Twenty-three years ago this dude Ryan Wedding was literally wearing a Canada jacket on an Olympic podium run well, not podium, he came 24th in parallel giant slalom in Salt Lake but still, he was there, repping the maple leaf, living the dream. Fast-forward to now and the same guy has a fifteen-million-dollar U.S. bounty on his head, which is apparently one of the biggest ever slapped on a Canadian. The FBI posters call him “El Jefe” or “Giant,” and he looks like the villain in a Netflix series nobody would believe is based on a true story.
He’s forty-four now. Grew up in Thunder Bay, moved out to B.C. as a teenager, got good really good at snowboarding. Junior world championship medals, the whole deal. Made the Olympic team, did his lap around the Games, then hung up the board. Tried university for five minutes at Simon Fraser, bounced at clubs, and somewhere along the line decided the real money was in cocaine.
A tweet from X.
By 2010 he’s in the States trying to buy a brick from an undercover cop, gets popped, does four years in an American prison. Gets out, jumps bail, runs to Mexico, and apparently levels up faster than anybody in the Sinaloa Cartel has ever seen. Now he’s allegedly running his own crew that brings in sixty tons sixty tons of coke a year, plus fentanyl, meth, and ketamine for fun. They’re saying the street value tops a billion dollars annually. Semis roll across the border, drop loads at stash houses in L.A., Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, wherever. Cash gets washed through Bitcoin, condos, Lambos, even high-end escort rings. It’s cartoon-level villain money.
Since last year they’ve charged something like thirty-five people. Eleven are locked up already, including some criminal-defense lawyer in L.A., a reggaeton singer, and a handful of Canadian Hells Angels associates.
Then it gets dark. January this year, a Colombian couple who were supposed to testify against him get gunned down at a restaurant table in Medellín. Feds say Wedding personally ordered it. Another time his guys went after a family in Ontario because somebody jacked one of their 1,100-kilo loads ended up killing the wrong people. Two completely innocent people, dead.
He hit the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted back in March. This week literally two days ago they bumped the reward from ten million to fifteen, plus another two million apiece for the shooters in Colombia. Biggest reward ever for a Canadian, easy.
Word is he’s still somewhere in Mexico, bouncing between safe houses, new face every month, cartel soldiers watching his back. With that kind of money floating around, though, somebody’s going to start thinking fifteen million is a pretty nice retirement plan.
Whole thing still feels like it can’t possibly be real. Olympic snowboarder to cartel kingpin with a fifteen-million-dollar price tag. Life is wilder than fiction sometimes.
