{"id":435821,"date":"2026-01-27T05:46:21","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T05:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/435821\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T05:46:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T05:46:21","slug":"ryan-wedding-pleads-not-guilty-to-murder-drug-trafficking-charges-in-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/435821\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Wedding pleads not guilty to murder, drug trafficking charges in U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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Wedding was flown to California after being arrested in Mexico City on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Wedding, 44, is accused of leading a transnational drug trafficking network and working with Mexico\u2019s Sinaloa Cartel to transport hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from \u200dColombia through Mexico to the U.S. and Canada.<\/p>\n

He was on the FBI\u2019s \u201cTop 10 Most Wanted\u201d list and the U.S. government had offered a US$15 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.<\/p>\n

Mexican officials said he turned himself in at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City last week and was\u00a0flown to Southern California\u00a0after a yearlong effort by authorities in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Colombia and the Dominican Republic to arrest him.<\/p>\n

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When speaking to reporters Monday outside the federal court in Santa Ana, south of Los Angeles, Wedding\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u201cHe was arrested,\u201d Colombo said after the brief hearing, offering no further details. \u201cHe did not surrender.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colombo said his client was in \u201cgood spirits\u201d but added that \u201cthis has been a whirlwind for Mr.\u00a0Wedding.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Federal prosecutors declined to comment after the hearing.\u00a0Wedding\u00a0was scheduled to be back in court Feb. 11 and a trial date was set for Mar. 24.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors accused him of ordering several drug-related murders, \u200cincluding that of a U.S. federal witness in Colombia in January 2025 before he could testify against him, the department said.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors also accuse him of directing \u200dthe murders of two people and the attempted murder \u200dof 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 \u200da drug debt.<\/p>\n

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If convicted of the most serious charges, he could face a sentence of life in prison.<\/p>\n

\u2013Reporting by Sarah Mills and Arafat Barbakh in Santa Ana, California, and Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; editing by Scott Malone and Rosalba O\u2019Brien<\/p>\n

\u2014with files from The Associated Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ryan Wedding, a Canadian former Olympic snowboarder, pleaded not guilty to charges of becoming a cocaine smuggling kingpin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2169,26072,43,44,136293,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-435821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-crime","tag-fbi","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-ryan-wedding","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}