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U.S. authorities alerted the RCMP about Ryan Wedding’s imminent arrest days before he was taken into U.S. custody in Mexico last week, Commissioner Mike Duheme has told CBC News.
The revelation marks the clearest indication yet that investigators knew of the longtime fugitive’s whereabouts before Jan. 22, when the Mexican government said Wedding “voluntarily surrendered.”
A clearer timeline has since emerged of an operation that involved both Mexican security forces and the same elite FBI unit recently involved in the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in Caracas.
Duheme said he was told to be in Ontario, Calif. — the Los Angeles suburb Wedding was flown to on a U.S. Justice Department jet on Jan. 23 — “to be there for the arrival of Ryan Wedding.”
“I would say probably three days before flying out, I was informed just to be on standby, and what was unfolding,” Duheme said in an interview that will air on CBC’s Rosemary Barton Live on Sunday.
The RCMP had sought Wedding since 2015, when he was charged in Montreal in connection with a large-scale cocaine-import conspiracy. He was indicted a decade later in the U.S. on murder and drug-trafficking charges, and added to the FBI’s list of 10 most-wanted fugitives last March.
Authorities allege the former Olympic snowboarder born in Thunder Bay, Ont., ran a violent and sophisticated cocaine-smuggling ring linked to Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa cartel. Wedding has pleaded not guilty to the 17 federal charges he faces in California.
Duheme described Wedding as “probably one of the biggest criminals” he’s encountered in his career spanning more than 35 years as a Mountie.
According to a CBC review of public flight records, the U.S. government-owned Boeing jet that transported Wedding to southern California had been flown to Mexico from Virginia the day before his arrest.
A flight carrying Olympian-turned-drug kingpin Ryan Wedding touches down at an airport in Ontario, Calif., on Friday, a day after the Canadian surrendered to U.S. authorities in Mexico.
FBI director Kash Patel said he happened to be in Mexico “on a previously planned trip” to meet with Mexican government officials when Wedding was taken into U.S. custody.
Patel returned to the U.S. hours later on the same jet as Wedding and Alejandro Castillo, another fugitive recently captured in Mexico. The FBI director appeared before the cameras when each man was escorted off the plane in handcuffs.
Patel, Duheme and other officials later spoke to reporters from the tarmac, with the jet as a backdrop, but declined to provide specifics about the operation that had unfolded.
Six days later, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum appeared to acknowledge for the first time the FBI’s involvement in Wedding’s arrest.
The Wall Street Journal reported that around the time Mexican security forces caught up with Wedding last week, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) got involved as well. The agency describes the HRT “an elite group of agents” who “deploy in any environment or conditions,” for situations such as high-risk arrests or undercover operations.
According to the report, the arrest came after “intense negotiation.”
The Journal reported the agency’s involvement was meant to be kept secret, until Patel said publicly that “FBI HRT teams executed with precision, discipline, and total professionalism alongside our Mexican partners to bring Ryan James Wedding back to face justice.”
Sheinbaum said Thursday, from the Journal’s account, “it’s very clear how the process occurred.”
She stressed Wedding’s arrest was led by Mexican authorities, after previously insisting the 44-year-old had surrendered at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.
“We are never going to accept joint operations from the United States,” Sheinbaum said.
The circumstances surrounding Wedding’s high-profile arrest have become a hot-button issue in Mexico, where operations by foreign agents are strictly limited by law.
The topic is all the more politically fraught for Sheinbaum, following Maduro’s capture earlier this month — involving the HRT — and threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to take military action against Mexican drug cartels.
At a news conference earlier this week, Sheinbaum mistakenly pointed to an AI-generated image of Wedding — purportedly standing outside the U.S. Embassy — as proof he had handed himself in “on his own two feet.”
After CBC News revealed the image was fake and taken from a previously debunked Instagram account with no ties to Wedding, Sheinbaum blamed the social media platform’s parent company Meta for failing to label the picture as AI-generated.
After Wedding’s arraignment Monday in Santa Ana, Calif., his lawyer Anthony Colombo insisted Wedding did not voluntarily turn himself in.
Anthony Colombo, Ryan Wedding’s lawyer, told reporters his client was apprehended and didn’t surrender to authorities, contrary to reports. ‘Any spin that the government of Mexico is putting on this, that he surrendered, is inaccurate,’ he said.
“Any spin that the government of Mexico is putting on this, that he surrendered, is inaccurate,” Colombo told reporters outside a federal courthouse.
“He was apprehended.”
Bill Essayli, the most senior federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, also cast doubt last week on the version of events provided by Mexican officials.
“Despite tremendous roadblocks and challenges,” he said of the operation to arrest Wedding, “our American law enforcement team was able to apprehend him.”
CBC News senior reporter Thomas Daigle has extensively covered the search for Ryan Wedding. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
