Ryan James Wedding: Powder Runs

0:04I cannot overstate the shock of him being at 10 million dollars on the FBI's most wanted list. Right now, one of the most wanted men in the world is completely off the grid. He could be hiding out in any number of places, pulling the puppet strings of a global drug empire, watching and waiting.

0:33In 15 years of covering organized crime, I don't think I've ever seen a single person dabble in so many criminal pawns. He's got ties to a litany of criminal organizations.

1:00Between his leadership skills and logistical know-how, he's earned a reputation for getting along with people operating outside the law. But perhaps the most glaring warning of just how dangerous he is, is the fact that he's on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for conspiracy to export cocaine, continuing criminal enterprise, and connections to multiple murders. He's considered capable of anything and authorities are working tirelessly to catch him before he makes his next move. And the thing is, if this man walked into your local coffee shop and struck up a conversation with you, you'd never guess he's a wanted fugitive.

1:52You might even be in awe of him, as fans of snowboarding might recognize him from the Olympic Games. On the outside, he comes across as totally normal, charming even. He's a very good-looking guy, he's very charismatic, and seems to have a knack for both people and logistics. His name is Ryan James Wedding, and it's not that he's likable despite being a ruthless drug lord. On the contrary, he's such a powerful drug lord because he's likable. Authorities believe he's still out there, pulling the strings across multiple global drug trades as we speak, but no one knows where he is. He could be in any country, living in a compound or even a modest home.

2:46He could be driving truckloads of drugs across borders. Or he could be the guy standing behind you in line for coffee.

3:01This is The Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin.

3:11Today, we're tracing the rise of a man at the top of the global drug trade, Ryan James Wedding, and breaking down all the carnage left in his wake. We'll take a closer look at the mystery surrounding how Wedding built his empire, and explore all the reasons why he is a total enigma.

3:42My name is Chris Dolby. I'm the director of World of Crime. We're a consultancy that helps governments make sense of criminal challenges. Ryan James Wedding is one of those interesting narcos who have had two very successful careers, one legal and one illegal. We don't know much about him. He's someone who stays out of the spotlight. His family is not a well-known sporting Our knowledge of his criminal past has really surged in the last couple of years as he's become one of the most notorious kingpins in the Americas. We do know that Ryan Wedding was born in 1981 and grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

4:22He seemed to have a pretty normal life growing up, but again, we don't really know a lot about his background. Though he didn't come from a big sports family, as a kid he showed a lot of athletic potential. Snowboarding was his favorite, and he was good at it. So good that in 2002, when Wedding was 21 years old, he qualified for the Olympics. He headed to Salt Lake City, Utah to compete.

4:542002, Salt Lake City.

5:04Unfortunately, the Olympics didn't really launch Wedding's career. He doesn't finish near the top. He was 24th, which is still world-class whatever sport you're in. But it's not enough to necessarily make a career out of it. Now, Wedding had to find something else to do with his life. I used to work for the Olympics in Beijing 2008 in the Olympic Village. I've spoken to a lot of athletes now as I look at sports and crime. And you do see a recurring pattern of people who have trained their entire life for that achievement, right? The snowboarding world is not a world in which many people make a professional living.

5:44It's not football, it's not volleyball, it's not basketball, where you can transition into coaching at a university or coaching college. And so I can imagine Ryan James Wedding after the Olympics feels deflated, feels a lack of opportunity, feels a big what's next in his career. At first, Wedding pursued a more traditional route. He went to Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. But something changed when he was there. Though he was enrolled in college, higher education didn't appear to be a real focus. After years of dedicating himself to snowboarding, he may have simply lost his footing when it came to academics.

6:27Maybe after brushing up against fame and fortune, a normal life just didn't seem appealing anymore. Or maybe he just fell in with a bad crowd. But very quickly, he falls into drug trafficking. Initially, small time, he got popped in 2006 for a fairly large marijuana bust. So I can easily imagine that when you look at Canada in the mid-2000s, well, going into the marijuana business was an easy choice, right? It's somewhere you can make money. At the time, there were a ton of weed farms in British Columbia and Vancouver. They supplied most of the domestic trade in Canada and the U.S. In the bus that Wedding got caught up in, authorities seized 6 ,800 plants.

