T
he hit man called himself Mr. Perfect. He had been given the list. He wanted the easiest one first.
He’d also need a getaway car, a fake ID, and a place to drop the gun.
The man who hired him went by Mero Wero. He said he would take care of all of that, plus any expenses. He suggested they start with the ginger, who lived in Niagara Falls, not too far from Mr. Perfect’s home in Toronto.
“Driveway job,” Mero Wero said. He’d pay $100,000.
The ginger was a redhead named Randy Fader. He was 29 years old and recently married, with two little blonde girls. He kept his hair in a tight fade and his red beard neatly trimmed. Had tattoos up and down his arm, none of which looked all that expensive. He was easy to spot and easy to find.
He lived right by the river, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. His family was well known to police in the run-down neighborhoods around Clifton Hill, the kitschy spot modeled after Times Square where tourists came to see the falls or gamble at the casino. In 2020, police had raided the home of Randy’s dad and seized cocaine, fentanyl, cash, a couple Mossberg shotguns, a pill press, and a stun gun. They arrested Randy, his dad, his mom, and his sister.
“Drive over Niagara and blow this guy’s top off,” Mero Wero instructed.
Last April 1st, a little after 6 p.m., Mr. Perfect pulled up to the address Mero Wero had given him in Niagara, a shaded lane thick with century-old trees and sagging houses with overgrown lawns, hopped out, and shot Fader in his driveway.
While Fader was transported to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Mr. Perfect headed to Toronto, parked next to a Ford Explorer with Alberta plates, switched cars, and drove off. He took a picture of the 9mm and a pile of cash and captioned it “Good night!”
For a 23-year-old contract killer who had just gotten out of jail for attempted murder, it had been a good night indeed, with everything going according to plan. Or so it seemed. Unfortunately for Mero Wero and Mr. Perfect, the getaway plan and disposal of evidence had been far from perfect.
Within days of the shooting, police in Niagara identified the car used in the hit: a white Audi SUV with darkly tinted windows. CCTV footage in Toronto showed Mr. Perfect exiting the Audi, getting into the Explorer, and driving off.
About two weeks after the murder, police pulled over the Explorer in Toronto. Mr. Perfect was behind the wheel. Searching the vehicle, police found 9mm bullets, over $100,000 in Canadian cash, and four cell phones — including a white iPhone that, when searched under warrant, included Mr. Perfect’s conversations with Mero Wero, Randy Fader’s street address, and a list of other people Mero Wero wanted dead.
Their conversations had taken place over Threema, a messaging app popular among drug dealers and organized crime because it features end-to-end encryption and doesn’t store messages on its servers in Switzerland, meaning, theoretically, that police can’t access them with a subpoena. Had Mr. Perfect thought to delete any of his messages with Mero Wero, the motive behind the murder may have remained a mystery. Instead, police linked Mero Wero’s Threema account to two other instances of contract killings in the greater Toronto area — one for a drug debt, the other a lost load — and plans to traffic cocaine from Los Angeles to Canada.
On Oct. 8, Mero Wero was sitting in a restaurant in Guadalajara when the Mexican Navy entered and arrested him. Usually, Mexican armed forces are utilized only in highly sensitive cases involving targets that have enough juice with the cartels that they can buy off municipal and state police. Roughly a week later, Mr. Perfect was taken into custody in Toronto, while police in Miami raided a multimillion-dollar mansion that had once belonged to DJ Khaled and arrested its owner, a music executive with a popular restaurant in Miami Beach.
The arrests were part of a sprawling investigation into a drug trafficking organization that routinely moved hundreds of kilos of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and Southern California to Canada, Martin Estrada, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, announced at a press conference in Los Angeles on Oct. 17. Besides Mero Wero and Mr. Perfect, 10 other members of the organization had been arrested. Only four remained at large, including its alleged leader.
His name was Ryan Wedding. In a photo Estrada used to announce a reward for his capture, Wedding had long, stringy hair that seemed to be thinning, steely blue eyes, and a beard. The photo was 11 years old and came from his driver’s license. But it was the best the FBI could do. For more than a decade, Wedding had been wanted by police. He had reputed connections to the Hells Angels and a loose confederation of crime groups in Toronto known as the Wolfpack. For a time, according to court records, he was one of El Chapo’s men in Canada.
