After allegedly killing a ‘rat,’ could Ryan Wedding turn FBI informant himself?
Alleged drug kingpin captured in Mexico, then taken into U.S. custody after 'intense' negotiations with FBI
As an alleged cocaine kingpin on the run, Ryan Wedding is accused of ordering the murders of rival drug traffickers and an FBI witness who he considered a “rat.”
He’s even said to have placed a $5 million US bounty on the informant’s head.
After all that, could Wedding now be the one to spill what he knows about the cartels?
Questions about Wedding’s involvement with the FBI began swirling Friday when Mexico’s security minister Omar García Harfuch wrote on social media that a Canadian matching Wedding’s description had “voluntarily surrendered” Thursday to authorities at the U.S. embassy.
The Thunder Bay, Ont.-born Wedding had been listed as one of the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives — described by the agency’s director Kash Patel as the “largest narco trafficker in modern times.”
According to a Vanity Fair article shared online by Patel, Wedding was first captured on Thursday by Mexican authorities, then taken into U.S. custody after “intense” negotiations with the FBI.
It’s not clear what U.S. federal agents could have offered him, but Brett Kalina has a hunch.
“There's a lot of things he can always do to help himself out and co-operate,” Kalina, a former FBI supervisory special agent told CBC News.
Kalina has had a particular interest in the Wedding case for a long time. He arrested the hulking former Olympic snowboarder in 2008 after Wedding flew to California to buy cocaine for a Vancouver-based organized crime group.
He was found guilty and — according to Kalina — made key underworld connections while in U.S. federal prison until 2011. Court records suggest it's where Wedding met Montreal-born drug trafficker Jonathan Acebedo-Garcia, the former ally turned FBI informant shot in the head last year.
If Wedding is indeed a high-level cartel operative as U.S. prosecutors have alleged, then “there are a lot of people that should be worried,” Kalina said.
Wedding may have 'wiggle room'
Wedding is scheduled to appear before a federal judge in Los Angeles on Monday and enter a plea. He faces an automatic life sentence if convicted on charges related to murder, drug trafficking and witness tampering.
Kalina, however, says an automatic life sentence may not be a foregone conclusion.
If Wedding agrees to tell investigators what he knows about global drug-smuggling operations, then Kalina says there could be "some wiggle room."
The FBI has repeatedly said Wedding was being protected by the murderous Sinaloa cartel, which the U.S. and Canada both consider a terrorist group.
“If you're that high level and you've done a great job of getting [cocaine] into Canada, you're going to know about different operations around the world,” Kalina said, describing the information as “extremely valuable” to law enforcement in multiple countries.
Authorities have said Wedding’s transnational criminal enterprise moved some 60 tonnes of cocaine per year into southern California, where it then moved on to destinations in the U.S. and Canada.
“This cocaine from Canada, I'm certain, went all over the world,” former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Mike Chavarria told CBC News Network. “This guy was very significant.”
Last year, the RCMP also highlighted the global nature of Wedding’s alleged operation.
“This network has been moving large amounts of methamphetamine and cocaine from Central and South America via the United States to Canada and overseas,” the Mounties said last March.
His network has also been linked to fentanyl and heroin trafficking.
Wedding also faces unresolved charges in Montreal, stemming from a cocaine-import conspiracy uncovered during the RCMP's Operation Harrington in 2015. Given the potentially lengthy sentence he faces in the U.S., it appears unlikely Wedding would ever be extradited to appear in a Canadian court.
Wedding's Mexican connections
What’s more, it’s likely U.S. investigators will be keen to learn about more high-level connections Wedding had with Mexican officials.
"Any time that we've gotten close, he can rely on those people watching out for him, to alert him in advance," F. Cartwright Weiland, then a senior U.S. State Department official, told CBC News last year.
In November, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned multiple alleged associates of Wedding, including a Mexican national identified as “the General.”
A former Mexican law enforcement officer with ties to senior officials in the country, Edgar Aaron Vazquez Alvarado “provides protection for Wedding within Mexico and uses law enforcement sources to locate targets for Wedding,” according to a recent Treasury Department statement.
Former allies turned informants
Wedding’s downfall came after at least two former allies turned on him.
Following the murder of ally-turned-informant Acebedo-Garcia in Colombia a year ago, court documents say U.S. investigators managed to convince another informant who had “trafficked drugs with Wedding and assisted Wedding with committing multiple murders."
The unnamed drug trafficker worked with the FBI for much of 2025 — until at least November, when Patel and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi unsealed an indictment charging Wedding and multiple accomplices with Acebedo-Garcia’s murder.
Two months later, Wedding is finally in custody.
Still, Kalina says, “I would fully suspect that he's not said a word to anybody."
At least not yet.
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