Ryan James Wedding's Early Cartel Links Part 1: BC Bud Farm & California Cocaine Bust

"Socalj" for Borderland Beat

Wedding made his court appearance in Santa Ana, California last week following his surrender and arrest in Mexico. He pleaded not guilty to charges across two indictments.

His lawyer, Anthony Colombo, Jr. grandson of slain New York Mafia boss Joe Colombo, stated multiple times that his client had in fact not surrendered but was apprehended in Mexico. This statement was of course contradictory to both the official Mexican and US Ambassador to Mexico's claim that he voluntary surrendered.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum went so far as to cite an AI generated image from a fake Instagram account as proof that Wedding had surrendered and was not arrested by Mexican authorities. 

According to CBC News, RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme was informed 3 days before Wedding's arrest and was told to fly to Ontario, California for the FBI's press conference. 

Similar statements from US authorities point to a planned surrender as well. Court records show that 2 days prior to Wedding's surrender, additional documents were filed under seal.

But before all of this, at a November 19, 2025 DOJ press conference in Washington, D.C., officials from the US and Canada described Ryan James Wedding as a "narco-trafficker on par with notorious drug lords like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Pablo Escobar." US Attorney General Pam Bondi said Wedding’s operation was responsible for more than $1 billion a year in illegal drug proceeds."

“He controls one of the most prolific and violent drug-trafficking organizations in this world,” US Attorney General Pam Bondi said, adding that under Wedding’s direction his operation has trafficked 60 metric tons of cocaine per year. “He is the largest distributor of cocaine in Canada.”

While the bold comparisons and claims to the notorious cartel leaders are clear exaggerations; based on court records and past events, Wedding seems to have been a large part of a Sinaloa Cartel network trafficking drugs from Mexico and Colombia to Canada via the United States.

President Sheinbaum citing an AI generated post on the @bossryanw Instagram.

Mexican Attorney-General Ernestina Godoy Ramos described Wedding as a “top-tier logistics operator” linked to the Sinaloa Cartel, who served “as a key bridge for the mass distribution of drugs in North America.

In the past year, Ryan James Wedding became the top target of the FBI. He had in fact filed an Amparo or injunction on February 15, 2025 from Ahome, Sinaloa, against his arrest and any extradition order.

Who is Ryan James Wedding?

According to Rolling Stone reporter Jesse Hyde, who has been reporting on him since 2009; Wedding was drawn to the nightlife and the violent local crime scene in Vancouver while working as a nightclub bouncer in the downtown area. But this was all after he had attended college, after the Olympics in 2002 and after his teenage years competing with Canada's National Ski Team.

His maternal grandparents owned the Mount Baldy ski resort in Thunder Bay. His uncle was the director of a ski school and coach of the Canadian women's National Alpine Ski Team. 

Wedding won the first snowboarding race he entered and, at 15, made the Canadian National Ski Team. Wedding competed in his first major international snowboard race at age 16, finishing 11th in giant slalom, according to online records.

He won silver and bronze medals at the Junior World Championships, and became a regular on the World Cup circuit. In 2001, he was crowned Canadian champion at Big White in Kelowna.

The two Canadian Snowboard Federation gold medals he won to qualify for the 2002 Olympic team were among the items recently seized in Mexico City alongside 62 motorcycles and various art pieces.

At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he competed for Team Canada in snowboarding men's parallel giant slalom, where he finished 24th. After this, he gave up competitive snowboarding.

After two years at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, he dropped out and began to speculate in real estate. He also started working as a bouncer at a New Westminster bar called BarFly.

Soon, Wedding began working with fellow Canadian snowboarding competitor, Edward Ian Hadgkiss who owned a 5-acre property that would house a large marijuana growing operation.

According to the 2006 search warrant on the operation, a "proven, reliable source" told detectives that around 8,000 plants were being grown at the location called 18 Carrot Farms.

The Vancouver police source alleged Wedding was the person who "transports and harvests the marijuana every two weeks."

BC Bud Farm Raid

Vancouver detectives used thermal imaging and utility records to deem that the house and warehouse was not growing carrots but cannabis. They even consulted the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands and a professional horticulturist who stated in a letter, "I can advised you that to the best of my knowledge there are no commercial warehouses in North America growing carrots. The cost of lighting, heating/cooling on top of the artificial soil required, makes such a concept totally unreasonable and economically viable."

