Whiteout: The Olympic Snowboarder Who Became A Cocaine Kingpin

Summary

Chameleon – "Whiteout: The Olympic Snowboarder Who Became A Cocaine Kingpin"

Host: Josh Dean | Campside Media & Audiochuck

Release Date: May 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Chameleon explores the stranger-than-fiction life of Ryan Wedding: a Canadian Olympic snowboarder who fell from national obscurity into infamy as a cocaine kingpin and cartel collaborator. Host Josh Dean, joined by top investigative journalists and crime experts, unpacks how a normal athlete from rural Canada ended up orchestrating billion-dollar drug deals, facilitating violence, and ultimately becoming one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives. Through careful storytelling, the episode exposes both the breathtaking scale of Wedding’s criminal enterprise and the chilling truth that, despite his capture, the machinery of the drug trade churns on.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins: An Ordinary Upbringing

• Thunder Bay, Canada Childhood
  • Ryan Wedding comes from a multi-generational skiing family; “He was one of those kids who was on skis before he could walk.” (Narrator, 03:01)
• After a move to Coquitlam, BC, at 12, Wedding transitions to snowboarding and quickly rises in the competitive ranks.
• By age 20, he competes for Canada in the 2002 Winter Olympics (Parallel Giant Slalom), finishing 24th—an undistinguished result.
• Quote:
  • “He competed in one Olympics and he finished 24th. He didn’t make it past the Qualifying round. And so... he’s not someone we would have remembered based on just that Olympics.” (Narrator, 05:08)

2. First Signs: Post-Olympic Drift & Early Trouble

• Wedding’s sporting career fizzles; “His once promising career fizzled out.” (Josh Dean, 05:27)
• He resurfaces in British Columbia court records, first for assault (22 years old) and then named in a massive marijuana grow-op (6,800 plants) with no charges stuck (12:32–12:55).
• “He’s a really big man and he seems to be bopping around between these clubs. He’s gotten into a little bit of trouble, and then he gets into a whole lot of trouble.” (Podcast Host, 13:05)

3. Descent into Drug Trafficking

• 2008: Caught at LAX attempting to buy 24 kilos of cocaine (street value: millions), with $100,000 in cash found. Claimed (unsuccessfully) in court he was training for the Olympics (13:39).
• While in prison, meets Jonathan Acevedo Garcia—who becomes a critical figure and eventually a federal informant (14:43).
• Post-prison, becomes involved in large-scale multi-national drug operations, moving product worth hundreds of millions in a single year.

4. From Bouncer to Billion-Dollar Broker

• Links to organized crime (Mexican cartels, primarily Los Chapitos/Sinaloa) solidify as Wedding’s operation distributes cocaine from South America through the US to Canada.
• Expert Insight (Steve Woodman, Security Analyst):
  • “Transnational drug trafficking rewards psychopathy because you can’t legally enforce contracts... being terrifying is really the only way to hold onto your market share.” (07:49)
• 2015: Tied (via wiretap) to a failed 400 kilos cocaine operation; implicated but not charged (15:13–16:05).

5. Violence and Intimidation: The Reign of Terror

• Pattern emerges: those who cross or betray Wedding’s organization meet violence.
  • “The pattern that’s going to start to develop, is if you cross Ryan Wedding... you will die. That’s the messaging that Ryan Wedding wanted to get out there.” (Podcast Host, 16:36)
• Multiple high-profile murders in Canada and Colombia linked to the organization, including assassinations of former associates and the brutal mistaken-identity hit on a family in Brampton, Ontario (18:04–18:45).

6. The Hunt, the Betrayal, the Fallout

• Wedding’s exposure accelerates when his prison friend turned confidant, Jonathan Acevedo Garcia, becomes a key federal informant—unbeknownst to Wedding (20:47–21:18).
• Upon learning of the betrayal, Wedding puts a $5 million bounty on Acevedo, leading to a global manhunt and Acevedo’s murder in Medellin orchestrated via an elaborate transnational network (21:40–23:46).
• “There is a whole number of people who are enlisted. They go all the way to Saudi Arabia. They go down to Colombia. Then there’s a group of commercial sex workers, a madam who is brought in...” (Podcast Host, 21:56)

7. The Scale of the Enterprise

• Authorities allege Wedding moved over a billion dollars’ worth of cocaine, using complex logistics, encrypted communications, and serial-number verification for transfers (30:10).
• Wedding’s amassed fortune included rare motorcycles, cars, art, and jewelry—some of it laundered through associates (31:14–32:03).
• “There’s too many drugs. We can’t fit all of this into a single tractor trailer. I mean, that’s how much drugs we were talking about.” (Podcast Host, 30:35)

8. Into the Spotlight: The Global Manhunt and Arrest Myths

• Wedding’s reputation grows as US authorities indict him for “running a continuing criminal enterprise, murder, attempted murder, and conspiring to possess, distribute and export cocaine” (17:27).
• FBI places Wedding on Top 10 Most Wanted list with a $15 million bounty.
• Arrest in 2026 in Mexico surrounded by conflicting narratives:
  • US: Daring multi-agency takedown.
  • Mexican Government: Voluntary surrender.
  • Wedding’s Lawyer: Forced, covert FBI operation that breaches Mexican law (36:34–41:26).
• Notable Quote (Steve Woodman):
  • “Law enforcement never really says they’ve caught a particularly stupid criminal. They’re always taking down, foiling criminal masterminds.” (34:24)

