Few life arcs today match the fascinating and painful story of Ryan Wedding, a former Canadian Olympic athlete who became a major cocaine trafficker in the Americas. Wanted for years by US authorities, part of the FBI’s most wanted list, the Treasury Department announced sanctions on Wednesday against him and his support network, a chain of people and companies that includes a Canadian lawyer and a jeweler, a former member of the Italian special forces and a Colombian pimp, who runs a prostitution ring in Mexico.
“A former Olympic snowboarder, Wedding, 44, is an extremely violent criminal allegedly responsible for the murder of numerous people abroad, including American citizens. He remains a fugitive from justice, hiding in Mexico, where he continues to direct drug trafficking, murders and other serious criminal activity,” the Treasury Department said in a statement. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) also indicated that the State Department increased the reward offered for the marriage, from $10 million to $15 million.
The defendant, the statement continues, “is responsible for trafficking tons of cocaine through Colombia and Mexico and then distributing it in the United States and Canada. His criminal organization uses cryptocurrencies to move and launder the profits of drug trafficking, thus hiding large sums of illicit money. According to the FBI”, the text adds, “Wedding ordered dozens of murders around the world, including the United States, Canada and Latin America. He uses highly sophisticated methods in both the planning and execution of these crimes.” The US justice system accuses him of cocaine trafficking, murder, attempted murder and continuing criminal activity, among other crimes.
The Treasury sanctions mean the assets of Wedding and nine other people and as many companies as part of his alleged criminal operation will be frozen. OFAC has listed an alleged former Mexican security agent, Edgar Vázquez Alvarado, as the head of its security team. “Vázquez, alias El General, provides protection in Mexico and uses police contacts to locate his targets. Vázquez is believed to be a former Mexican law enforcement officer with ties to senior police officials in the country,” the statement read.
The list includes, in addition to Vázquez, Wedding’s “wife”, Miryam Andrea Castillo Moreno, 34 years old, originally from Nuevo León, in northern Mexico; his “girlfriend”, Daniela Alejandra Acuña Macías, Colombian, 23 years old, who the authorities located near Morelia, Michoacán; an alleged Colombian collaborator of the Canadian, Carmen Yelinet Valoyes, who, according to OFAC, operates a high-level prostitution ring in Mexico City; Canadian lawyer Deepak Balwant Paradkar, who “introduced Wedding to drug traffickers who distributed his cocaine and also helped him with bribes and murders”; Canadian jeweler Rolan Sokolovski and former Italian special forces member Gianluca Tiepolo, the latter, is part of his washing network.
The activities attributed to each are various. Of Miryam Castillo, his wife, they say, for example, that “she launders money from drug trafficking on Wedding’s behalf and helped him commit acts of violence.” From Carmen Valoyes, who “assisted Wedding in the murder of a federal witness in January 2025” and who introduced the alleged criminal leader to his girlfriend, Daniela Acuña. As for the murder of the witness, it is the Colombian-Canadian Jonathan Christopher Acevedo, murdered in Medellín, Colombia. Acevedo had served a sentence years earlier in Canada for drug trafficking.
The list goes on. Of Acuña herself, OFAC points out that she received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wedding, knowing his activities, and that she “helped him obtain information on his rivals.” And of lawyer Paradkar, the Treasury also claims that he allowed “Wedding and his associates to intercept confidential communications with other of his clients, many of whom Wedding wanted to kill.”
Of his money laundering network, OFAC points out that Sokolovski, the Canadian jeweler, “oversaw the accounting of Wedding’s organization and laundered his funds through his jewelry store, which operates under the trade name Diamond Tsar and has a store in Toronto. In addition to using his business as a front for money laundering, Sokolovski transferred millions of dollars from drug trafficking through cryptocurrencies, thus concealing the source of the profits.” For his part, “Tiepolo collaborated closely with Sokolovski in the acquisition and management of Wedding’s assets, including high-end vehicles,” such as a 2002 Mercedes CLK-GTR, valued at $13 million, confiscated by the FBI.
Marriage is an enigma to the collective of sociology schools around the world. A precocious snowboarder, he made the Canadian national team at age 15 and, at age 21, competed in the parallel giant slalom category at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Identified by the aliases “King” and “James Conrad,” named after a character from a King Kong film, Wedding comes from an affluent, middle-class family in British Columbia. After the Olympics, he began studying at a university in the Vancouver area, a career his parents funded.
But the academic adventure lasted only two years, as journalist Jesse Hyde states RollingStone, who has followed him since 2009. Attracted by the night and by the local criminal scene, violent in those years, by the control of the marijuana market, Wedding began his career as a security guard at bars and clubs in the city, while starting a huge marijuana plantation. In 2006 the authorities intervened in the warehouses, plants and tools and Wedding had to start from scratch. After some operations in the local real estate market, the Canadian moved to the Major League of Drugs and tried to enter the cocaine market.
Bad luck for him is that one of his first purchases, monitored by the FBI in Southern California, went wrong. Authorities arrested Wedding and sent him to prison. The year was 2008. The Canadian spent three years in prison, between San Diego, California, and Texas, until the United States agreed to send him to Canada to finish serving his sentence. It seems that the years of prison in the southern United States served as a school for the trafficker who, once he returned to his country, started again.
Little is known of Wedding’s movements for just over 10 years. Like the United States, Mexican authorities place it south of the Rio Grande, as federal security secretary Omar García Harfuch acknowledged in March. The Navy arrested one of its collaborators in Jalisco in October last year, Andrew Clark. The US justice system emphasizes that the Sinaloa Cartel, or one of the factions that formed it, protects him and works with him. He is known to have had meetings in Mexico City over the past two years. He is blond and muscular. Measures over 1.90m. It seems difficult for anyone to find it.