7:18And if, like Wedding, you're a charismatic dude, you know how to talk, you're good with money, you've got a good head on your shoulders, you're good with logistics, people can use you. For sure. Meaning, drug dealers, or even growers, can find ways to use someone like that. And remember, wedding was surrounded by an industry that was just starting to boom. Lucky for him, the charges were dropped. To Ryan, that seemed like proof that drug dealing pays off. So he dropped out of school. His time trafficking marijuana taught him that he didn't really need a college degree to make money. It was actually just an entry point to a very lucrative world.

8:05We know from a number of traffickers that dealing marijuana can be a gateway to dealing harder substances. Once Wedding got himself off the cookie-cutter path laid out for him, he went all in on drugs. He appears in 2008 in California, and that seems to be where he gets his start as a cocaine trafficker. That career, as we will see, takes him a lot further and makes him a lot more money. There's a reason that California is one of the first states to legalize marijuana in the United States. It already has a number of illegal plantations. So he finds his feet in drug trafficking in that world. He is very charismatic and seems to have a knack for both people and logistics.

8:49Very quickly, he surrounds himself with an unusual array of criminal partners from all around the world. In 15 years of covering organized crime, I don't think I've ever seen a single person dabble in so many criminal pawns. Wedding kept quiet about the empire he was building. It's possible that after his 2006 arrest, he had learned to fly under the radar. And with no one the wiser, things escalated. He made moves. Big moves. In 2008, he flies into Los Angeles. Next to him are two people. One is an Iranian money launderer. His name was Hassan Shahari. And one is a former Russian mobster. Michael Kropchen, who owes a ton of drug money to a man named Yuri Trufanov.

9:50He's an ex-KGB agent turned cocaine dealer. Wedding's got all this money in his suitcase. This is not a James Bond movie plot. This is a legitimate drug deal. They arrive at LAX. The ex-KGB agent Trofanov asks for the money up front. They're in the middle of a bustling airport with security cameras everywhere. Wedding can tell something is off. If you're involved in such a secretive undertaking like cocaine dealing, you're not going to draw attention to yourself by handing over a bunch of money in such a public place. He lies to Trufinov and says they don't have the money on them, but that they'll get it to him within a couple days.

10:39Turns out that that ex-KGB agent was completely collaborating with U.S. authorities and was wearing a wire. but since the deal didn't actually go down there's nothing the fbi can do yet wedding and his associates go to their hotel to regroup they know they can't meet trufanov in person again but if cropchin doesn't give him his money he's a dead man so they wire him the funds from an Iranian account, a money or value transfer service called Hawala. Now, Hawala is illegal in the U.S., so Wedding and his partners don't anticipate American authorities to monitor it. They don't think they'll get caught.

11:25But the feds are watching too closely. And within two days, all three men are arrested. When Wedding goes to trial, he turns on the charm. He gives a really convincing apology. He sort of talks around, mentions his Olympic past, and gets a four-year sentence. Which, for a major cocaine deal when you're dealing with Iranians and Russians, is very lenient. Wenning also had to turn over$120 ,000 as part of a plea deal. He was sent to prison in Texas, but he only ended up serving two years before being released, most likely let out early for good behavior. However, he accomplished quite a lot while he was behind bars.

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14:31In 2008, Ryan Wedding was sentenced to four years in prison after a cocaine bust that occurred in Los Angeles. He only served two years, but he made good use of his time behind bars. While he's in prison, he gets mad. His wife has never been publicly released. We know she's Iranian-Canadian, and there is a strong belief among investigators that marrying her gave him access to financiers from Iran. In Chris Dalby's article, For Seasons of Crime, he explains that after Wedding left prison, he got access to encrypted money wiring systems. Those systems were linked to Hezbollah, a Lebanese paramilitary group that the U.S.