9. The Aftermath: Legal Limbo and Lingering Questions

• Wedding pleads not guilty; whereabouts and security tightly controlled due to risk from cartel reprisals and to maintain prosecutorial integrity (41:57–42:54).
• “If anything happens to Ryan Wedding, the prosecution could very well collapse.” (Josh Dean, 42:41)
• Massive operations have yielded only temporary disruption in supply chains; episodes like Wedding’s are “repeatable” in the global drug trade (49:17–50:18).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Olympic Obscurity

  • “He would have been a footnote in Olympic history if not for what happens next.” (Podcast Host/Interviewer, 10:19)

• On Personality and Crime

  • “Personality traits associated with psychopathy are actually more prevalent among elite athletes. High stress tolerance, intense competitiveness.”
    — Steve Woodman (07:03)

• On the Machine of Trafficking

  • “There’ll be another Ryan Wedding. He probably won’t be a snowboarder. He might not be Canadian, but he’s easily replaceable within the infrastructure. They haven’t dismantled the infrastructure even of Los Chapitos.”
    — Steve Woodman (49:44)

• The Human Toll

  • “At the end of the day, I always come back to this woman who was shot from her neck all the way down to her feet because she was living in a house that was mistaken for a drug dealer’s family. You can’t help but think it’s a Hollywood story. But then at the end of the day, it’s someone’s real life story, a lot of people’s real life story.” (Podcast Host, 47:44)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:01 – Early life and family skiing background
• 04:02 – Olympic debut and results
• 06:36 – Personality and risk-taking traits in athletes
• 13:18 – Cocaine deal at LAX, first US arrest
• 14:43 – Prison connection with Acevedo Garcia
• 15:29 – Wiretaps and Canadian cartel connections
• 18:04 – The Brampton mistaken-identity murder
• 21:40 – $5 million hit on the informant, global manhunt
• 23:10 – Assassination of Acevedo Garcia
• 30:10 – Details of the international supply chain
• 31:14 – Luxury assets, money laundering
• 34:24 – FBI–media narrative manipulation
• 36:34 – Multiple versions of Wedding’s arrest
• 41:26 – Legal limbo and secrecy post-arrest
• 46:56 – Discovery of Wedding’s old athletic medals
• 49:17 – The futility of “big busts” in the long arc of the drug trade

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Tone and Style

The episode is fast-paced, cinematic, and meticulously reported, balancing true-crime astonishment with somber reflection on the systemic cruel realities of global drug trafficking. Through crisp dialogue, direct quotations, and authoritative analysis, the hosts and guests maintain a tone that is credible but incredulous—chronicling a saga both melodramatic and chillingly real.

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Conclusion

The saga of Ryan Wedding is a modern criminal parable—an athlete’s collapse into the dark heart of cartel capitalism. But as the episode makes clear, the real chameleon isn’t just one man: it’s the global, adaptable criminal networks that outlast any single person’s rise or fall. The stunning details—Olympic dreams, luxury stashes, violent hits, and cross-border intrigue—may seem like Hollywood, but for victims, their families, and swathes of society, it’s real life, and—regrettably—just one chapter in a much larger, ongoing story.

Transcript

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[MacKenzie]

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[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

campsite media hello.

[Dr. Horton Advertiser]

What is.

[Steve Woodman]

What do you want me to say?

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

Chameleon.

[Josh Dean]

Chameleon. Chameleon. Weekly. Oh. Today's story begins in Thunder Bay, Canada, an unremarkable town on the shores of Lake Superior in Ontario. It's where the subject of this episode is born. His family are ski people. His grandparents even own a small ski area.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

He was one of those kids who was on skis before he could walk.

[Josh Dean]

This is Alyssa Roenig. I spoke to her just a couple days after she got back from Italy, covering the Milan Cortina Olympics for espn.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

His father was a competitive skier in college. His uncle coached Canada's women's Alpine team through the 1992 Olympics in Albertville.

[Josh Dean]

When he was 12, the family moved to Coquitlan, outside Vancouver. There were still mountains there, in fact, bigger ones, which is where he switches to snowboarding. And speaking as a snowboarder who also started out on skis, I get it.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

You know, I assume, like a lot of young kids, you see a friend who's snowboarding says, ah, that looks fun. I want to try it.

[Josh Dean]

He was a natural and started competing.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

Within three years, he was named to the Canadian national snowboard team, and by 20, he had qualified for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics in parallel giant slalom snowboard racing.

[Josh Dean]

Today, some of the biggest winter sports celebrities are snowboarders, especially in halfpipe and slopestyle. But the sport didn't have quite the same pull back in the early 2000s. It skewed older, and giant slalom as a specialty was pretty niche. But it's also fast, brutal and technical. So making the Olympic team at 20 was no small thing.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

He was doing quite well in the Canadian National Championships, and so, yeah, he definitely earned his spot.

[Josh Dean]

This is where today's story takes the smallest of many turns. This promising Canadian snowboarder did not go on to dominate the sport. In fact, at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he pretty much bombed.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

The way that parallel giant slalom works is competition starts out with qualifying runs. So a lot of the video you see of him at the Olympics, he's solo on the course. And so parallel giant slalom is called parallel because it's head to head racing, but it starts with those qualifying runs. And so he didn't make it out of the qualifiers.

[Josh Dean]

He finished 24th, a result that barely registered.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

Look, I don't want to downplay the fact that he was an Olympian and he made it to the Olympics. That said, he competed in one Olympics and he finished 24th. He didn't make it past the Qualifying round. And so he's. Yeah, he's not someone we would have remembered based on just that. Olympics. And he stopped competing pretty quickly after those Olympics.

