FBI's Most Wanted Trafficker Ryan James Wedding Part 2: Canadian Gang Leader, Lawyer & Blogger Arrested in Killing of FBI Informant

 "Socalj" for Borderland Beat

In new indictments announced, Wedding is accused of ordering the murder of a federal witness. “The witness was gunned down at a restaurant in Medellín before he could testify against Wedding,” US Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

According to the new indictment, Wedding had the help of accomplices in several countries, including a woman in Colombia who claimed to have contacts within the cartels and authorities capable of tracking cell phones. 

Another accomplice was a woman whose mission was to lure the victim to a specific location. In exchange, Wedding's money launderers paid for her mortgage and for cosmetic surgery.

Known by the aliases “King” and “James Conrad,” after a character in the 2017 film Kong: Skull Island, Ryan James Wedding comes from a well-to-do middle-class family in British Columbia. After the 2002 Olympics, where his snowboarding skills placed him 26th in the parallel giant slalom, he spent two years studying at a university in the Vancouver metropolitan area.

According to Rolling Stone reporter Jesse Hyde, who has been tracking Wedding since 2009, he was drawn to the nightlife and the violent local crime scene. Wedding worked as a nightclub security guard, while setting up a massive marijuana growing operation. 

In 2006, Canadian authorities seized his warehouses, plants, and equipment ending his cannabis career. Not long afterwards, the Canadian moved into the big leagues of the drug trade, the cocaine market, and made his way to California.

Unfortunately for Wedding, one of his first purchases, monitored by the FBI in Southern California, went wrong. Authorities arrested Wedding and sent him to prison. It was 2008 and he would spend three years in prison, in San Diego and Texas, until he was transferred to Canada in 2011 to finish serving his sentence there. In US prison, Wedding made many connections in the drug trade, including through his first wife.

Slain FBI witness Jonathan Acebedo Garcia and Ryan Wedding met around 2010, when both were imprisoned in Texas.

One of Wedding's connections he met in prison was Jonathan Acebedo Garcia, a Montreal-based member of his organization with ties to Colombia. Acebedo-Garcia and an accomplice were arrested in New York state in 2009 for a traffic violation and when police searched their vehicle, they discovered 23,000 MDMA (ecstasy) pills.

He was expected to testify that he met Wedding in 2011 while both were incarcerated at the same Texas prison, and that he communicated with Wedding using encrypted messages almost daily or weekly since around 2013. His role was to oversee the delivery of cocaine to couriers for transport to customers in Canada, and then launder the proceeds back to Wedding in Mexico.

Acebedo-Garcia was listed as a director of several companies registered in Quebec, including a bar located in the Ahuntsic district of Montreal, a gas station in Laval, a holding company and a vehicle detailing business.

At some point in 2023, he had agreed to cooperate with the FBI and testify against Wedding and others in court.

In January 2024, the FBI informant met Wedding and Andrew Clark in Mexico City while wearing a wire. In recorded conversations, Clark allegedly explained that he sends 2 to 3 tons of cocaine each month to places in Canada, including about 600 kilograms a month to Alberta.

The Mexico meetings set in motion a plan to arrange shipments of more than 650 kilograms of cocaine from the Los Angeles area into Canada using a Toronto-based transportation network allegedly run by Gurpreet Singh and his uncle, Hardeep Ratte.

On October 17, 2024, the US announced a sweeping indictment against Ryan James Wedding, Andrew Clark and his network of traffickers and gunmen.

Court documents say Wedding “suspected he knew the identity” of the FBI’s confidential source, but he sought assistance to confirm this. Wedding also asked Canadian gangster Atna Ohna to confront the suspected FBI source via text.

Wedding then had an encrypted group chat with a Toronto lawyer identified in the court documents as Deepak Paradkar. It’s alleged that the lawyer said if the confidential source “was eliminated” and could not appear in court, an indictment against Wedding and his drug organization would likely be dismissed.

Wedding subsequently told one of his accomplices “he wanted to murder” the FBI source and was willing to spend up to $5 million to make that happen.

Dirty News Website

A Canadian website that describes itself as a crime news outlet, The Dirty Newz, allegedly received money from Wedding to help track down "rats" who agreed to cooperate with police. The site reportedly circulated a photo of the victim Garcia for this purpose.

According to US court filings and statements released by Canadian and American law-enforcement agencies, Gursewak Singh Bal, co-founder of the crime-focused blog site is accused of using his social media platforms to expose the protected witness and promote Wedding's drug trafficking activities.

Gursewak Singh Bal

Bal was among seven Canadians arrested on November 19 in coordinated raids, which also involved the seizure of The Dirty Newz by the FBI. The US is seeking his extradition on charges including conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, and drug trafficking.

Authorities allege Bal was paid $10,000 by defendant Chapman to not post negatively about Wedding and Andrew Clark and to publish the witness’ photograph, a move prosecutors say contributed to the victim’s eventual killing in Medellín, Colombia, in January 2025. Filings say an undercover RCMP officer contacted Bal in August 2025, as investigators closed in.

According to the US DOJ filing referenced in the reports, Bal reportedly posted on November 5, 2024, a story naming the witness as a “rat” and claiming he would likely “never be found again.” The victim's photo, along with messages from Chapman claiming he was a snitch and was seeking his location.

Tracking the FBI Informant

The indictment includes a detailed timeline of the efforts to track and locate the victim which began shortly after the posting of the FBI informant's photo online. Several of the additional defendants had worked to locate the FBI informant through seized encrypted messages, including on Threema and WhatsApp.

