Manhunt underway for Ryan Wedding, former Olympian turned accused drug kingpin

A Canadian former Olympic snowboarder accused of cocaine trafficking and murder has landed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list — and now is the subject of a planned television true crime docuseries.

Currently dodging authorities, Ryan Wedding has drawn comparisons to narcotics traffickers such as Pablo Escobar, the billionaire South American drug kingpin killed in 1993 at age 44 during a rooftop shootout with authorities in Medellín, Colombia.

FBI Director Kash Patel described the 44-year-old Wedding as “a modern-day iteration” of Escobar. At a recent news conference, Patel stressed that Wedding, a fugitive from Thunder Bay, on Lake Superior in Ontario, is responsible for engineering “a narco-trafficking and narco-terrorism program that we have not seen in a long time.” The FBI director also compared Wedding to Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, a former Sinaloa Cartel leader from Mexico now in a maximum-security prison in Colorado.

According to the FBI, Wedding is wanted on suspicion of shipping hundreds of kilograms of cocaine routinely from Colombia to the United States and Canada and for orchestrating multiple murders.

One killing occurred when Wedding tracked down a federal witness in Medellín, said U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. The witness was killed while dining at a Medellín restaurant. Wedding had used a Canadian website to post photos of the man and his wife in an attempt to locate them, and he offered a bounty on the witness, hiring shooters to find him, The New York Times reported. The website has been taken down.

The U.S. Treasury Department said Wedding uses “highly sophisticated methods” to plan and carry out killings, “demonstrating a level of coordination and ruthlessness that has made him one of the world’s most dangerous fugitives.” 

‘Snow King’

As the hunt for Wedding continues, a proposed docuseries promises to show viewers how he went from “national hero to alleged cartel boss and international fugitive,” according to a social media post from Dogwoof, a London-based production company.

Dogwoof CEO Anna Godas said the company became interested in Wedding’s story after it was called to their attention. Titled Snow King: From Olympian to Narco, the docuseries is a collaboration involving Dogwoof, Visitor Media of Toronto, Rolling Stone Films and others. A run date has not been set.

“When we first came across the story last year,” Godas said, “we instantly knew it could become an incredible series that elevates the true crime genre by going deeper into what drives people to make certain choices, much like Breaking Bad.”

As with the schoolteacher in Breaking Bad, a fictional television drama, Wedding’s involvement in the narcotics underworld has an unusual plot twist. In Wedding’s case, the unexpected turn is his background as an Olympic snowboarder in a country where such athletes are held in high regard.

Competing for Canada in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, Wedding finished 24th in the snowboarding parallel giant slalom. When his snowboarding career ended, he turned to a life of crime as a transnational narcotics trafficker, the FBI said. 

Four years after the Salt Lake City Winter Games, while living in British Columbia, Wedding was investigated in connection with a marijuana operation but not charged, The New York Times reported. In 2010, he was convicted of attempting to buy cocaine from a U.S. government agent and sentenced to prison. He was released in 2011.

Since then, criminal allegations against Wedding have continued to pile up. In October 2024, while on the run, he was indicted on charges of trafficking cocaine from California to Canada and three counts of murder, according to The New York Times.

At a recent news conference with other officials, Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, said Wedding’s organization is responsible for importing about 60 metric tons of cocaine a year into Los Angeles from Mexico.

“To put that in perspective, 60 metric tons is approximately 40 cars, the weight of 40 standard cars,” she said.

During the investigation into Wedding, several people connected to his drug ring have been arrested, Bondi said. Authorities said they have seized cocaine, firearms, ammunition and large sums of U.S. currency and cryptocurrency linked to his suspected criminal network. 

In conjunction with this operation, the U.S. State Department’s Narcotics Rewards Program is offering $15 million for information leading to his arrest or conviction. He also has been added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

Akil Davis, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, said the effort to capture the former snowboarder means “finding justice for several murder victims — including a cooperating witness — and ridding communities in North America of deadly drugs.”

The law enforcement operation is labeled Operation Giant Slalom.

“Ryan Wedding’s athletic drive snowballed into a life of violence and, instead of conquering mountains, he mastered a deadly drug distribution enterprise and will continue to order murders while he enjoys protection by his cartel associates and others,” Davis said.

Links to Sinaloa Cartel

As the FBI’s Davis indicated, Wedding has been tied to the Sinaloa Cartel, once led by El Chapo and still a deadly narcotics trafficking organization based in Mexico. 

Authorities believe Wedding could be in Mexico, but he also might have fled to other countries, including the United States, Canada, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala or Costa Rica. The FBI warns that the 6-foot-3, 240-pound athlete, known as “Giant,” “Public Enemy,” “El Jefe” and “Jesse King,” is considered armed and dangerous.

In a telephone interview, Steve Murphy, a retired U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, told The Mob Museum he thinks Wedding eventually will be captured.

Murphy and fellow retired DEA agent Javier Peña were the lead U.S. investigators in tracking down Escobar decades ago.Their book, Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar, gives an account of that experience. Their involvement also was dramatized in the Netflix series Narcos. Murphy now hosts the Game of Crimes podcast.

Murphy said Wedding could be found in “relatively short order” if Mexican officials allow U.S. authorities in the country to hunt for him.

“Whether we’re talking about special operators from the U.S. military or the U.S. Marshal Service — they’re phenomenal at finding people,” Murphy said. “That’s how a lot of people get captured in the United States, because of the Marshals and their expertise and their experience and equipment and technology they have available to them.”

In the search for Escobar, Murphy and Peña were sent to Colombia because local officials wanted them there.

“The difference between what we did in Colombia and what’s going on Mexico is that the Colombian government invited us in,” Murphy said.

As the focus on Wedding intensifies, a snitch might come forward, Murphy said, or the Sinaloa Cartel could get fed up with him. Someone’s value to the drug cartel depends on that person’s ability to earn money, the former DEA agent said.

“At what point does the cartel say this guy is trouble to us?” Murphy asked, noting that the cartel has a reputation for excessive violence.

With the unwanted attention Wedding is bringing to them, and if he is no longer much of an earner, an order could come down from a cartel leader to “get rid of him,” Murphy said.

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.