Courtesy of the FBI
Wedding was currently under the protection of the Sinaloa Cartel, Estrada said. He had been recorded talking to a confidential informant in Mexico City in January, but his exact whereabouts were unknown. For all intents and purposes, he was a ghost.
As significant as Wedding’s organization is (the U.S. government says its annual revenues exceeded $1 billion), it is unlikely any of this would have gotten the attention of The New York Times, the Guardian, Good Morning America, and dozens of other media organizations if not for one fact: Ryan Wedding had once been an Olympic snowboarder. How he went from Olympian to international drug lord is a story police in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada are still piecing together. It may hold the clues to where he is now, or what he might do next.
FROM THE BOTTOM of the mountain, Ryan Wedding was a tiny speck, a silhouette against the pale sky. At 7,000 feet the air was cold and dry. The white slopes were almost blinding.
Usually, when Wedding raced, his parents and maybe a couple fans showed up to watch. Today was different. At the bottom of the run, television reporters and cameramen from around the world stood shivering in the cold, waiting for the race start. This was the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, the first round of the parallel giant slalom.
The start signal beeped, and Wedding launched himself out of the chute, his six-foot-four frame coiled low to the ground. He and his coaches had scouted the course earlier in the day, but the weather had changed in the time since, and so had the snow, turning soft and slushy. Now he was at the third gate, and his strategy was wrong, but it was too late.
As the television cameramen prepped for the next heat, Wedding stood near the fence that held back the crowd, his hands on his hips, his breath labored, his flushed face turned toward the race clock. He’d been snowboarding since the age of 12, and it had all built to this moment. He had missed the next round by a little more than a second. “His potential was awesome,” Ross Rebagliati, snowboarding racing’s first gold medalist, told me. “He had everything in place to make it happen. But you’ve got to want it, and Ryan wanted something else.”
I first reported on Ryan Wedding for Rolling Stone in the winter of 2009, months before the Vancouver Olympics, where, had things turned out differently, he would have competed before a hometown crowd. Instead, he was awaiting trial on a federal drug trafficking charge. I traveled to San Diego for the trial, where I met his mom and sister, and later to Vancouver, where I visited with his parents and friends he had grown up with. The story never ran, and the draft sat on my desktop for more than a decade. What always stayed with me was the confusion Wedding’s family felt about his choices at the time — athletic promise abandoned for a life of crime. “You can have every opportunity and still take the wrong path,” his mom told me at the time, during a visit to the family’s condo in Whistler, the world-class ski resort north of Vancouver. “But it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”
Ryan spent his early childhood in Thunder Bay, a working-class town on Lake Superior. Most people worked in logging or at the paper mill at the edge of town. Nearly every family had a cabin, or camp, somewhere in the woods.
As a kid, Ryan was an early riser, obsessed with model airplanes and trucks and engines. When he’d wander off, his mom sometimes found him in a neighbor’s garage, on his tiptoes, digging through a toolbox. He preferred being alone, riding his little motorcycle on the old logging trails until the snow came. A friend from childhood who was in the same gifted and talented program remembered the Wedding family as one of the few in town who had a computer. He often encountered Ryan working on software used by engineers like his dad, or drafting freehand with a ruler, drawing buildings to scale.
The Olympics had seemed almost destined for Wedding. His family skied competitively on both sides: His dad, René, raced in college, and an uncle on his mother’s side had skied for the Canadian national team. His parents didn’t push racing on Ryan, but he clearly had talent, the genetics, and one other quality that you either have or you don’t but is necessary to compete at the highest level: “He had no fear,” Bobby Allison, a former national champion ski racer, told me in 2009. “A lot of kids, they say they want to go fast, but they don’t really want to go fast. They hold something back, because there’s a little bit of fear there of falling. Ryan had none of that.”