15:18State Department considers a terrorist organization. As he built out his connections, he was able to give his associates custom-encrypted BlackBerrys. so again we see this ability to navigate people to get ahead of the system at the same time the prison he was sent to was basically on the mexican border and while he was there wedding made one more crucial connection because right when he got out he moved to mexico we don't know if his wife went with him but we do know he wasn't there long He's setting up the building blocks for what is one of the largest cocaine trafficking rings in the Americas.

16:04It was a whirlwind. You don't go from a bus for marijuana to being next to KGB and Iranian guys two years later. That is the man who clearly showed an ability early on to find the right people, to find the right contacts and find the right money to make those larger deals. After about a year in Mexico, Wedding relocated to Montreal, where he keeps amassing shady contacts. By 2012, Montreal is a big city for the Sinaloa cartel. And I swear to God, I'm not just name-dropping every famous crime group in the world. He legitimately is connected to all of them. This is still a time when Sinaloa cartel is uncontested in Mexico.

16:48The Jalisco cartel New Generation is just starting. Their control of the cocaine trade into the US and into Canada is massive, especially through Chicago. Chicago has always been a platform for the Sinaloa cartel to get drugs into Canada, first into Toronto. And then into Montreal, where he seamlessly enmeshes himself with some of the most dangerous people on the North American continent. He makes friends with two big groups, Hells Angels. That's not unusual. Hells Angels move drugs across Canada. They're well known for it. But Wedding doesn't just set his sights on big-name criminals. Again, he knows this isn't a James Bond movie.

17:31He's thinking practically, logistically. He makes friends with a family of Sikh Punjabi immigrants. that own trucking companies. He moves drugs from the US into Canada in large hauling trucks up the Pacific coast, and then along southern Canada into the bigger cities like Toronto and Montreal. The last 10 years, everybody's been saying that the cocaine trade has moved from the US to Europe. Europe is the center of the global cocaine trade right now. Well, Wedding proved us wrong. Wedding was moving 60 tons of cocaine a year into North America, showing that if there was still a market for the drug, he was going to absolutely corner that market, whatever was left of it, after the Europeans started buying most of the cocaine in the world.

18:24He would make deals with anyone. He didn't have an existing network to build on. He didn't have a bunch of money to invest himself. He found his own finances. He found his own drug suppliers, and he found his own drug distributors. It's astonishing how quickly he fits into these international drug rings. So again, we're seeing these building blocks that sort of escalate into the pyramid that he would sit atop of in the 2020s. He corrupts people very quickly. We know of police officers. We know of a woman who was on a Greenwood Air Force base in Nova Scotia. She was a secretary at the base, and he was paying her to clear the way for his drugs to come in and get off base.

19:05We know that there was several members of the Canadian military and Coast Guard that were in his pocket. At this point, Ryan Wedding's level of persuasion is giving off serious Charles Manson vibes, the kind of charisma that compels people into doing whatever he tells them to. Again, when you're talking about the Sinaloa cartel, when you're talking about guys like Wedding, they're not selling drugs door-to-door, corner-to-corner. They're the middlemen. He's moving billions of dollars, tons of drugs at a time, then moving them into the cities. Then in the cities, he'll be selling those drugs to local gangs who are then in charge of getting to individual users.

19:48Smaller drug offenses started popping up in those cities. And by 2013, just a couple years after Wedding got out of prison in Texas, Canadian authorities started putting together the puzzle pieces and realized they had a major drug operation underfoot. The Royal Mounted Police in Canada launches an operation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, of all places, Nova Scotia, really, you know, that island off the east coast of Canada. And they, for the first time, see that there's cocaine going from South America straight to Halifax. Royal Canadian Mounted Police agents went undercover, using fishing boats to track drug shipments.

20:32The drugs were being handed off at sea, and as agents mapped the route further and further, they discovered that the cocaine coming into Canada was coming from the Mexican cartel. Joaquin Guzman, a.k.a. El Chapo, still headed things up at that point. According to the Canadian news outlet The National Post, investigators noticed over time that whenever a Canadian drug trafficker entered El Chapo's orbit, They ended up dead. So the Mounties went all in. They wiretap people. They roll up conspirators in five countries outside Canada, including Antigua, Brazil, Colombia, Guyana, the US, moving cocaine in on planes and then shipping it by truck to Canada.

