‘Los Angeles is safer,” LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said of Ryan Wedding’s arrest Thursday night in Mexico City, ending a manhunt that involved investigators from multiple countries and agencies
Olympian Ryan Wedding – accused of sitting at the helm of a murderous transnational narcotics empire – has been on the run for more than a decade with a phalanx of international investigators on his tail and a $15 million U.S. bounty on his head.
On Thursday night Wedding – accused of a slew of violent crimes, including orchestrating last year’s assassination of a witness against his drug empire in Medellín, Colombia, an assassination detailed by Los Angeles in the January issue – was captured in Mexico City, FBI Director Kash Patel announced. Patel called Wedding “the largest narco trafficker of modern times” at a press conference at Ontario International Airport, where the accused kingpin landed Friday morning.
Wedding turned himself in at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, two law enforcement sources told Los Angeles, a move that came after international agencies turned the heat up on his network, arresting 36 associates and seizing his prized possessions.
At a press conference at the airport, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, Akil Davis, detailed the “massive manhunt” that went into tracking Wedding. “We seized a mountain of drugs, cash, weapons,” Davis said while flanked by Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell, whose detectives were among the phalanx of investigators dedicated to finding Wedding. McDonnell said
“This has been a coordinated, intelligence based effort,” McDonnell said. “We have disrupted a major narcotics pipeline…Los Angeles is safer.”
Credit: FBI
Wedding is accused of moving 60 metric tons of cocaine through a sophisticated network of Los Angeles area safe houses before the drugs were transported into Canada. As he built his purported empire, Wedding picked up several monikers, among them Giant, el Jefe, Public Enemy and Buddy — and authorities compared him to Pablo Escobar last March when the FBI announced that it was upping its reward for information leading to his capture to $15 million.
To maintain control of his empire, which he started, federal prosecutors say, immediately upon his release from a U.S. federal prison after serving a short stint for a 2008 San Diego drug bust, Wedding allegedly used a team of sicarios to take out anyone who got in his way, federal prosecutors say. Wedding’s beginnings in the drug trade and his network’s ties to L.A. were featured in a long-form story in Los Angeles last spring.
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He’s been listed as one of the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives since March 2025, with the U.S. State Department offering a $15-million US reward for information leading to his arrest. In recent months, investigators have hit Wedding where it hurts, seizing his rare $14 million Mercedes-Benz Roadster and a $40 million collection of MotoGP racing bikes in a series of raids in Mexico. Wedding’s Olympic medals, earned while the skilled snowboarder competed for Team Canada in the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City, were also recovered as investigators rounded up his associates late last year.
Ryan Wedding had a coterie of unusual alleged criminal compatriots around himCredit: Graphic by Lisa Lewis
In November, U.S. officials announced a slew of Wedding associates had been arrested in connection with a sophisticated hit that played out like a Hollywood movie at a restaurant inside a Medellín strip mall. The target: Jonathan Acebedo-Garcia, a Colombian native who met Wedding in a Texas prison, and quickly became part of the coterie of purported traffickers around the Olympian when they were both released.
Acebedo-Garcia had been there since the beginning, they say, and knew everything about how the operation worked, from the cocaine laboratories protected by paramilitary groups in Colombia, to the transport routes through Mexico and the stash houses in L.A. where the drugs were secreted before being trucked into Canada. He was believed to have been privy to the encrypted conversations between Wedding and his accused top lieutenant, Andrew Clark.
And, he was spilling his guts, which, according to a federal indictment, was information served up to Wedding and Clark by a Canadian criminal defense attorney on their payroll — a flashy lawyer named Deepak Paradkar, one who also earned a couple of underworld monikers, according to federal prosecutors: “Cocaine Lawyer” and “Descartes.”
The lawyer, along with women who helped lure the Acebo-Garcia out of hiding, were arrested in November. On Friday, FBI Director Kash Patel, along with his boss Pam Bondi, announced Wedding’s capture on social media. Patel is expected to join officials with the Royal Canadian Mounties on Friday for a press conference to release details.
FBI’s Top Ten Fugitive Ryan Wedding apprehended in Mexico and returned to the United States. #Captured@LAPDHQ @RCMPGRCPolice @DEA @USAO_LosAngeles
https://t.co/jYSKIggYq5
— FBI Los Angeles (@FBILosAngeles) January 23, 2026
Wedding sits atop a federal indictment in California’s Central District. He is expected to make his initial appearance in a DTLA federal courtroom on Monday, Davis said.
This is a developing story. Stay tuned to lamag.com for new details as they emerge.