“A lot of kids, they say they want to go fast, but they don’t really want to go fast. They hold something back, because there’s a little bit of fear there of falling. Ryan had none of that.”
Former champion ski racer Bobby Allison
Allison first met Wedding at Whistler, not long after the Wedding family had moved to Vancouver for René’s job. Ryan had switched to snowboarding and won the first race he entered at the age of 12. Allison admired his elegant but aggressive style and asked if he wanted to join his race team, a scruffy crew of part-time roofers and mountain climbers who were all in their late teens and early twenties.
Back then, in the mid-1990s, snowboarding still had an outlaw aura, made up of people who, instead of bundling up in a $450 North Face jacket, rode bare-chested, wearing nothing but torn jeans and floppy Sorel boots. With no sponsors, Allison’s team slept in their trucks on the road or hit the bars hoping to score with someone so they’d have a place to crash for the night. Wedding could hang with his teammates on the slopes, but off the mountain he was still a kid, and a clean-cut one at that, traveling with a teddy bear and a family photo album.
“I came from a ski-racing background, where parents are crawling around like army ants, and part of the reason I got into snowboarding was to get away from the parents,” says one of his teammates from that time. “But Ryan didn’t have that. His parents were right there. We enjoyed the road a different way than he did.”
At the age of 15, Wedding made the Canadian national team. His life became a constant state of coming and going — he’d call home from Chile, or Italy, or Austria — and when he got home, he’d dump all his laundry on the floor, call over his high school buddies, and give away stuff he’d picked up from race sponsors. He tried to carry on like a normal teenager, playing video games and rugby with his in-crowd circle, but snowboarding was becoming an obsession, and winning a science. For hours, he’d sit on the floor with his dad, who would put his engineering skills to work as they tinkered with bindings, boards, and boots, looking for any kind of edge. His parents lined the walls of their home with framed photos of him snowboarding, hung his race bibs on the wall of their Whistler condo, and generally treated him like an athletic boy wonder who was expected to do nothing but race, work out, and eat right. While his teammates worked summer jobs to pay their way on the circuit, Ryan’s dad footed the bill, which he told me some years came to $40,000.
At the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake, Wedding got a taste of stardom. Suddenly, he was getting free gear from Nike and rubbing shoulders with pro hockey players he’d seen on TV. During the opening ceremonies he called his mom, who was watching from home. “Hey, can you guys see me?” he asked. The cameras were on him, and he loved it.
“I really thought that was just the beginning,” Allison says. “He hadn’t even been expected to make that team because of his age. His future seemed so bright.”
FOR A YOUNG MAN with ambition in the early 2000s, Vancouver presented unique opportunities. It sat just 25 miles from the longest unprotected border in North America. A pound of weed went for as much as $2,000 on the streets of Vancouver, and twice that that in the U.S. Those who dared risking a flight across the border could make as much as $40,000 a run.
Wedding’s path into this world began innocently enough. Not long after the Salt Lake Olympics, he enrolled at Simon Fraser University, which has three campuses in the greater Vancouver area, on a trust fund his parents had set up for him. He was interested in becoming a stockbroker, he told his dad, or maybe joining his dad’s engineering firm. Settle down in the Vancouver suburbs at some point, get married, have kids, get a condo up at Whistler like his parents.
To earn extra money, he took a job as a bouncer, a friend from the time named Ian Hadgkiss told me. On one of his first nights at a club called Onyx, a fight broke out in the parking lot that escalated into an all-out brawl. Before long, the parking lot was mayhem, Hadgkiss recalled, with cars weaving and screeching around Wedding and the other bouncers, trying to run people over. A bouncer near Wedding grabbed a hatchet from a patron in a fight, and as a car came barreling toward them, smashed the blade into the hood. “He was never in the middle of any gun play in any of the clubs, thank goodness,” Hadgkiss said of Wedding.
Explosions of random violence were breaking out all over the city. What police wouldn’t realize until years later is that Vancouver was on the verge of a gang war for control of the city’s lucrative pot market. Legalization of marijuana in the United States was still a decade away, and B.C. bud was considered the best pot in the world, or at least in the Western Hemisphere.