[Josh Dean]

His once promising career fizzled out. And yet you very likely know this man whose name is Ryan Wedding. Because in early 2026, a week before the Winter Olympics were about to get underway in Italy, Ryan Wedding was back in the headlines.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

Breaking news, we have new video of former Olympic snowboarder and fugitive Ryan Wedding in FBI custody. This was the moment that agents escorted the 44 year old Canadian off a plane after a touchdown in Southern California this morning.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Wedding, who's accused of running a drug

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

emp, was taken into custody last night in Mexico. He was believed to be hiding in the country for more than a decade. It landed him on the FBI's top 10 most wanted fugitives list.

[Josh Dean]

The story is pretty hard to believe. A former Olympic snowboard racer from Canada now linked to organized crime in a way that feels almost absurd. How do you get from a start like that to this? No one could have predicted it in a million years. But looking back, Alyssa says there were some small hints, like a bit of a reckless streak.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

Helmets were not mandated until, I believe, right around the 2006 Winter Olympics. That said, it's a sport that sees athletes reach speeds up to about 70 miles per hour. So most athletes were wearing helmets back then, even in GS racing. And yeah, he was not.

[Josh Dean]

And then there's a darker. The traits that make someone elite in one world can sometimes transfer into another.

[Steve Woodman]

Research shows that personality traits associated with psychopathy are actually more prevalent among elite athletes. High stress tolerance, intense competitiveness.

[Josh Dean]

This is Steve Woodman, a journalist and security analyst based in Mexico. He's an expert in the cartels and is well aware of Ryan Wedding.

[Steve Woodman]

I'm not, you know, encouraging people to be terrified of, like, winter sports and disasters, but we're talking about elite Olympic level athletes. And there are probably some transferable skills, more than you may realize at first.

[Josh Dean]

In Ryan Wedding's second life as a drug trafficking kingpin, the rules and the stakes were different, but they might have rewarded some of the same potential.

[Steve Woodman]

Basically, transnational drug trafficking rewards psychopathy because you can't legally enforce contracts. You can't sue someone who disappears with a shipment of yours. So being terrifying is really the only way to hold onto your market share.

[Josh Dean]

I'm Josh Dean and this is Chameleon, the show about people with something to hide. This week, the story of a former Olympic snowboarder who ended up on the FBI's most wanted list with a $15 million bounty on its head.

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[Talkspace Sponsor]

This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. November is Men's Health Awareness Month. So Talkspace wants guys to know that being prepared for life's biggest challenges and opportunities means prioritizing mental health too. Talkspace can help you go beyond fine tuned workouts, supplements and productivity hacks. Talkspace can help you fine tune your inner life so you can succeed in being the best version of yourself in any situation. And with Talkspace, you can get therapy from anywhere and on your time. You can even text your therapist between sessions. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or just need a little extra one on one support, Talkspace is here for you. Plus, Talkspace takes most insurance and most insured members have a $0 copay. Men's Health Awareness Month is the perfect time to reach out to TalkSpace. Now. Get $80 off your first month with promo code space80 when you go to talkspace.com match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace.com and save $80 with code [e-mail] that's talkspace.com promo code space80.

[Josh Dean]

You're listening to Chameleon, the Weekly

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

One of my favorite lines that Alyssa has written during all of this was Ryan Wedding would have been a footnote in Olympic history if not for what happens next.

[Josh Dean]

This is Tisha Thompson, an investigative reporter with espn. Working separately and together, Tisha and Alyssa have been trying to reconstruct Ryan Wedding's life from snowboard racing to the outrageous life of crime that came after. So what sort of person was Ryan?

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

He was really obsessed with working out, with his physique, with being stronger, with being, you know, sort of seen as the man.

[Josh Dean]

Alyssa reached out to athletes, coaches, people who had known him around the Canadian team and the Olympics to try and build a picture.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

He was known, yeah, for being as aggressive outside of the sport as he was known for being in it.

[Josh Dean]

It's been challenging to report because Ryan Wedding has a reputation.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Lys and I, you know, are in the business of getting people to talk to us about really difficult, very challenging things. We have very deep conversations with people about things they've never told anyone before. And nobody wants to talk about Ryan Wedding. They're afraid to talk about Ryan Wedding.

[Josh Dean]

And the more you learn about what investigators are alleging, the more that fear starts to make sense.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Even if he is in custody, he's connected with the cartel. When you learn about Ryan Wedding's case, you learn that he puts hits out on people and it doesn't matter where they are, he's going to find them.

[Josh Dean]

So getting people who actually knew Ryan Wedding to speak has been a problem. And his rise or fall, if you want to look at it that way, happened very much in the shadows. That's made it a difficult story for journalists to piece together. And what we know is largely through court records and information that has been released by the US Government as part of its extensive investigations into Wedding's life of crime. It was two years after Ryan Wedding's unremarkable appearance at the 2002 Olympics before he showed up again in any public record. He was then 22 and charged with assault in British Columbia.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

There's not much detail in the court records other than he pays a very small fine and agrees to keep the peace. Two years after that, when he's 24 years old, he's named along with another snowboarder in a search warrant of a suspected marijuana farm in British Columbia, where the police end up seizing 6,800 marijuana plants.

[Josh Dean]

This was an industrial scale weed farm, but no charges were brought. Still, it's a sign of things to come after this. Wedding spends time working as a bouncer.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

He's a really big man and he seems to be bopping around between these clubs. He's gotten into a little bit of trouble, and then he gets into a whole lot of trouble.

