The Snowboarder. On the trail of Ryan Wedding
On the trail of Ryan Wedding, the Olympic athlete who became one of the F.B.I.’s most wanted fugitives.
A 2002 Olympic snowboarder running a billion-dollar cocaine empire would make for decent Netflix material. The actual indictment, however, reads less like scripted drama and more like a graduate seminar in how transnational organized crime actually operates in 2025.
The Wedding Criminal Enterprise—the DOJ’s terminology, not mine—supplied more cocaine to Canada than any other organization. Colombian neo-paramilitary kitchens cooked the product, Mexican cartel partners moved it north by boat and plane, semi-trucks handled the border crossing, and stash houses across Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino staged it for Canadian transportation networks. Textbook vertical integration, executed at scale.
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The story begins, as these stories often do, somewhere unremarkable.
In the winter of 2002, a twenty-two-year-old Canadian named Ryan James Wedding competed in the giant parallel slalom at the Salt Lake City Olympics. He did not medal. The event itself was unremarkable—Wedding finished well outside the podium, one of those athletes who make the Games but leave no trace in the record books. A photograph from that time shows a young man with the vaguely cocky expression common to winter-sports competitors, someone you might see at a Whistler bar and forget by morning.
Twenty-three years later, in late January of 2026, Wedding was escorted off a plane in handcuffs, transferred to American custody after his arrest in Mexico City. He had spent years on the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list—a distinction he shares with figures like James Earl Ray and Osama bin Laden. The charges against him span fifty-four pages and nine counts: conspiracy to distribute cocaine, conspiracy to export cocaine, murder in connection with a continuing criminal enterprise, witness tampering by completed murder. The organization he allegedly led, which federal prosecutors refer to, with characteristic bureaucratic flatness, as “the Wedding Criminal Enterprise,” is described in the indictment as “a billion-dollar drug trafficking organization” and “the largest supplier of cocaine to Canada.”
The trajectory from Olympic also-ran to cartel boss is unusual, though perhaps not as unusual as one might hope. What distinguishes the Wedding case, and what has drawn the attention of Treasury officials, blockchain analysts, and anyone who studies the intersection of organized crime and digital finance, is not the cocaine. Cocaine is boring—it moves, as it has for decades, from Colombian labs through Mexican corridors and across the southern border. What is interesting is everything else: the cryptocurrency laundering operation that processed hundreds of millions of dollars through Tether wallets; the Canadian lawyer whose Threema handle was, allegedly, “cocaine_lawyer”; the Instagram account that posted proof-of-death photographs with the caption “BOOM! Headshot”; the bejewelled necklace commissioned as payment for facilitating a murder. The Wedding indictment reads less like a drug case than like a engaging document about how transnational organized crime actually functions in the twenty-twenties—complete with encrypted messaging apps, stablecoin transfers, and, for reasons that remain somewhat obscure, a thirteen-million-dollar Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR.
The basic narrative is this: After his Olympic appearance, Wedding drifted into drug trafficking. In 2009, he was convicted in the Southern District of California of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and served roughly two years in federal prison. According to the indictment, he founded his criminal enterprise “no later than” December 7, 2011—the day of his release. The organization he built sourced cocaine from Colombia, where it was manufactured and tested in facilities run coöperatively with what prosecutors describe as “a Colombian neo-paramilitary group and drug cartel.” The product moved north by boat and plane to Mexico, then crossed into the United States by semi-truck. Stash houses in Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties served as the central hub; from there, Canadian “transportation networks”—referred to in the indictment, with an acronym that suggests a suburban delivery service, as “TPs”—conveyed the cocaine to its final markets.
Wedding, meanwhile, lived in Mexico, reportedly under the protection of cartel associates. He managed operations remotely, using GrapheneOS phones—a privacy-focussed mobile operating system favored by journalists, activists, and, apparently, international drug traffickers. His co-defendants include his second-in-command, Andrew Clark, also a Canadian; a Colombian citizen who managed a cocaine laboratory; a Lithuanian-Canadian jeweller and professional poker player; an Italian former special-forces member who ran “paramilitary-style training camps” for enforcers; and a Canadian reggaeton artist who provided a murder target’s contact information for somewhere between five hundred and a thousand Canadian dollars.
The cast of characters is extensive. One struggles, reading through the indictment, to invent better ones.
