Ryan Wedding, a former Olympian turned alleged drug kingpin, was named to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list today. A $10 million reward was announced for his capture. In January, Rolling Stone detailed how Wedding went from a snowboarding prodigy who raced for Canada in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics to the top of a drug trafficking empire that allegedly transported as much as $1 billion in cocaine a year from Colombia to Canada. Wedding has essentially been on the run since 2015, when he was identified by police as “El Chapo’s man” in Canada, and implicated in a large-scale cocaine trafficking ring that involved cargo ships out of the Caribbean. “While we haven’t ruled out other countries, we believe Wedding is residing in Mexico and possibly living under the protection of the Sinaloa drug cartel,” said Akil Davis, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office at a press conference on Thursday. When federal charges against Wedding’s organization were first announced in October, federal law enforcement sources told Rolling Stone that it was just a matter of time before Wedding was arrested, or killed — unless he could keep his transportation network up and running. On Monday, the CBC reported that Wedding is very much alive, and that he continues to traffic drugs while in hiding, referencing a three-page memo U.S. federal prosecutors filed in Ontario at a bail hearing related to one of Wedding’s co-defendants. That defendant, Gurpeet Singh, is currently in custody in Canada fighting extradition to the U.S. for allegedly coordinating shipments of cocaine for Wedding. During a hearing last week, Canadian prosecutors revealed that U.S. authorities have allegedly obtained communications that show Singh travelled to Culiacán, Mexico, the de facto headquarters of the Sinaloa Cartel, last summer to resolve a $600,000 debt. On Aug. 2, 2024, Singh was kidnapped, bound, and given till the end of the day to pay the debt, prosecutors say. And if not for Wedding, Singh may have been killed, but over the next five days, prosecutors say Wedding negotiated with cartel leaders for Singh’s release. Wedding’s placement on the Top Ten list could be tied to the slaying of the government’s top witness against him in Medellín, Colombia, in January. According to Calvi Leon of the Toronto Star, the witness, who had been working with Wedding for over a decade, had agreed to testify against him in 2023, and in January of 2024 recorded a conversation with Wedding’s right-hand man in Mexico City during which they arranged cocaine shipments. But on Jan. 31 of this year, at around 2:30 p.m., the witness, a 42-year-old Canadian named Jonathan Acebedo-Garcia, was sitting in a restaurant in a shopping center in Medellín when a person armed with a handgun and silencer approached and opened fire, before fleeing on a motorcycle. By the time police arrived, Acebedo-Garcia was dead. Wedding’s second in command, a 34-year-old former elevator mechanic turned real-estate investor from Toronto named Andrew Clark, had been detained in October and held in a Mexican jail, but at the press conference this morning, the FBI’s Davis said Clark had inexplicably been released from jail on bail, and had only recently been recaptured. Clark was extradited last week as part of the extraordinary and unprecedented transfer of 29 high-ranking members of Mexican cartels to the United States that included Rafael Caro Quintero, the so-called Narco of Narcos wanted for the murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985. According to law enforcement in Mexico and Canada, Clark was the “logistical link” between the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels. “Wedding, who is wealthy, is dangerous and has connections in very high places,” Davis said. Trial is set for May 7 for the defendants who allegedly belonged to Wedding’s organization who are in custody in Los Angeles, which served the “primary hub” for the organization’s narcotics operations, said Alan Hamilton, chief of detectives for the Los Angeles Police Department. Hamilton said the organization moved an estimated 60 tons of cocaine a year and five tons of fentanyl a month through the city. In addition to drug trafficking and conspiracy charges, Wedding and Clark have also been charged with ordering contract killings that resulted in four deaths in Canada. If convicted, they face a mandatory minimum penalty of life in federal prison.