Between 2001 and 2004, there were so many shootings in Vancouver-area clubs that gang police started roaming through bars, throwing out anyone who looked like a drug dealer. The established organized crime groups — the Triads and Hells Angels — were smart enough to stay away, or at least not dress the part, but for the new gangs trying to get a piece of the action, who called themselves the Red Scorpions and the United Nations, attention was the point. It wasn’t hard for police to spot them: designer hoodies, Dolce&Gabbana loafers, armor-plated cars.
They came from the suburbs like Wedding did, often from well-off families like his. Perhaps because they were upstarts, with no family history in crime, they had no respect for territory, tradition, or codes of honor. Multi-ethnic, flashy, and reckless, they left bodies in empty cars, along the waterfront, and in the street. Among their favorite places to kill, as it turned out, were the very kind of clubs where Wedding was bouncing.
Other bouncers started wearing bulletproof vests. Wedding told his mom he didn’t need one. He wasn’t afraid. It was the opposite: He was intrigued.
The typical narrative with kids who get involved in drug trafficking or organized crime is that they do so out of desperation, but that didn’t apply in Vancouver at that time, says Peter Edwards a Toronto Star reporter who has written a dozen books on organized crime in Canada. “Many of these were upper-middle-class kids. They went to good schools. What drew them to it was the image. The glamour.”
Wedding competing at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games in 2002.
Adam Pretty/Getty Images
It was also fairly easy to get into the drug game, and the stakes, compared to the U.S., were relatively low, at least when it came to the legal system: Marijuana grow ops were ubiquitous in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, and the Canadian justice system has a notoriously liberal drug policy. You had a friend from high school who grew pot, he asked you to run it across the border for $10,000, and, like that, you were in.
“These guys knew that even if they got caught, they’d at worst do a short stint in jail,” says Edwards. “I can’t think of anyone who couldn’t post bail and be out in a few days. Here, there’s more of an emphasis on rehabilitation than just locking someone up and throwing away the keys.”
Wedding’s descent into this world was no different than how one gains entrée into any legitimate industry. He made friends who became connections. He networked.
The line between his work as a bouncer and his life in the suburbs blurred. Drug dealers grew into friends, who invited him to parties where everybody was snorting coke out in the open. Perhaps because of his devotion to his body, and how much his parents had emphasized physical fitness and eating right, Wedding never partook, but his girlfriend could tell he was changing. He was becoming someone else.
When they had first met, she loved how he didn’t care about clothes and preferred hanging out at his parents’ house watching hockey over going out. He never missed Sunday dinner with the family, and treated his two younger sisters like a dream big brother, driving them to dance class and vetting the boys who wanted to date them.
But the more time Wedding spent in the clubs, the more he took on the mannerisms of his new friends, and he started dressing like them too — Prada shoes, a Breitling watch, and bejeweled Ed Hardy T-shirts. He became obsessed with bulking up. “I hate it if I go to the gym and guys are bigger than me,” he told Hadgkiss.
He told people he was a real estate investor, but his friends wondered if there was another revenue stream. “He was growing pot,” one of them told me when I visited Vancouver in 2009. “Lots of it.” He bought a condo in an area of Vancouver known as the Westwood Plateau and transformed it into a gaudy bachelor pad, complete with huge pillars, 30-foot ceilings, and his initials carved into the entranceway. He stuffed the garage with a Hummer, snowmobiles, a Ducati, and a BMW M-5. Upstairs, he put a pinball machine in one corner and side-by-side race car seats for a video game in another.
In the fall of 2007, Wedding started hanging out with a man named Hassan Shirani, a pudgy-faced Iranian immigrant with droopy eyes and a fondness for tracksuits who lived on the city’s north side. Shirani had been known to police since 1997, when a friend of his was gunned down at a movie theater in North Vancouver during a screening of the gangster flick Donnie Brasco.