The entrance to the farm as seen during a 2012 raid on a medical marijuana grow.

The search warrant that led to the September 22, 2006 raid of Eighteen Carrot Farms on Cedar Way named the current owner of the property, Edward Ian Hadgkiss, an athlete who has competed in the Snowboard World Cup, as well as the former Olympian, Ryan James Wedding, then of Coquitlam.

Police seized 6,800 marijuana plants and over 85 pounds (40 kilos) of processed marijuana all said at the time to be worth over $10 million. They also found a shotgun, a revolver and ammunition. No one was at the property at the time, and no arrests were made.

The Eighteen Carrot Farms property was sold in 2008 for $805,000 to a new owner, who seemingly carried on with the side business and gained a medical marijuana license a few years later.

It is possible that this sale helped to finance Wedding's way into the wholesale cocaine market, where some of his aliases would eventually include James Conrad King, Jesse King, "Giant," "Public Enemy," "Boss," "Buddy," "Grande," "El Jefe," “El Guero,” and “El Toro.”

In 2006 as well, Wedding visited a Vancouver passport office to renew his passport. There, he ran into a former teammate who recalls he had changed dramatically. 

“This guy comes up to me and he’s got a wife-beater on, tats and necklaces, his hat on backwards. And I’m like, dude…go stand somewhere else. Like, mother of god! I’m trying to get a passport and you look like a gangster! He just laughed."

One popular drug trafficking scheme in Canada at the time was to use the funds from the BC bud sales, with organized crime groups including the Montreal Mafia and Hells Angels transporting and selling the marijuana in New York City, to purchase wholesale quantities of cocaine from the Sinaloa Cartel.

One of Wedding’s new associates was Hassan Shirani, a Persian Canadian who had been implicated in a police investigation into a Vancouver-­area murder, though he wasn’t ultimately charged with the crime. Shirani was involved in the money-­transfer system known as Hawala.

In 2008, Wedding turned to Shirani to help him in a new venture, one with the potential to be much more lucrative than cultivating cannabis. Together, they made plans to smuggle cocaine into Canada via San Diego. That spring, Shirani met with a hawaladar in Vancouver and deposited $300,000 that he would then be able to draw on in California. 

Wedding and Shirani flew to Los Angeles on June 10. At LAX, they met up with a Russian Canadian named Michael Krapchan, whom Shirani had hired to set up the purchase. Krapchan had also brought along the seller, who he claimed was a former KGB agent named Yuri.

Unfortunately for Wedding, his first purchase was monitored by the FBI.

San Diego Cocaine Bust

Over the next few days in Los Angeles, Shirani and Wedding visited malls, restaurants and hookah bars, and they stopped by a Persian rug store that was also a hawala brokerage. There, they retrieved a portion of their cash in the amount of $120,000, bundled up in newspapers. They stashed the package in a drawer below the TV in their hotel room.

On June 12, Shirani and Wedding met with Krapchan in Anaheim and gave him $17,000, enough to procure the first kilo of cocaine. The next day, to inspect the sample, they drove to a San Diego hotel room that Krapchan had booked. Krapchan left in a rental car to buy the remaining 23 kilos of cocaine from Yuri while Shirani and Wedding waited at the room. After waiting an hour and a half, they  left to get lunch only to be quickly apprehended by the FBI, which had arrest warrants for both of them.

The whole thing had been a set-up. Yuri, the ex–KGB agent, was actually a confidential police informant who’d been wearing a wire at the LAX meeting. The cocaine he’d sold Krapchan in San Diego had been given to him by the feds. As soon as Krapchan had completed the deal, agents arrested him, then headed to the hotel to round up Shirani and Wedding.

Both Krapchan and Shirani pleaded guilty for participating in the plot. Wedding pleaded not guilty and stood trial in San Diego in November of 2009. His defense was that he was under the impression they had travelled to Los Angeles to buy cars (the code used for the drugs). Wedding's lawyer claimed that Shirani was setting Wedding up to be the fall guy, creating an impression that Wedding was bankrolling the purchase by telling him his credit card was maxed out.