Efforts were made by Ohna and others to gain information about the Colombia-based girlfriend of the FBI informant. Tejeda, one of the sex workers connected to Mexican madam Carmen Florez was approached to travel to Colombia and lure him to a location to be killed in exchange for Wedding paying for her mortgage and corrective cosmetic surgery.

Following inquiries from Canadian law enforcement about the FBI informant, Wedding paid $18,500 to have Acebedo-Garcia's phone tracked. First, to Mecca, Saudi Arabia and eventually Medellín, Colombia. One of the defendants, Zitoun was sent to both places multiple times between December 2024 and January 2025.

Zitoun reportedly located the FBI informant in Mecca, was paid over $50,000 CAD for his work in finding him, but declined Wedding's request for him to kill Acebedo-Garcia there. 

In late January 2025, Wedding sent Andrew Clark surveillance footage of the female associate they had recruited and Acebedo-Garcia via Threema.

Acebedo-Garcia was shot five times in the head by a gunman in a restaurant.

After the witness was murdered in Medellín, Colombia on January 31, 2025, Bal allegedly posted an Instagram story showing part of the crime scene with captions such as:

“[Victim A] down…”

“BOOM! Headshot”.

On January 31, 2025, via Instagram, Bal posted a photo depicting a screenshot of a Colombian news report on the murder captioned. 

"One of the informants involved in dismantling Ryan ‘Snowboarder aka SB’ Wedding’s transnational organization/ criminal network has been assassinated in Colombia. 

"As soon as the world learned who SB was (USA X Canada Investigations gone public via media releases), there were bounties being placed on every individual involved in ‘snitching’ on the kingpins operations. Some of these bounties were being reported as 7 figure hits. It turns out they got [Victim A] in #Colombia He got hit with a sniper while sitting at a restaurant. The criminal underworld will always find you. The world isn’t big enough to hide."

According to the FBI, Wedding allegedly celebrated the assassination and declared that the authorities' case would collapse without this key witness. He then set about paying those involved in the conspiracy. First, around 500,000 USDT was sent to those in Colombia. 

The US announced rewards of up to $2 million each for information leading to the arrests and/or convictions of the multiple unknown assassins responsible for the January 2025 murder in Medellín, Colombia. This is in addition to the $15 million reward placed on Wedding.

Atna Ohna contacted Andrew Clark requesting around $300,000 CAD for facilitating the murder of the informant. Wedding coordinated Clark to pay him $150,000 CAD and 30 kilograms of cocaine as well as a custom necklace made by Sokolovski's Diamond Tsar company to be given to Ohna as a bonus.

Atna "Tupac" Onha

Who is "Tupac"?

Montreal authorities arrested the gangster Atna Onha, known as Tupac, a leader of one of the more prominent gangs in the city. Until his arrest, Tupac had been seen as a rising star in Montreal's underworld for several years.

Onha is sometimes nicknamed "The Ghost" for his discreet manner of travel in an armored vehicle and regularly wearing a bulletproof vest. He reportedly owns several properties to avoid spending the night in the same place for several consecutive days, a third police source confirms. There are reports from the Canadian media that he has had three death contracts placed on him since 2023.

According to police contacts, Onha and Wedding are believed to be the reason why the price of a kilo of cocaine has remained low in Montreal in recent years. Police believe Wedding is deliberately lowering prices to attract independent dealers. Their goal? To wrest control of the drug trade in Canada from traditional organized crime.

Atna (lower left) claiming Crips/Blue in the early 2000s.

In the early 2000s, Onha founded a gang called Black Mafia Clique (BMC), which has since disbanded. It was the first group in Quebec to bring together members of both blue and red allegiances. At that time, the Crips and Bloods were rivals in Canada, stemming from their Los Angeles lineage.

This garnered Onha alliances with several important organized crime figures including Italian Mafiosos, and Hells Angels bikers but he would later break these alliances in order to work with newer, more independent groups.

Onha seen meeting with several Hells Angels bikers and gang members in 2020.

He was close to Davide Barberio, considered the street boss of the Sicilian Mafia, until a conflict erupted between the two men in 2019. His enemies also included Pietro D'Adamo, Stefano Sollecito, a Mafia boss, the gang leader turned biker Jean-Philippe Célestin, and Youness Aithaqi. He was also at odds with Frédérick Silva, a hitman turned informant.

Police believe that the murders of several of Onha's close associates (Frantz Louis, Ernst Exantus and Arsène Mompoint) may have marked the end of his ties with the Montreal mafia.

Onha's main confidant was Christopher-Shawn Jean Vilsaint, who was murdered on May 14, 2024, in Montreal. Like Vilsaint, he was from the Villeray area. Police believe Onha may be behind the recent attempted murder of gang leader Markens Vilme in prison. According to our sources, this was an act of revenge for Vilsaint's death.

According to several figures in the criminal underworld, he was the first to understand that young criminals were "fed up with doing the dirty work for organized crime," which was predominantly of Quebec and Italian origin. He exploited this sense of injustice to encourage a new generation of gangsters to become "independents" or to work for him, according to several gang members who requested anonymity.

His current partners were criminals from Arab Power, who are also strong in Montreal's drug scene.

The US Sanctions on Ryan James Wedding's drug and money laundering network can be read here.

Canadian attorney Deepak Balwant Paradkar

Part 3 will dive into the background of Canadian criminal attorney Deepak Balwant Paradkar and his involvement in the Canadian drug trade and the FBI informant's killing.

Sources La Presse, La Presse, OFAC, Submundo Criminal, US State Dept, DOJ, FBI, Vancouver Sun, Borderland Beat, Global Mail

Categories: Canada, colombia, FBI, ryan james wedding