The State Department Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs announced a reward offer under the Narcotics Rewards Program of up to $10 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction, in any country, of Canadian narcotics trafficker Ryan James Wedding. This reward is offered in coordination with the governments of Canada and Mexico in an effort to bring Wedding to justice.
The FBI also announced the addition of Wedding to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List.
Wedding is a former Olympic snowboarder who represented Canada in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. After his snowboarding career, Wedding turned to a life of crime as a transnational narcotics trafficker. He is last known to be residing in Mexico.
Wedding and another Canadian citizen residing in Mexico were charged in an original indictment with running a continuing criminal enterprise, murder, and conspiring to possess, distribute, and export cocaine. Wedding’s co-conspirator was arrested on October 8, 2024, by Mexican law enforcement and was transferred on February 27, 2025, to the United States.
The first superseding indictment, unsealed on October 16, 2024, names 14 additional co-defendants. The superseding indictment alleges that from January 2024 to August 2024, Wedding 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 co-conspirators in Ontario, Canada. The cocaine shipments were transported from Mexico to the Los Angeles area, where the cocaine trafficking organization’s operatives would store the cocaine in stash houses before delivering it to transportation network couriers for transportation to Canada using long-haul semi-trucks.
Wedding’s organization committed violence and murder to achieve its aims. This includes the November 2023 murder of two members of a family in Ontario, Canada, in retaliation for a stolen drug shipment that passed through Southern California, as well as the May 2024 murder of another victim in Niagara Falls, Ontario, over a drug debt. Of the 16 indicted subjects, only Wedding and one other co-conspirator remain fugitives.
The United States remains committed to tracking down and bringing to justice narcotics traffickers that flood the nation with their deadly, illicit drugs.