The financial dimension of the case has attracted particular attention from analysts who track illicit cryptocurrency flows. According to Treasury Department findings and blockchain-analysis reports, Wedding’s network used multiple blockchains—Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRON, BNB Chain, Solana—and stablecoins, particularly Tether, to move and launder drug proceeds. The strategy involved fragmenting large sums into smaller transfers, routing them through intermediary wallets, and passing them through what regulators call “high-risk virtual asset service providers.” The indictment includes a flow chart—reproduced from what appears to be a law-enforcement analysis—showing Tether movements between various wallets and cryptocurrency exchanges.
The numbers are considerable. Between April and October of 2024, according to the indictment, a single wallet cluster controlled by one of Wedding’s alleged financiers, a man named Rasheed Pascua Hossain, sent approximately two hundred and seven million U.S.D.T.—the ticker symbol for Tether—to a wallet controlled by Wedding. Another defendant, the jeweller Rolan Sokolovski, who operated under the alias “Diamond Tsar” and, per the indictment, also went by “The Jew,” allegedly received more than twenty million U.S.D.T. through his KuCoin account between September, 2023, and May, 2024. Sokolovski’s role, prosecutors allege, was to convert cryptocurrency proceeds into luxury goods: watches, jewellery, the usual instruments of value storage for those who prefer their assets portable and untraceable.
Then there is Gianluca Tiepolo, an Italian citizen and former special-forces member who, according to Treasury’s sanctions announcement, managed a fleet of luxury vehicles—including the aforementioned Mercedes CLK GTR, which was seized by the F.B.I. and is valued at around thirteen million dollars—through front companies in Italy and the United Kingdom. Tiepolo also allegedly operated the paramilitary training camps. The indictment does not specify what, exactly, was taught at these camps, but one can venture a guess.
The most serious charges against Wedding involve murder—specifically, the January, 2025, killing of a federal witness in Medellín, Colombia. The victim, identified in court documents only as “Victim A,” had apparently served as an intermediary in cocaine transactions and subsequently coöperated with American authorities. When a superseding indictment against Wedding was unsealed, in October, 2024, Victim A’s testimony was evidently central to the government’s case.
According to prosecutors, Wedding responded by placing a bounty of up to five million dollars on Victim A’s head. The indictment details the subsequent efforts to locate the target: a Canadian defendant named Ahmad Nabil Zitoun was allegedly paid ten thousand Canadian dollars, plus expenses, to travel to Medellín and Mecca—Victim A had apparently gone on pilgrimage—in search of the witness. (Zitoun was offered the contract to carry out the killing itself but declined.) A network of commercial sex workers, operated by a Colombian woman named Carmen Yelinet Valoyes Florez, was deployed to gather information. Wedding allegedly paid eighteen thousand five hundred dollars for “an on-device interception tool” to be installed on Victim A’s phone.
On January 31, 2025, according to the indictment, Victim A was eating at a restaurant in Medellín. A man on a motorcycle had followed him there. Another man—referred to in the indictment as “LNU 2,” for “last name unknown”—entered the restaurant, approached Victim A’s table, and shot him approximately five times in the head. A fourth defendant photographed the body. Within hours, a Canadian man named Gursewak Singh Bal, who operated an urban-news Instagram account called the Dirty News, posted an image of the crime scene with the caption “BOOM! Headshot.” Bal had allegedly been paid ten thousand Canadian dollars to publicize Victim A’s photograph before the killing and to refrain from posting about Wedding and Clark.
The payment for facilitating the murder, according to prosecutors, was approximately five hundred thousand U.S.D.T., transferred via Threema-coördinated instructions. A Canadian defendant named Atna Ohna, who allegedly helped locate the victim, received a hundred and fifty thousand Canadian dollars, thirty kilograms of cocaine, and a custom necklace made by Sokolovski.
Among the defendants is Deepak Balwant Paradkar, a criminal-defence lawyer based in the Toronto area. Paradkar’s alleged role in the organization is distinctive and, for those who study professional enablers, instructive. He is not accused merely of providing legal representation to Wedding and his associates—that would be, within limits, his job. Rather, the indictment alleges that Paradkar “go[ing] beyond legitimate legal representation” introduced Wedding to cocaine suppliers, assisted with bribery, facilitated murder plots, and allowed Wedding to monitor privileged communications, allegedly in exchange for luxury watches and illicit fees.
The specifics are detailed. When two couriers transporting Wedding’s cocaine were arrested in Arkansas in October, 2024, Paradkar allegedly called law enforcement to gather information about their detention, then arranged to speak with the defendants while Clark—Wedding’s second-in-command—”covertly listened in.” When Clark and another co-conspirator began discussing, in a Threema group chat, the possibility of murdering one of the arrested drivers, Paradkar allegedly advised them to continue the conversation elsewhere and to delete the messages. (Prosecutors describe this as Paradkar “advise[ing] them to discuss the matter on a different chat without him present.”)
