Becoming El Jefe
August 19, 2025 at 12:50AMOnce upon a time, Ryan Wedding was a snowboarding prodigy who dreamed of winning Olympic gold. Today, he’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for smuggling drugs and ordering murders as an associate of El Chapo. Simon Lewsen details Wedding’s remarkable fall from grace and rise to criminal preeminence, a pivotal chapter of which happened in San Diego, where he was arrested for participating in a cocaine-trafficking scheme in 2008. His defense attorney would argue that Wedding was just a fall guy, but Brett Kalina, one of the agents who arrested him, believes otherwise:
If Wedding was a bit player in the plot, Kalina argues, he didn’t present like one. At the San Diego hotel, Wedding was dressed head to toe in Ed Hardy gear, with a Breitling watch as heavy as a paperweight. He was physically imposing, having reached a level of bulk that can be achieved only through steroid use.
Wedding said almost nothing to Kalina during his arrest. He was eerily silent—until the strip search at the detention facility, during which he saw Kalina watching him and called him a “faggot.” 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. These phone conversations revealed that Wedding was a callous and calculating operator. He had as many as five girlfriends back in BC, all of whom believed themselves to be dating him exclusively. At Wedding’s behest, they would wash his cars, clean his condo, or pick up money from his associates and use it to pay off creditors. Wedding spoke to male colleagues on the phone too, bragging about the “good connections” he was making in prison.
This was likely true. Because of its proximity to Tijuana, southern California is one of the hottest spots in the US-Mexican drug trade. For anyone looking to meet well-connected drug traffickers, there may be no better place on earth than a San Diego jail. And Wedding was exactly the kind of person Mexican cartels are known to seek out: a white Canadian with an English name, someone who doesn’t fit the stereotype of a cartel associate and can therefore do business abroad without arousing suspicion. “We knew we were giving Wedding all the contacts he needed to return to a life of crime,” Kalina says ruefully, “but there was nothing we could do about it.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/18/becoming-el-jefe/
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