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Canada|From an Olympic Snowboarder to an Accused Drug Kingpin and Killer
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/world/canada/ryan-wedding-olympic-snowboarder-drug-lord.html
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Ryan Wedding rose to fame as a Canadian Olympic athlete, but the authorities say he became one of the world’s biggest drug lords, who ordered an informant executed.
Dec. 26, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
The target was a drug trafficker turned F.B.I. informant who didn’t stand a chance. As he had lunch with friends at a restaurant in Medellín, Colombia, a hit man in a dark hoodie sneaked up behind him and shot him five times in the head.
The man who had ordered the hit quickly received a photograph of the body, the authorities said. He reshared it widely — boasting that he had killed “the rat.”
The man behind the killing was Ryan Wedding, a Canadian who rose to fame as an Olympic snowboarder two decades ago, only to become what the authorities describe as one of the world’s biggest drug lords. “El Jefe,” as he was known, ran a drug-trafficking empire out of Mexico and was now one of the most wanted fugitives in the world.
The killing in Medellín in January of this year — detailed in a grand jury indictment in the United States, a State Department reward offer and two court documents filed in Canada — was the culmination of months of meticulous work by Mr. Wedding, the authorities said, to track down a Montreal-born associate who had flipped to become the U.S. government’s star witness in a pending trial.
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Mr. Wedding placed a $5 million bounty on the turncoat and dispatched an underling to pursue leads from Mecca to Medellín, according to prosecutors. Government lawyers said he obtained key information from a panoply of people — a hit man nicknamed “Kim Jong Un,” a reggaeton D.J. in Montreal, a crime blogger in Toronto, the head of a prostitution ring in Colombia and a sex worker in Miami — in exchange for cash payments and even promises of a down payment on a house and breast implants.
