Ryan Wedding, a Canadian former Olympic snowboarder, pleaded not guilty to charges of becoming a cocaine smuggling kingpin responsible for multiple drug-related murders in a U.S. federal court in Santa Ana, California, on Monday.
Wedding was flown to California after being arrested in Mexico City on Thursday.
Wedding, 44, is accused of leading a transnational drug trafficking network and working with Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel to transport hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico to the U.S. and Canada.
He was on the FBI’s “Top 10 Most Wanted” list and the U.S. government had offered a US$15 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.
Mexican officials said he turned himself in at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City last week and was flown to Southern California after a yearlong effort by authorities in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Colombia and the Dominican Republic to arrest him.
Story continues below advertisement
When speaking to reporters Monday outside the federal court in Santa Ana, south of Los Angeles, Wedding’s defense attorney Anthony Colombo disputed that his client had turned himself in in Mexico and said he was living in Mexico, not hiding out there.
Get daily National news
Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.
“He was arrested,” Colombo said after the brief hearing, offering no further details. “He did not surrender.”
Colombo said his client was in “good spirits” but added that “this has been a whirlwind for Mr. Wedding.”
More on Crime
More videos
Federal prosecutors declined to comment after the hearing. Wedding was scheduled to be back in court Feb. 11 and a trial date was set for Mar. 24.
Trending Now
-
Some Canadians will get GST credit top up to tackle grocery costs: Carney
-
Pizza Pops E. coli recall grows as roughly a dozen products now hit
Wedding, who competed for Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, faces charges including conspiracy to distribute cocaine, conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to tamper with a witness.
Prosecutors accused him of ordering several drug-related murders, including that of a U.S. federal witness in Colombia in January 2025 before he could testify against him, the department said.
Prosecutors also accuse him of directing the murders of two people and the attempted murder of a third in Ontario, Canada, in November 2023 over a stolen drug shipment, and of ordering the killing of another person in Canada in May 2024 over a drug debt.
Story continues below advertisement
If convicted of the most serious charges, he could face a sentence of life in prison.
–Reporting by Sarah Mills and Arafat Barbakh in Santa Ana, California, and Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; editing by Scott Malone and Rosalba O’Brien
—with files from The Associated Press