21:24At least one Toronto-based trafficker, a major figure in the drug ring, went to prison. But before long, authorities realized there was one man who remained untouched. Wedding is a top-down organization. Two years after he comes out of jail. That tells you this is a very smart guy. We can't deny that organizing that scale of drug deal within two years is impressive. It tells you his ambition. Thing is, all that ambition came at a price. Canada's not the U.S. It has a fairly low homicide rate, but we begin to see some of his lieutenants getting shot. In 2015, all the way across the country from Montreal, two men were killed in Calgary.

22:15One man's cause of death was a mystery, but ruled as a homicide. The other man was shot. Well aware of the drug problem sweeping the nation, investigators looked into how the two deaths might have been related. Pretty soon, their suspicions were confirmed. Both men were, quote, connected to a group of individuals who were heavily involved in drug activity. Task forces from Canada and the U.S., as well as the Drug Enforcement Administration, worked together to track down the killers. And in 2016, they found them. We have charged four men in connection with two murders and an ongoing drug investigation.

23:05During the first arrest, agents seized over 14 kilos of cocaine and 3 kilos of methamphetamine. They then obtained warrants to search the other suspects' homes. And then Ryan Wedding fled to Mexico. And what he does in Mexico is truly amazing. We don't know exactly where he was set up. We believe he was in Sinaloa. But he starts working for the Sinaloa cartel. We know that Wedding already had close ties with the Sinaloa cartel. But then he made a surprising move. And he starts working with the Jalisco cartel new generation. Now, these are blood rivals in the strongest possible use of the term.

23:49This part of Chappas is the heart of a turf war between Mexico's two most powerful cartels. Signs of violence are all around. Buildings scarred by large caliber bullets and abandoned houses. The attacks between the two fighting factions are taking place mostly at night. And so every morning right now, the city is waking up to scenes like this one, bodies dumped in the street. Ryan Wedding became a middleman between two of the most violent, notorious cartels in history. The Sinaloa-CJNG war is the main contributor to Mexican drug violence for the last decade. And his organization broke his deals between them, which is unheard of.

24:37He had a number two called Andrew Clark, another Canadian who was arrested last year and just sector into the US. But again, this is a man who is incredibly skilled at these alliances. He was in a very protected position. He had Iranian money protecting his investments, financing his deals. He had access and partners in Colombia and Guyana, getting the cocaine in Colombia, moving it to Guyana and flying it into the US or into Mexico. He had access in the US to a network of trucking companies to move drugs inside the US, California, and into Canada. He then had partnerships in Canada to distribute it.

25:16So the Sinhala cartel didn't actually face a lot of risks in partnering with him. They could just get a cut of moving cocaine through their territory, moving cocaine through CJNG territory. It was essentially a no-loss situation. From there, once they see that he's a trusted guy, we start hearing about Ryan James' wedding outside of cocaine. We start hearing about him in fentanyl. We start hearing about him in meth. He's one of the few foreigners living in Mexico who has his own criminal alias. They call him El Jefe or El Gigante, the chief or the giant. Until that, he's been spotted a couple of times in Mexico.

25:51He seemed to have been living under fake papers. It went on like this for years, until El Chapo, the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel, was finally put in prison. That shift gave Ryan Wedding status, protection, and freedom. He felt untouchable. But with no one to rein him in, he soon became his own worst enemy.

26:26By the late 2010s, Ryan James Wedding was at the top of his drug empire. He had connections to numerous criminal organizations around the world. But as he charted out his own kingdom, chopping down the competition, Wedding got overzealous. He's dropping too many bodies. He was ordering hit after hit. And in November of 2023, someone got sloppy. An Indian Sikh couple who had just arrived in Canada to visit their children who were living there are murdered by accident. A gunman bursts into their home. It's an absolutely brutal murder. I think they were hit over 15 times each. Their daughter was hit over a dozen times.

27:17She miraculously survives. It turns out they had nothing to do with any of the drug trafficking. It turned out Wedding's men had mistaken the father for someone else. This was a massive blunder.