Wedding came to Shirani partly out of desperation. Since 2004, the police had been investigating Wedding on the suspicion that he was running a massive marijuana grow op in Maple Ridge. According to a confidential informant, Wedding and a partner were cultivating 8,000 marijuana plants in a warehouse on a property there owned by one of his friends. Every two weeks, Wedding harvested the plants and sold them to a broker, the informant said. The farm earned Wedding and his partner hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, maybe more. “They were literally hauling out trash bags full of cash,” another former friend told me.
In the summer of 2006, Vancouver police raided the grow op and discovered loaded guns in a locked safe, 6,800 marijuana plants, and 86 pounds of dried weed. The total haul: an estimated $10 million. It was the largest marijuana grow op ever discovered in Maple Ridge. But with nothing but the confidential informant linking Wedding to the operation, police never pressed charges.
By 2007, Wedding was telling friends he was broke. He had lost close to half a million dollars on a shady real estate scheme and, according to testimony Shirani would later give, another $300,000 in a cocaine deal that had gone bad. According to Shirani, Wedding approached him about buying cocaine in California and said he had about $340,000 he could front for the deal. Through a series of meetings, one of which included Wedding, Shirani and two men linked to Russian organized crime agreed to buy 24 kilos of cocaine from a contact in L.A. If things went well, they would continue to do business.
FROM THE TIME Wedding and Shirani touched down in Los Angeles in June of 2008, the FBI was watching. Wedding had never done a cocaine deal of this magnitude, and, according to one agent working the case, he didn’t seem like he knew what he was doing. He had never asked where the cocaine was coming from, for example, and he had shown up to do the deal himself, rather than hiring a middleman.
But Wedding didn’t appear nervous, the agent says. He acted like he was on vacation. He and Shirani slept in, ate breakfast at Denny’s, and smoked at hookah lounges late into the night. When they had downtime, Wedding flipped through real estate magazines, mulling over the possibility of buying property in Southern California.
After a couple days, they got the call that the deal was on. Shirani and Wedding picked up $100,000 in cash Shirani had arranged through a hawala he had in L.A.’s Iranian community and hid it in their hotel room. Then they sent one of the Russians, a man named Michael Krapchan, to the city’s waterfront to buy one kilo of cocaine. If it was good, he would call them and they’d buy the rest.
But Krapchan never made it back. The buy was a setup. Krapchan was nabbed on the scene, and Shirani and Wedding were arrested in San Diego leaving their hotel room, where the FBI found the $100,000 hidden under a dresser.
“Wedding was dead to rights,” says Brett Kalina, a former FBI agent who arrested him. “He was on the recordings from the second he stepped down on U.S. soil.”
With hours of taped conversation in the hands of the FBI, the other two members of the conspiracy — Shirani and Krapchan — agreed to plea deals. Shirani was sentenced to 18 months and Krapchan was given 30 months. (Shirani and Krapchan could not be reached for comment.) But Wedding had no interest in cooperating.
“He was very controlled,” Kalina remembers. “Once we read him his rights, he didn’t say anything. And in the few instances that we did have chances to interact with him, when we were either picking him up from jail or dropping him off to make a proffer, he was kind of like, ‘You know you’re not getting anything from me.’”
His hulking physical presence was intimidating, and while Wedding didn’t say much, it was clear he wasn’t afraid of the police and didn’t have any respect for them. “He would have gotten into a fight with any one of us if there wasn’t 20 of us there on his arrest,” Kalina recalls. “I remember we had dropped him off one time during the trial, and we had to witness him being transferred over to the guys at the jail, and they had to do like a search on him. And I’m standing there, and he looks at me and calls me a ‘faggot’ for watching him. He had no plans to play nice.”
Kalina and the lead prosecutor on the case wondered if Wedding was even taking the charges seriously. In court, a rotating cast of girlfriends showed up for his various pretrial appearances. One got in trouble for flashing Wedding in the visiting room at jail, Kalina says.
“We really did just turn him into a much better drug dealer than he ever was when he started with us.”
Former FBI agent Brett Kalina
“This guy had a swagger about him, like he was untouchable,” says a federal law enforcement agent who worked on the case. “There was one day he walked into court and the judge was moved to say, ‘Hey I don’t know what you think this is, but this is serious stuff.’ He had this attitude like this was water on a duck’s back. Nothing was going to stick.”