[Josh Dean]

In 2008, when Wedding was 27, he was caught on tape trying to buy 24 kilos of cocaine near LAX in Los Angeles. That's a lot. A street value of several million dollars. The FBI believed that Wedding was working for a Vancouver drug lord. They found $100,000 in cash in his hotel room and arrested him.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

And when he went to court for that case, he claimed to be training for the Olympics.

[Josh Dean]

It's a story he told in court, but not something that seems to actually be true. Here's Alyssa.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

If you look at the results after 2002, there's really no evidence of him even racing About a year after, he never shows up at a race again.

[Josh Dean]

Still Wedding and his lawyers pushed this narrative.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

It's right before 2010, the Olympics are going to be in Vancouver. It's his backyard. It's his hometown. So they really leaned into the fact that, look, you have this athlete. He could represent Canada in the Olympics in a year. Do we really want to send him to jail? He says, you know, what I did was out of character for me. It's a mission of mine to rebuild my reputation. You know, as an athlete. I was taught there were no second chances, but I'm asking for one. He had not been competing for quite a while, but that narrative that he was about to go and compete or could compete in 2010, I think they really leaned into before his sentencing, and it didn't work.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

They ended up finding him guilty, and he ends up being sentenced to four years in prison.

[Josh Dean]

While in prison in Southern California, Ryan Wedding met someone who would go on to play an important role in this story. A man named Jonathan Acevedo Garcia, also inside, on drug charges, also with a relatively short sentence.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

And from that moment on, they develop a relationship that will extend the next decade. It involves significant drug dealing, and Jonathan becomes a very critical piece of the puzzle.

[Josh Dean]

The puzzle being what exactly Wedding was up to in the period after he left prison. And the first hint of this is in 2015, when a huge undercover sting apprehends 15 people accused of trafficking 25 million Canadian dollars worth of about 400

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

kilos of cocaine is what they're accused of. Moving all the way from South America through Canada, predominantly into Montreal. Some of these people that are connected in this Canadian drug bust in 2015 have connections, according to the Mounties and according to the FBI, with El Chapo.

[Josh Dean]

This is the first detail linking Ryan Wedding to the Mexican drug cartels.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

And Ryan Wedding is caught in a recording by an undercover officer discussing how to move. Move the drugs through the Caribbean, through Newfoundland, Canada, and then into Montreal.

[Josh Dean]

But Wedding was never arrested. He never stood trial.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Instead, the man who introduced Ryan Wedding to the undercover police officer, he goes to prison. And when he gets out of prison, he's gunned down in a restaurant in Montreal. It's an unsolved case. No one knows who did it. There's never been any resolution to it. There's no known motive.

[Josh Dean]

But it sure looks like someone paid the price for crossing Ryan Wedding.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

And that's the pattern that's going to start to develop, is if you cross Ryan Wedding, if you cross Ryan Wedding's operation, you will die. That's the messaging that Ryan Wedding wanted to get out there.

[Josh Dean]

From there, Wedding pretty much disappears for a decade. But cops in several countries led by the FBI never stopped looking. And given some time, they began to home in on him. First in October 2024, when an indictment in Southern California is unsealed accusing Ryan Wedding of, quote, running a continuing criminal enterprise, murder, attempted murder, and conspiring to possess, distribute and export cocaine. The Department of Justice alleged that Wedding and his associates were shipping bulk quantities of cocaine, hundreds of kilograms worth, from Southern California to Canada through a Canada based drug transport network.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

More than a billion dollars worth of cocaine moving from South America, Colombia, through Mexico and the Caribbean, through the United States up into Canada.

[Josh Dean]

He was also connected to two different murders in Canada. Authorities at that time still didn't know where Ryan Wedding was, but they suspected he was in Mexico. The following year, more charges connected to a January 2025 murder, this one in Columbia. And the break in the case, so far as reporters could tell, seemed to start back in another small suburban Canadian town, this time Brampton outside of Toronto.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

A husband and wife are visiting with their adult daughter. They're from overseas, they're staying with her for an extended period of time and they're all in the house together when a group of men busts through the door and guns down the father, the mother, and then shoots the adult daughter 13 times all the way from her neck down through her feet. Remarkably, she survived much, much later, through court documents. Will you be able to piece together that this was a case of mistaken identity?

[Josh Dean]

Someone had put out a hit on this house believing that this family had been linked to the theft of 300

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

kilos of cocaine and that this assassin crew, which is what the feds called these guys, came and gunned down this family thinking that they were connected to this man.

[Josh Dean]

While the RCMP were trying to figure out just what the hell was going on, there was another murder in Niagara Falls, this time of a 29 year old man named Randy Fader.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

He's gunned down in his driveway. A few weeks later, the gunman is pulled over during a traffic stop because he's speeding. And the local police in Canada get their hands on his phone and his phone has messages, encrypted messages, with who we will later discover is Andrew Clark.

[Josh Dean]

Andrew Clark is a former elevator mechanic from Toronto who ultimately became Ryan Wedding's right hand man. It was Clark who had put the hit on Feder for stealing from his operation. This was the first puzzle piece.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

It's right around that same time in Arkansas, a trucker, a large, you know, 18 wheeled rig full of cocaine gets pulled over. And he is also connected to the Ryan Wedding and Andrew Clark organization.

[Josh Dean]

The clues are stacking up now.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Okay, so all these cases are starting to happen in various locations, and the Feds are starting to piece this stuff together. Right after the murder in Niagara Falls, the FBI arrests two guys in Los Angeles for trying to distribute cocaine, hundreds of kilograms of cocaine. And the reason why the FBI was able to capture these guys is because they had a confidential informant, a confidential witness who was intercepting the messages between these various couriers who were moving the drugs through LA safe houses that were supposed to go through 18 wheelers up into Canada. And those messages were being intercepted.

