Former Olympic Snowboarder Turned Alleged Drug Kingpin: The Ryan Wedding Case
Before the manhunt.
Before the cartels.
Before federal agencies labeled him a “modern-day Pablo Escobar”…
Ryan James Wedding was a highly ambitious athlete chasing something very different: Olympic gold.
This episode reveals the formative years of a young athlete whose relentless drive and obsession with winning would later shape one of the most complex criminal cases in modern Canadian history.
We break down how an Olympic-level competitor—disciplined, talented, and intensely ambitious—transitioned from the slopes to the underworld, eventually becoming the alleged architect of a multi-country cocaine pipeline stretching from Colombia to Mexico, California, and Canada.
In this episode we cover:
• The extreme competitive mindset that defined Wedding’s early athletic career
• When the pursuit of perfection crossed into the pursuit of criminal power
• How U.S. federal agencies first connected Wedding to organized crime
• When the FBI announced he was linked to an alleged murder of Randy Fader in Niagara Falls
• The arrest of Toronto's ''Cocaine Lawyer'' Deepak Balwant Paradkar and what the FBI alleged he did
This chapter sets the foundation for everything that comes next in the Ryan Wedding series—ambition, opportunity, violence, and the rise of a criminal network that spanned three countries.
New episodes in the full series are coming soon.
written + created by sad girl productions