Wedding took the case to trial and was found guilty of conspiring to traffic cocaine. The minimum mandatory sentence was 10 years.“I think deep down he knew that there’d be a fairly decent chance of a transfer up to a Canadian prison and that when he got to Canada his sentence would be greatly reduced,” Kalina says.
In the two years between his arrest and conviction, Wedding was incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego. While the MCC holds inmates awaiting trial or sentencing for a host of federal crimes, it’s crawling with people on the lower rungs of Mexican drug trafficking organizations, in particular “mules,” or those who specialize in transporting drugs across the border. “You’ve got people that are in that facility that have amazing drug-world connections,” Kalina says. “We really did just turn him into a much better drug dealer than he ever was when he started with us.”
In May of 2010, Wedding’s sentence was reduced to four years, and the U.S. government agreed it would not stop a transfer to Canada to finish his sentence, on the condition he drop an appeal and forfeit $121,000. “As an athlete, I was always taught that there is no second chances, and well, I’m here asking for exactly that,” he told the judge.
Other suburban kids who had been drawn into the Vancouver underworld had been far less lucky. Some were dead; others in jail. The way his family saw it, Wedding would do a few years in jail, go home, and one day look back on his ill-fated trip to Los Angeles as a brief moment in his life where he got caught up in the wrong crowd. A youthful discretion.
But Kalina heard something else on recorded phone calls from prison while Wedding was awaiting trial. “I don’t remember him saying, like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to get out of here to start up again.’ But his plan was, ‘Hey, I’ll be out of here in a little bit, and we’ll be back at it.’ He was using coded language, but it was clear he wasn’t planning on stopping what he had had set in motion up in Vancouver.”
From MCC, Wedding was sent to Federal Correctional Institution Reeves in Texas, the largest for-profit prison in the world. When Wedding arrived, the prison housed nearly 4,000 inmates, mostly undocumented immigrants serving sentences related to drugs or immigration-related offenses. The year before, the prison had been the site of two back-to-back riots in which inmates had burned mattresses to protest inadequate medical care and the persistent use of solitary confinement to punish prisoners who complained. But according to records from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Wedding caused no problems at Reeves. He was deported to Canada in December of 2011.
“He showed he wasn’t going to crack, that he wasn’t going to panic. They call it being ‘solid,” says Edwards. “For a criminal, it’s like he’d gone to grad school. He’d gone to Oxford, and now he was ready to move up to the big leagues.”
That meant Montreal.
IN 2013, MONTREAL’S UNDERWORLD was in a state of flux. Mob boss Vito Rizzuto had just returned from the U.S. after doing 10 years on racketeering, loan-sharking, and murder charges in connection with the gangland killings of three Bonnano crime family members in New York in 1981. The Hells Angels were reorganizing, too. Most of their high-ranking members in Québec were in jail or waiting to go on trial for their part in that province’s biker war of the 1990s.
U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada at a press conference announcing multiple arrests, including Wedding, following an investigation into an international drug trafficking operation.
Christina House/”Los Angeles Times”/Getty Images
At the same time, Chapo Guzman had made inroads into Canada that had caught the DEA off guard. According to Andrew Hogan, one of the DEA agents who eventually caught El Chapo, the Sinaloa Cartel had built a formidable distribution network into Canada: They smuggled cocaine across the border into Arizona, stashed it in warehouses in Tucson or Phoenix, and from there drove it in cars to the Washington border, where it was loaded onto helicopters and dropped into the forests of British Columbia.
El Chapo had found that doing business in Canada was even more profitable than in the U.S. At the time, cocaine in Los Angeles or Chicago sold for $25,000 a kilo. In Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal it went for more than $35,000 a kilo.
There was another reason El Chapo was drawn to Canada. “His key cartel lieutenants could exploit weaknesses in the Canadian system: the top-heavy structure of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police hampered law enforcement efforts for even the most routine drug arrest and prosecution,” Hogan wrote in his book Hunting El Chapo. “It was a perfect match…hindered law enforcement and an insatiable Canadian appetite for high-grade coke.”