[Josh Dean]

And who was this informant? Well, it turns out to be none other than Ryan Wedding's old friend from prison, Jonathan Acevedo Garcia. Although at the time, no one knew this.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

In fact, Ryan Weddings so trusted Jonathan that they were texting weekly. And he actually puts Jonathan in charge of another purchase a few months later of more huge kilos of cocaine deliveries, not realizing that he's working with the Feds the whole time.

[Josh Dean]

This all changes when the case becomes unsealed. That's when a Wedding story blew up in the media. And it's how Tisha and Alyssa found out what this mysterious Canadian outlaw had really been up to. Of course, someone else had access to the same information. Ryan Wedding. Using those court records, it wouldn't have been hard for Wedding to identify the leak in his operation.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

He wants some proof, but he knows. And he puts a $5 million hit out on Jonathan. He wants them to find Jonathan.

[Josh Dean]

Wedding allegedly organizes a manhunt for Acevedo Garcia, tapping a whole cast of characters from his network.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

It includes, like, a former youth hockey player up in Canada who's paying this crime blogger to post a picture of Jonathan and call him a rat and a snitch and to basically put it out into the world that the hunt is on for this guy. There is a whole number of people who are enlisted. They go all the way to Saudi Arabia. They go down to Colombia. Then there's a group of commercial sex workers, a madam who is brought in. And she connects Ryan Wedding with a woman in Orlando who is born in Colombia. And he offers to pay for plastic surgery and to pay off her mortgage if she'll lure Jonathan to a restaurant in Columbia.

[Josh Dean]

But they still need to find him.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

There's a musician up in Toronto who offers up Jonathan's phone number and gets $500 for that. And using that phone number, they put tracking software on Jonathan's phone. And now they know where he is.

[Josh Dean]

And so they, whoever they are, can now get the sex worker from Orlando to carry out her part of the mission to get Jonathan Acevedo Garcia to a restaurant in Medellin.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Jonathan sits down, he starts to eat, a motorcyclist pulls up, walks right up to him and shoots him five times through the head. Another man on a different motorcycle comes up and photographs the body and they flee. And they've never caught the men who did the assassination. That photograph then gets sent to the crime blogger who posts part of the photograph along with Jonathan's name, saying, this is what happens to you if you cross Ryan Wedding and his organization.

[Josh Dean]

This is the event that led to the second set of charges. In October 2025, anyone involved in the hunt for Jonathan Acevedo Garcia had charges brought against them for drug trafficking and conspiracy to murder a government witness. 30 people in total.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Now they've lost their star witness, right? He's dead. What I think the great irony of all this is that the lawyer suggested that if they eliminated the star witness for the American prosecution of Ryan Wedding's organization that the case would have to be dropped. And instead all it did was bring even more attention and more charges against Ryan Wedding and put him on the most wanted list.

[Josh Dean]

The hunt was now well and truly on for Ryan Wedding. The assumption at this point was that he was hiding out in Mexico with the protection of the cartels. What exactly was Wedding doing there? We'll try to answer that question after the break.

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[MacKenzie]

My name is MacKenzie and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a non verbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she, she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really, really generous donations from people who are really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

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[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Whispers in the dark Phenomenon that slip past the logic Legends that refuse to die when the unknown stirs Its trail leads to our podcast, so Supernatural. I'm Yvette Gentile. And I'm her sister Racha Pecorero. Together we explore all of the world's most bizarre mysteries. Listen to so Supernatural every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Dean]

This is Chameleon, the weekly. There's one giant question pretty much everyone asks when they first hear the story. How the hell does a middle class kid from rural Canada who grew up skiing on his family's hill, become a violent drug kingpin in cahoots with the Sinaloa Cartel?

[Steve Woodman]

It was a rapid rise. He allegedly led a major criminal operation. They all have nicknames and yeah, so he was known as the Giant.

[Josh Dean]

This is Steve Woodman Again. Steve has a deep understanding of the drug trade in Mexico. He's lived in Guadalajara, a center of cartel activity, since 2012, and it's his job to know how these things work.

[Steve Woodman]

It's actually much more common than you'd imagine for Canadian citizens to end up in these types of situations.

[Josh Dean]

Foreigners like Wedding and Andrew Clark would not be involved in the production of cocaine. That's handled by the cartels. But Steve says groups like the Sinaloa Cartel are not really involved in street level distribution. And that's where others can come into play.

[Steve Woodman]

There are all sorts of gangs from all sorts of different backgrounds that are involved in drug distribution in the US and that includes groups like the Mexican Mafia, the Hell's Angels.

[Josh Dean]

Wedding was a middleman, a link between the product, meaning the drugs, and the markets in North America. Basically, he tapped into the existing infrastructure and made himself very useful.

[Steve Woodman]

We have seen these brokers become very powerful. For example, Chinese brokers who are responsible for bringing fentanyl and meth precursors. They've become very influential in Latin American organized crime. The cartels are fine with it.

[Josh Dean]

The Mexican group that Wedding worked with in Mexico is known as Los Chapitos. It's a faction of the Sinaloa cartel hotel led by Ivano Guzman, nicknamed Il Chapito, or Little Chapo, after his dad, the infamous El Chapo.