Most striking, perhaps, is the allegation that Paradkar advised Wedding and Clark that if Victim A were killed, “the charges against them in Wedding I and related extradition proceedings would necessarily be dismissed.” Whether this reflects sound legal analysis is, of course, a separate question; the charges against Wedding have not, in fact, been dismissed. Paradkar was denied bail in November, 2024; a Canadian court found him to be a flight risk. His Threema handle, according to the indictment, was “cocaine_lawyer.” One assumes this was not listed on his Law Society of Ontario registration.
On November 18, 2025, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Wedding, nine individuals, and nine entities under Executive Order 14059, which targets transnational criminal organizations. The sanctions block their property and prohibit American persons from transacting with them. The State Department raised the reward for information leading to Wedding’s arrest to fifteen million dollars. The Justice Department issued a superseding indictment.
The designated individuals include Wedding’s wife, Miryam Andrea Castillo Moreno, who is alleged to have laundered drug proceeds and helped facilitate violent acts; Florez, the operator of the sex-worker network, who allegedly assisted in the Medellín murder and a separate killing of a federal witness in Colombia; and several others whose roles ranged from financial management to, in one case, collecting “large sums of money from Wedding while knowing his lifestyle was funded by violent narcotics trafficking.”
Treasury’s sanctions announcement describes the organization as “extremely violent,” attributing to it “dozens of murders across multiple countries.” The Medellín killing was not an anomaly. In November, 2023, according to the indictment, Wedding and Clark ordered the murder of a Canadian transportation-network associate whom they believed had stolen three hundred kilograms of cocaine. The assassins broke into a rental property in Caledon, Ontario, and shot three people—killing two and seriously wounding a third—whom they mistakenly believed to be the target’s family members. They were not. The actual target apparently escaped.
What does one make of Ryan Wedding? The Olympics-to-cartel narrative is, admittedly, arresting—it has the quality of a prestige-television pitch, the kind of thing that gets greenlit on the basis of a single sentence. But the substance of the case is more banal and, for that reason, more instructive. Wedding built an organization that functioned, in most respects, like any large-scale cocaine-trafficking enterprise: Colombian production, Mexican logistics, American distribution hubs, Canadian retail markets. The innovation, such as it was, lay in the financial infrastructure—the use of stablecoins and fragmented blockchain transactions to move hundreds of millions of dollars across borders without relying on the traditional banking system. And in the professional enablers: the lawyer, the jeweller, the Instagram influencer, the network of associates who provided services ranging from cryptocurrency conversion to murder-for-hire.
The indictment describes Wedding as using numerous aliases: “James Conrad King,” “Jesse King,” “El Jefe,” “El Toro,” “Giant,” “Grande,” “Public Enemy,” and a series of alphanumeric strings that appear to be wallet identifiers or encrypted-messaging handles. He reportedly lived well in Mexico—cartel protection, remote management, the lifestyle of a man who has, against all reasonable expectation, made it. He was forty-five years old when he was arrested.
The charges against him carry potential sentences that include, for the murder counts, the death penalty or life imprisonment. Court proceedings are ongoing. There is no final judgment yet on the most recent charges.
In the photograph from 2002, he looks like what he was: a young athlete who had made the Olympics and would leave no mark on the sport. Twenty-three years later, he has left a different kind of mark—fifty-four pages of it, filed in the Central District of California, detailing a billion-dollar criminal enterprise, multiple murders, and a cryptocurrency-laundering operation that moved more money in six months than most people will see in several lifetimes. The Salt Lake City giant parallel slalom, one suspects, is not the event for which he will be remembered.
Founder and Managing Partner of Skarbiec Law Firm, recognized by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna as one of the best tax advisory firms in Poland (2023, 2024). Legal advisor with 19 years of experience, serving Forbes-listed entrepreneurs and innovative start-ups. One of the most frequently quoted experts on commercial and tax law in the Polish media, regularly publishing in Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Author of the publication “AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto. Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator” and co-author of the award-winning book “Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy” (Security of a Modern Company). LinkedIn profile: 18 500 followers, 4 million views per year. Awards: 4-time winner of the European Medal, Golden Statuette of the Polish Business Leader, title of “International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.” He specializes in strategic legal consulting, tax planning, and crisis management for business.