By the time Wedding moved to Montreal, the city’s drug trafficking, which had long been controlled by the Mafia and the Hells Angels, was wide open, especially to someone with connections to Mexico. “In Canada, it’s not as regimented as Mexico, where certain cartels control key corridors, or plazas,” says Brian Fitzpatrick, a senior investigative reporter at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. “It’s much more entrepreneurial. You might work with the Sinaloa Cartel and there’s someone else a couple towns over who does as well, and you don’t even know each other exist.”
From the time Wedding left U.S. custody, he had a plan, Kalina says. “I think he knew what he was doing in prison, meaning, ‘I’m going to meet people, I’m going to get organized, I’m going to take this time while I’m here to get all these things set up for when I’m out of here.’ He knew he was never gonna be some community civic leader after what happened.”
In 2013, the RCMP began targeting two Canadians involved in large-scale trafficking of cocaine, one with connections to the Coast Guard and another with a security clearance at one of the country’s largest air force bases, according to court records. They were planning to import at least 1,000 kilos of cocaine from the Caribbean to Newfoundland. From there, they would haul it in trucks to Toronto or use the St. Lawrence River to bring it to Montreal, which had always been the most important transit point in Canada for drug traffickers because of its proximity to New York.
Eventually, the investigation led to Wedding. In January of 2015, the lead undercover agent in the investigation went to Montreal to meet with a man named Philipos Kollaros, who, according to court records, had ties to El Chapo. In fact, he’d been seen in Montreal with the wife of El Chapo’s right-hand man, Alex Cifuentes-Villa.
According to court records, Kollaros said he’d brought the “man in charge.” His former boss had been gunned down in White Rock, B.C., the year before. The new boss, Kollaros said, was Ryan Wedding.
Wedding introduced himself as an importer of cocaine. He mentioned a previous deal out of St. Kitts. He’d been receiving updates the whole time. He asked the undercover agent what kind of boat he’d be using, its storage capacity, and how they’d get it onto smaller fishing boats, which would head to Newfoundland. From there, they’d transfer the cocaine into trucks headed for Montreal.
The officer posed as someone with a sailboat brokerage business who could bring boats back and forth between Canada and the Caribbean. He’d start with a test run of between 500 and 1,000 kilos of coke and go from there, with a 25 percent cut of the load’s value as his fee.
That deal was called off, but in April of 2015, the French navy intercepted a supply boat near Antigua carrying 212 kilos, which had a street value of about $10 million. Three days later, the RCMP carried out coordinated raids across Canada, arresting 15 targets connected to the investigation, which they dubbed Operation Harrington. According to the RCMP, the group had planned to move 15 tons of cocaine, and had ties to drug-trafficking groups in Colombia and Mexico.
Kollaros was arrested and served two-and-a-half years for his role in the operation (he was gunned down a year after his release at a restaurant in Montreal’s Little Italy), but Wedding was never arrested in connection with the case, and other than the brief moment he met with an undercover officer in Montreal, he doesn’t appear in the reams of investigative files and court documents related to it. Liam Price, the Director-General for the RCMP (Canada’s equivalent of the FBI), says Wedding has been a “fugitive from justice” since 2015, but wouldn’t say if Canadian police have been actively pursuing him since that time.
WHEN WEDDING WAS ARRESTED in 2009, his family regularly visited him in jail in San Diego and attended his trial. They insisted he was innocent, and even after he was convicted, said they were confident he had been chastened by the experience, and that when he got out of prison, he’d put it all behind him.
His childhood friends from Thunder Bay and his teammates on the Canadian national team seemed bewildered by the charges against him. Perhaps he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somehow, he’d gotten mixed up with the wrong people. It seemed entirely out of character; a youthful indiscretion that would one day be a footnote in his past.