[Steve Woodman]

Guzman and Los Chapitos, they're like the kind of evolution of the Sinaloa cartel. So they're quite savvy with social media. They're known for, like, flaunting their wealth. But they basically are under extreme pressure at the moment. They have been since 2024, because the rival faction is at war with them and they're facing, like a multitude of sanctions. And there's a lot of pressure from the Trump administration on the Mexican federal government to crack down on them.

[Josh Dean]

Ryan Wedding's success in Mexico was based almost entirely on his ability to get drugs into the US and eventually into Canada on massive 18 wheeler trucks, which picked up shipments from safe houses all over LA and across the border. Tisha explains how it works.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

They had this very complex system that involved using the serial numbers of American dollar bills to positively identify that, yes, you are the courier that I'm supposed to hand these drugs off to. You know, a vehicle has moved to a location, then it's moved to another location, and then it meets the truck, and then the truck moves to a different location.

[Josh Dean]

The scale of the operation Ryan Wedding is alleged to have run was enormous.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

At one point, there was so much cocaine being moved that the man in charge of the large 18 wheeler trucks sends a note that's intercepted by Jonathan that says there's too many drugs. We can't fit all of this into a single tractor trailer. I mean, that's how much drugs we were talking about.

[Josh Dean]

This quantity of drugs meant that Wedding accumulated massive wealth.

[Steve Woodman]

His wealth was apparently spectacular, based on the manhunt and the seizures of his property. And so you had motorcycles that were valued around US$40 million. You had a Mercedes that was only one of six units in the world.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

It had like something like 13 miles on the odometer. It's worth over $13 million. It had been tied to the royal family in Abu Dhabi and a dealership in Miami had sourced it for Drake, the musician. The name of the person it was sold to was Roland Sokolovsky, who is the jeweler, who is accused of laundering money for the Wedding organization, one of the people who were arrested in the murder conspiracy. And so that jeweler's name being on that bill of sale is what then they were able to connect this car to Wedding. Some experts on rare motorcycles have looked at those bikes and they, you know, a lot of them belong to famous motorcycle racers. There were three that supposedly belonged to Valentino Rossi, the Italian MotoGP star. There was rare art, there was jewelry.

[Josh Dean]

According to Steve Woodman, we should be careful about comparisons to the more famous drug lords. Despite Weddings vast wealth and now fame,

[Steve Woodman]

he was a top tier broker and logistics operator, which is quite different to a Chapo or Escobar. There isn't any evidence that he commanded territory, that he ran an armed militia, or that he had serious political influence. For example, Pablo Escobar was elected to Colombian Congress. So there are quite a few big differences in their level of like political penetration and influence.

[Josh Dean]

Also in violence. Ryan Wedding is alleged to have ordered at least three murders, including one of a government informant. That's serious shit. But El Chapo was connected to 34,000 murders during his time at the helm of the Sinaloa cartel. Alyssa and Tisha point to some excellent reporting by the cbc, which managed to speak to a Sinaloa member in a safe house.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

He sat for the interview, he said, because he felt that the United States specifically were inflating Ryan Wedding's image as a means to then chest thump once he was captured, that it was more likely that they knew where he was and were getting close to capturing him, but were inflating his image in the lead up to that, you know, they put him on the 10 most wanted list at the end of 2025. They upped the bounty on him to 15 million. While the charges against Wedding are egregious, you know, even if there are a dozen murders and a billion dollars in drug trafficking between Colombia and Mexico and the United States and Canada, it's hard to compare him to El Chapo and, you know, these men who are Pablo Escobar, who are, you know, potentially responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

[Josh Dean]

But this didn't stop FBI Director Kash Patel from making precisely these comparisons when he stepped to a podium after Wedding was apprehended. And just to tell you how bad

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

of a guy Ryan Wedding is, he went from an Olympic snowboarder to the largest narco trafficker in modern times. He is a modern day El Chapo. He is a modern day Pablo Escobar, and he thought he could evade justice.

[Steve Woodman]

If you look at someone like Kash Patel, I think it's quite obvious that federal agencies, the leaders of these bodies, they're interested in glorifying themselves, drawing media attention, and ultimately that helps them secure federal funding and grow. Law enforcement never really says they've caught a particularly stupid criminal. They're always taking down, foiling criminal masterminds.

[Josh Dean]

Wedding's arrest, when it finally came on January 23, 2026, wasn't a surprise to anyone.

[Steve Woodman]

He was obviously being built up so he could be brought down and the Trump administration can claim a win. That's how it works with these types of things. I don't believe there was any way for him to continue to do what he was doing.

[Josh Dean]

The investigation was extensive, and as more people were arrested and gave up information, it became inevitable that authorities were going to catch up with Wal Wedding.

[Steve Woodman]

There would have been arrests of people close to him, so they would have revealed details about his whereabouts.

[Josh Dean]

One of those arrests in particular mattered a lot because in November 2025, Operation Giant Slalom got a massive win. Andrew Clark was arrested.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

He's in custody, and the feds get their hands on his phone. And using his phone and the phones that they have already seized from some of the other defendants, they're able to piece together how all these other people are involved. In the court documents, it says, using confidential witnesses phone, and then they say using statements made by confidential witness, which

[Josh Dean]

suggests that someone other than Jonathan Acevedo Garcia had turned on the Wedding operation.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Everyone, myself included, Alyssa, anyone who's read these court documents in detail was like,

[Josh Dean]

that's Andrew Clark, as in Wedding's right hand, the former elevator mechanic from Toronto.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

That confidential witness is Andrew Clark. You're like, whoa, that's who they're talking about.

[Josh Dean]

When it comes to the actual arrest of Ryan Wedding, there are several versions of events. Most in question is whether Wedding was captured or turned himself in.