In his testimony for the prosecution, Shirani told a different story. He conceded that he’d managed the hawala transfer to the LA rug store and that he’d arranged for the drugs to be smuggled into Canada, but he insisted he was just handling logistics for Wedding, who was the money guy.

Retired FBI Agent Brett Kalina was the lead investigator on the June 13, 2008 San Diego sting. At the San Diego hotel, Wedding was dressed head to toe in Ed Hardy gear, with a Breitling watch as heavy as a paperweight, Kalina recalls. He was physically imposing, having reached a level of bulk that can be achieved only through steroid use.

“He was different than any other subject I’ve ever arrested,” Kalina said. While Wedding’s co-conspirators cooperated with authorities, Wedding did not. Kalina recalls how he used his size to intimidate; chest pushed out, presence looming. “I think he felt invincible.”

Wedding said almost nothing to Kalina during his arrest, until the strip search at the detention facility, during which he saw Kalina watching him and called him a “f*gg*t.” The slur was shocking because it was so unusual. “Typically, when people are arrested, they try to make nice,” says Kalina. “They’re vulnerable. They know who has power at the moment and who doesn’t.” Kalina remembers Wedding as the most hostile suspect he’s ever arrested.

During the 17 months Wedding spent awaiting trial, he was held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, where the FBI monitored his calls. According to Kalina, he began forging connections and absorbing lessons from seasoned foreign traffickers. “We did hear comments he’d make about meeting interesting people and learning things,” said Kalina, who listened to phone calls Wedding made to the outside world.

Naturally, Wedding's defense attorney would argue that Wedding was just a fall guy. Yet, he was convicted of cocaine smuggling and sentenced to 4 years with another 3 years of supervised release.

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

It was 2009 and he would spend a total of three years in prison, in San Diego and Texas, until he was transferred to Canada in 2011 to finish serving his sentence there.

In 2012, his old grow farm was raided again by Canadian authorities after a fire broke out on the property that was now a legal medical marijuana farm.

Massive Montreal Market

After being released in 2011 and deported back to Canada, Wedding then resurfaced in Montreal, where a shift in longtime power dynamics in the Montreal underworld created more opportunities for newcomers.

At this time, the Rizzutos, who long controlled wholesale drug trafficking in Quebec and other parts of Canada were in turmoil as Vito Rizzuto was serving a 10-year sentence in the US for his involvement in killing three Bonanno family capos in 1981. Several key Rizzuto figures were being targeted and killed by multiple factions looking to gain control. Authorities had also greatly hindered the Hells Angels as well during this time, after years of prosecutions following the Quebec Biker War and the imprisonment of Maurice "Mom" Boucher for ordering the murder of prison guards. 

U.S. documents related to "El Chapo" Guzman's trial said that in 2011, Chapo sought to expand his narcotics trafficking operation in Canada because the price per kilogram of cocaine was higher in Canada than in the United States. During an early meeting with Chapo, Chapo informed Colombian trafficker turned witness Alex Cifuentes, that they were earning between $3 million and $4 million per week selling narcotics in Canada.

By 2014, Wedding, then 32, was living downtown and rising quietly. One of his associates was Philipos Kollaros, a British Columbia native as well. Montreal court records described Kollaros as “very close” to Wedding.

Philipos Kollaros was gunned down in 2018 after serving his prison sentence.

Like Wedding, Kollaros had established ties with local crime groups. Quebec’s business registry shows him linked to an individual suspected by police of working with the Montreal Mafia, specifically the Sicilian faction of the Rizzutos. One of the key figures they both worked for was Stephen Tello who was identified as "El Chapo's" main Canadian contact during this time.

Wedding had begun cultivating ties with Sinaloa cartel traffickers himself. A Quebec judge would later describe Wedding’s alleged growing network as a “high-level” cocaine operation, far beyond street-level trafficking.

By this time, according to Canadian court documents related to Operation Harrington, Wedding was involved in coordinating large, multi-ton loads of cocaine coming into Canada.

Part 2 Will Detail Operation Harrington and Wedding's Ties to "El Chapo."