That was nearly 15 years ago. Now, most of the people who once defended Wedding declined to comment for this article, or didn’t return phone calls. If any of them had been in recent contact with him, or knew where he was, they weren’t saying. Even his attorneys from the San Diego case declined comment. Being connected to an Olympian caught up in a bungled cocaine deal was one thing. If the current allegations against him are true, Ryan Wedding is now a very different man, and a very dangerous one at that: a drug lord wanted for ordering three murders and overseeing the shipment of 60 tons of cocaine a year from Colombia to Canada. According to Liam Price of the RCMP, Wedding worked with both the Hells Angels and a group called the Wolfpack Alliance, a loosely connected consortium of organized crime groups that operate across Canada, to sell cocaine once it got to Canada.
His activities over the past decade are a mystery, and at this point, unproven allegations. Because he is on the run, an attorney has not been named to represent him in his current case. In other words, his side of the story since he left U.S. federal prison in 2011 has yet to be told. It’s worth noting that no charges were filed in his 2006 marijuana case in Canada, and that while he was named as a suspect in Operation Harrington, he was never convicted in that case. He’s also innocent until proven guilty of the eight counts he now faces in U.S. federal court, which include conspiracies to traffic cocaine, and murder and attempted murder in connection with a continuing criminal enterprise.
There are, however, clues about his activities since 2015 in recently filed court records. An affidavit filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in October, for example, reveals that in 2023, a person who had allegedly trafficked drugs with Wedding for more than a decade agreed to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement, and plans to testify against him. In January, this informant met with Wedding and Mero Wero in Mexico City and recorded their conversation, in which, according to the affidavit, they ironed out the specifics on a deal to traffic cocaine from Mexico into Canada.
This informant seems to have been one of Wedding’s most trusted lieutenants. According to court records, sometimes Wedding communicated with him directly, and sometimes the informant received orders from Wedding via Mero Wero, whose real name is Andrew Clark, a 34-year-old elevator mechanic turned real estate investor from Toronto. From February through April of this year, for example, Clark worked with the informant to set up cocaine shipments, according to the affidavit. These shipments resulted in seizures of cocaine by law enforcement in the greater Los Angeles area between April and August. All told, had the cocaine made it to Canada, it would have had a street value of $148 million.
Once police had infiltrated Mr. Perfect’s Threema account, they also found evidence linking him to a Miami Beach restaurateur and music executive named Nahim Jorge Bonilla. According to an indictment filed in U.S. federal court, Bonilla told an informant he thought was a member of Wedding’s organization that Wedding had threatened to kill his mother if Bonilla didn’t pay him for five kilos of cocaine. Bonilla ultimately returned three kilos to the group in Montreal and paid for the remaining two with a shipment of meth. On Oct. 16, the day before Martin Estrada announced the indictment against Wedding’s group, the FBI raided Bonilla’s 6,522-square-foot home near Miami, which he had bought from DJ Khaled in 2020 for $4.8 million. Bonilla is currently in custody and has pleaded not guilty. His attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
How long Wedding can evade capture is an open question. “It’s pretty hard to hide a six-foot-four white guy,” Kalina says. “He’s in a part of the world where he’s going to totally stick out, and I don’t see him being the kind of guy who is OK hiding out in a bunker for the next 20 years.”
But another law enforcement official who asked to speak on the condition of anonymity said he isn’t so sure Wedding will be captured quickly, or that he’ll be captured at all. “His transportation network has been disrupted, but if he can get it up and running, the Sinaloa Cartel will continue to protect him,” the official said. Wedding’s organization was one of the larger cocaine trafficking operations in Canada. “He was a big earner, and as long as he can keep paying a tax, he’ll be protected.”
On Nov. 14, the FBI released an updated picture of Wedding taken sometime this year. The long, stringy hair has been cut short, and he looks older, his facial features hardened. He’s sitting at a table in what appears to be a restaurant with a cell phone in his hands, wearing a black T-shirt and a beige zip hoodie. I wondered what his friends and family would make of the picture, and if they could explain how a boy with a prodigious intellect had given up privilege and comfort for a life that requires violence, exploitation, and depravity.
The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles both declined comment, but an official close to the case said Wedding’s operation has been crippled and he’s living in hiding. It’s just a matter of time, they say, before he turns up.