[Steve Woodman]

It could be that he was drawing too much heat and attention on Los Chapitos, or that he feared for his life in Mexico because Los Chapitos could have turned on him. That's the way it works. Basically. He wouldn't have been able to evade law enforcement in that way without the support of Los Chapitos.

[Josh Dean]

So why not run away?

[Steve Woodman]

The reason is that he would have not been protected. So I think the manhunt would have basically continued. And, yeah, he could even fear for his life. Because the Sinaloa cartel has international reach, it's not impossible to imagine him being killed wherever he was.

[Josh Dean]

There are actually three versions of events of the arrest itself. Kash Patel's version in that press conference was that it was a joint operation by the US and Mexican governments.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

He talks about the FBI and the Mexican government and gives a lot of shout outs. He keeps saying, I want to give a shout out to the Mexican government, a shout out to the Canadian. And this was a multi agency apprehension.

[Steve Woodman]

But not only that, it was a dramatic, high stakes affair, tense negotiation. The kind of the most apt for the movie version of it.

[Josh Dean]

In the official Mexican version, Wedding turned himself in.

[Steve Woodman]

And to support this version, President Claudia Scheinbaum produced a photo from Wedding's Instagram account of him outside the embassy moments before he surrendered.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Listen, I looked at that photo and I was like, that's AI. It just looked really obvious to me.

[Josh Dean]

About two weeks earlier, an Instagram account reportedly run by someone in Weddings organization had appeared flashing photos of the motorbikes, watches, all the trappings of a drug kingpin lifestyle. This is where that photo in question came from.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

It was hard to believe that one of the the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Men were running an Instagram account.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

It did not pass my sniff test.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

The more we looked into it, it was very clear that these photographs that were being posted, they were AI generated,

[Josh Dean]

which was later confirmed by the cbc.

[Talkspace Sponsor]

Take a look at this sculpture.

[Josh Dean]

The text on the metal is garbled.

[Talkspace Sponsor]

And this watch, the numbers are also warped and nonsensical.

[Josh Dean]

I contacted the person running the account and they said they are Ryan Wedding, but they wouldn't provide any proof.

[Talkspace Sponsor]

And as we've shown, the content they're sharing is fake.

[Josh Dean]

So if Wedding did hand himself in, this wasn't proof.

[Steve Woodman]

There's another version which is outlined by his lawyer, Anthony Colombo, who said his client was detained in a direct FBI op in Mexico.

[Josh Dean]

This story, if true, would be problematic for the Mexicans. In fact, it's illegal and against the Constitution for the US Government and to make arrests inside Mexico and could be hugely damaging politically.

[Steve Woodman]

The Trump administration would just basically say whatever and they'll change their versions because they don't really care. There aren't any political implications. But Mexico's under enormous pressure from the Trump administration to allow U.S. officials to come in to conduct operations with Mexican officials alongside them. But they've actually made multiple direct threats that they will just do what they want. If he's not happy with Mexico. So it comes at a very tense moment of, like, discussion about the issue of Mexican national sovereignty being under threat.

[Josh Dean]

There's a real worry in Mexico that Trump could launch an operation inside the country's borders, not as he did in Venezuela, by taking out the leader. But even surgical operations against cartel members have serious political implications. US Officers are allowed to assist and advise, but they don't have the power to act as cops.

[Steve Woodman]

So that would have a lot of diplomatic and economic implications. It would have like a knock on effect for the economy. Where Mexico is now a kind of basket case country, it can't be taken seriously. They've got a foreign power just sending in military to sort out their problems. It would be an absolute disaster for President Sheinbaum if the US Were to impose unilateral operations on Mexico.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

And then we come to Monday, and after his hearing, his attorney does a 10 minute press conference and says, my client absolutely did not turn himself in. He was captured, he was apprehended, and I won't go into any more details, but my client absolutely did not turn himself in.

[Josh Dean]

We're not really sure what happened in the final moment before Ryan Wedding was arrested in Mexico in January, and we may not get a clear answer until this case actually makes it to court.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

The feds are not going to tell you anything because they don't want to jeopardize the integrity of their case. So until these cases make their way through the court system and become adjudicated, you're not going to hear anyone explain how they did something.

[Josh Dean]

And where is Ryan Wedding now? We just don't know.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

He was captured on a Friday. He appeared on Monday. However, they moved that hearing because of ICE protests in Los Angeles, ongoing ICE protests. We were not in the courtroom that day. During the press conference with his attorney, a reporter asked a question about his jumpsuit, saying Santa Ana on it. And his attorney, Mr. Colombo, said, well, you could see his jumpsuit. He didn't answer questions about where Wedding was being held. He is being held somewhere around the Los Angeles area.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Normally, if you ask me where someone's being held currently, I can go into the computer and Google it real fast. They are not telling you where he's being held, probably for his safety, because

[Josh Dean]

the cartels have ways of reaching people inside prison walls. And it's not just about the man, it's about the case. If anything happens to Ryan Wedding, the prosecution could very well collapse.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

The feds will say that he's a modern day Pablo Escobar. The feds will say that he was running a billion dollar cocaine international empire and that he was the largest supplier of cocaine in Canada. So they're going to take a lot of extra steps with him.

[Josh Dean]

At this point, it's worth saying clearly, Ryan Wedding has not been convicted of anything. He pleaded not guilty to all charges and is presumed innocent unless and until he's proven guilty in court. And because the trial could be years away, we're stuck in a strange in between moment. One of the big questions hanging over all this is scale. How much of what the feds say will stand up when it's tested? Was he the top guy or just a cog in a much bigger machine? We might find out. But for now, we have to wait. And in the meantime, I'm still left wondering about the basic premise of this story. A Canadian kid from a normal middle class family, an Olympian, and then somehow, years later, a name on the FBI's most wanted list. How does that happen?

