picture of four motorcycles. “Starting over, piece by piece.”
The final post on the bossryanw page showed a Patek Phillippe watch and a silver Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR Roadster worth about $13 million. The caption read, “They took away my toy, but nobody can take away what I’ve learned.” Later that day, Wedding turned himself in, and the next morning he was on a plane with the director of the FBI, headed to Los Angeles.
