Inside Ryan Wedding’s alleged rise through the narcotrafficking world

Before Ryan Wedding was arrested last week as one of the FBI’s Top 10 most wanted fugitives, and before he was charged a decade earlier for masterminding a plot to sail thousands of kilos of cocaine up from the Caribbean to Canada’s East Coast, Canadian police viewed the former Olympic snowboarder as one of the many middling profiteers in Metro Vancouver’s massive underground cannabis trade.

It was 2006, and Mounties, acting on an anonymous tip given to the Vancouver police, raided a farm in the eastern suburb of Maple Ridge. There they found thousands of pot plants and dozens of kilograms of dried flower, worth roughly $10-million at the time.