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Did he fall into this? Did he seek it out? Did he get into, you know, dealing some weed and then that turns into farming weed and then that turns into maybe, you know, moving coke and moving coke then puts him into prison.

[Josh Dean]

There are still so many questions. And the people around Ryan Wedding have all gone quiet, including his family.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

It's all disappeared. I mean, they're pretty hard to find, even, you know, on an Instagram account or a Twitter account. I imagine anyone connected with Ryan Wedding at this point is concerned to be too public.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

If what the feds say is true, Ryan Wedding is a very dangerous person. And there may be a reason why you're not hearing from his family. There's a reason why people don't want to talk. This is some dangerous stuff we're talking about.

[Josh Dean]

It's tempting to try to reverse engineer a new explanation, to find the moment everything went wrong in his life. But real life stories don't work like that.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Anyone who's done any kind of reporting on families knows that there's no one size fits all. There's no formula for this. Just because you would think that you would love your child or that your child would stay in contact with you does not mean that's what's happening in a family. Like, you just cannot assume unless someone tells you what was really happening happening in that family dynamic. But it does make you wonder, what happened to Ryan Wedding? How do you go from being the very best at a very young age to leading a life so violent, so high profile, so dangerous, like, how does that happen?

[Josh Dean]

There just isn't really anything in this story to suggest it would go the way of went and, you know, sport.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

Aside from all accounts, just a normal loving middle class family.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

You could do a whole podcast about what does it take to be an Olympic athlete? But generally speaking, Olympic athletes do not become transnational drug traffickers.

[Josh Dean]

That's part of what makes this case so unsettling. It just doesn't fit a template most of us have seen before.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Sure, plenty of people get in trouble for dealing drugs, but this is drug trafficking at a very complex level.

[Josh Dean]

There is one detail in all this that stuck with me. When authorities searched a Mexican property tied to Wedding, they seized the obvious stuff. Cash, jewelry, cars, bikes. But they also seized something else. Medals. Some people reported that these were Olympic medals. They weren't because he didn't win any Olympic medals. They were from a lesser Canadian national competition. But the fact that Wedding still had these reminders of his previous life as an elite athlete feels telling. It's a link back to the beginning of this story.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

This man is now 44 years old. He has not been in Canada, we don't think, for more than a decade. But he is still carrying these snowboard medals with him, which is fascinating. You know, you have to ask why? But also, those medals allowed the FBI to directly connect Ryan Wedding to this home, to this property, because they were medals he had won as a 17, 18 year old racing in Canada.

[Josh Dean]

It's like Ryan Wedding carried proof of the life he used to have or the life he still wanted to be associated with right alongside the life he actually built. And maybe that's why this story is catnip to people. Because on paper it sounds like a movie and surely is going to be one.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

The reason why everybody wants to make a documentary out of it is just the facts alone. You have characters that are coming straight out of central casting. You have characters from Better Call Saul. You have characters from Peaky Blinders. Uncut gems. I mean, it felt almost farcical how you've got commercial sex workers and jewelers and professional poker players and hockey players and contract assassins and corrupt lawyers and guys moving drugs in big rigs over the border, but no one's catching them. And then drug deals are happening in the backyards of LA neighborhoods. It just feels like every movie you've ever seen in Hollywood, but it's all absolutely real. And at the end of the day, I always come back to this woman who was shot from her neck all the way down to her feet because she was living in a house that was mistaken for a drug dealer's family. You can't help but think it's a Hollywood story. But then at the end of the day, it's someone's real life story, a lot of people's real life story.

[Josh Dean]

And beyond this one case, there's an even bigger reality. The drug trade isn't a single storyline. It's millions of storylines, millions of families losing people they love in a horrific cross border mess of addiction and murder. And as Steve Woodman points out, whatever Ryan Wedding did, it's barely going to make a dent in this reality. His capture may bring a single criminal to justice or even 30 criminals, but it's not going to change anything in the long term.

[Steve Woodman]

What we'll get with all of this drama and this manhunt and the arrest is basically an extremely short lived disruption to parts of the cocaine supply chain in North America. That's all they can hope for.

[Josh Dean]

And so the most disturbing part of this whole story might not be that it's barely believable. It's that it's almost definitely repeatable.

[Steve Woodman]

There'll be another Ryan wedding. He probably won't be a snowboarder. He might not be Canadian, but he's easily replaceable within the infrastructure. They haven't dismantled the infrastructure even of Los Chapitos. Even if they were to do that, that infrastructure would be replaced within a year or so by arrival. These types of captures, they don't have a long term impact.

[Josh Dean]

Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean and was written by me and Joe Barrett. It was produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminhoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack. Theme by Ewin lytramuin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Sher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help and if you have any feedback, tips or story ideas, you can email [e-mail] or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

I think Chuck would approve. In the world of true crime, the real story isn't always in the headlines. It's in the evidence.

[Josh Dean]

Brandi.

[Narrator/GoFundMe Sponsor/Brandi Churchwell]

I'm Brandi Churchwell, host of 13th Juror podcast, and I'm here to take you past the news cycle and straight into the courtroom. Every week, I'll break down the investigation, the prosecution, the defense, and everything that unfolds beyond the jury box. We'll examine every testimony, every exhibit, and every hidden motive. Listen to 13th Juror wherever you get your podcasts.