A Canadian snowboarder who suited up for the country at the Olympic Games has been found at the centre of a potential major crime ring.
Ryan Wedding was named in a superseding indictment along with 15 other defendants for “allegedly running and participating in a transnational drug trafficking operation that routinely shipped hundreds of kilograms of cocaine, from Colombia, through Mexico and Southern California, to Canada and other locations in the United States, and whose leaders orchestrated multiple murders in furtherance of these drug crimes,” as per a statement today from the US Attorney’s Office, Central District of California.
The 40-year-old competed for Canada at the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, finishing 24th in the parallel giant slalom. He remains at large, with the FBI offering $50,000 for information relating to his arrest.
“As alleged in the indictment, an Olympic athlete-turned-drug lord is now charged with leading a transnational organized crime group that engaged in cocaine trafficking and murder, including of innocent civilians,” said United States Attorney Martin Estrada.
“My office’s mandate is to protect the public and stopping sophisticated and violent organized crime groups goes to the heart of that mission. We will continue to collaborate with our federal, local, and international law enforcement partners to bring these groups to justice.”
The statement provided further details of the alleged operation, which ran from “approximately January 2024 to August 2024.”
If convicted, Wedding and his co-conspirators would face a mandatory minimum penalty of life in federal prison on the murder and attempted murder charges.
“The superseding indictment alleges that Wedding, Clark, 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,” the statement continued. “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 the transportation network couriers for transportation to Canada using long-haul semi-trucks.”
Wedding had previously been arrested in 2008 in Los Angeles on drug charges, while he was also named in a 2015 warrant, as per the Vancouver Sun.
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