Olympic Snowboarder and Drug Kingpin Charged With Orchestrating Witness Murder

November 19, 2025

Ryan James Wedding, 43, represented Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, where he came in 24th in the men’s parallel giant slalom. Since then, though, he’s become more famous for his part in running a transnational drug trafficking ring. Now, authorities have added additional charges in connection with the killing of a federal witness, as the Associated Press reports.

Wedding, who also went under the aliases “El Jefe,” “Giant,” and “Public Enemy,” is accused of leading an organized crime group that not only shipped hundreds of kilograms of cocaine, but also orchestrated multiple murders. According to the Central California U.S. Attorney’s Office, “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.” THE Inertia