The reward for a former Olympic snowboarder has been upped to more than $10 million. Ryan Wedding, a Canadian citizen accused of running an international drug trafficking operation, is believed to be living in Mexico but federal prosecutors said Thursday that investigators "have not ruled out his presence in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, or elsewhere," the CBC reports. The 43-year-old has been added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. He allegedly orchestrated several murders while running an operation that moved large amounts of cocaine through Mexico to Canada and the US.
Authorities say Secretary of State Marco Rubio has authorized a $10 million reward for information leading to Wedding's arrest and/or conviction, which will be added to the $50,000 reward the FBI is offering. The reward is being offered with assistance from the Canadian and Mexican governments. Wedding competed for Canada in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. "Wedding went from shredding powder on the slopes at the Olympics to distributing powder cocaine on the streets of US cities and in his native Canada," Akil Davis, assistant director of the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office, said in a news release. "The alleged murders of his competitors make Wedding a very dangerous man."
The LAPD said Thursday that Wedding's operation brought truckloads of cocaine through Los Angeles and also moved five metric tons of fentanyl per month to cities in the US and Canada. "The increase in the reward should make it clear: there is nowhere safe for Wedding to hide," LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton said, per the Guardian. The FBI says Wedding is also known as James Conrad King, Jesse King, El Jefe, Giant, and Public Enemy. He is believed to be under the protection of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, though a former FBI agent who arrested him in 2009 notes that it's "pretty hard to hide a six-foot-four white guy" in the territory the cartel operates in. (More drug trafficking stories.)
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