SPECIAL REPORT: Canadian drug kingpin atop FBI most wanted list...

Canada's long history of supplying drugs to the United States through organized crime.

We’ve got a Canadian riding high on the FBI’s most wanted list and a $15 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Ryan Wedding.

Ryan Wedding in a 2024 photo released by the FBI.

Canadians love to revel in stories of how we were part of the bootlegging of booze into the United States during prohibition. Every town from Moose Jaw to Toronto to his supposed home in Quadeville, Ontario on Letterkenny Road, Canadian revel in that kind of smuggling.

Tell Canadians that we have a history of drug smuggling into the United States, especially since Donald Trump blamed us for fentanyl and you get denial and deflection.

The truth is, we are not and have never been clean on this front.

Canada as a narco state…

There was a movie made in 1971 starring Gene Hackman called The French Connection. It’s famous for a couple of things including solidifying the car chase as a feature of action movies, and for detailing the heroin trade from Europe to North America using the mafia throughout the continent.

Canada, specifically Montreal, was a major conduit for the flow of drugs from France, via Montreal and down into New York and beyond.

I raise this in light of the latest news on Ryan Wedding, the former Canadian Olympian snowboarder who is now seen as a drug kingpin.

“Make no mistake about it: Ryan Wedding is the modern day iteration of Pablo Escobar. He’s a modern day iteration of “El Chapo” Guzmán. This Justice Department and this FBI will work with our Canadian counterparts and the government officials across the world to bring him to justice,” FBI Director Kash Patel said during a news conference Wednesday.

Pam Bondi, Donald Trump’s Attorney General, said that Wedding’s operation has trafficked 60 metric tons of cocaine per year.

“He controls one of the most prolific and violent drug-trafficking organizations in this world,” Bondi said. “He is the largest distributor of cocaine in Canada.”

The problem is, Wedding is based in Mexico but he distributes throughout the United States and Canada. Officials said that the 44 year-old Thunder Bay native works with the Sinaloa Cartel to flood American and Canadian communities with cocaine from Colombia.

Not the lone Canadian…

Wedding is the kingpin of this operation, one known for extreme violence and murder but he’s not working alone and he’s not the only Canadian. American officials released a list of 10 individuals associated with Wedding who were arrested on Tuesday and seven of them are Canadian.

• Deepak Balwant Paradkar, 62, of Thornhill, Ontario, Canada

• Atna Ohna, 40, of Laval, Québec, Canada

• Gursewak Singh Bal, 31, of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

• Allistair Chapman, 33, of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

• Ahmad Nabil Zitoun, 35, of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

• Carmen Yelinet Valoyes Florez, 47, of Bogotá, Colombia

• Yulieth Katherine Tejada, 36, of Orlando, Florida, who is legal permanent resident from Colombia

• Edwin Basora-Hernandez, 31, of Montréal

• Wilson Riascos, 45, of Cali, Colombia

• Rolan Sokolovski, 37, of Toronto

Deepak Paradkar is a name many may know, he’s a lawyer who has defended some high profile people including Dellen Millard in his brutal and revolting trial for the murder of Tim Bosma. According to American officials, Paradkar advised Wedding to kill a witness in a trial in order to have charges dropped.

He is charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder and drug trafficking. Read the profile on this lawyer from my colleague Brad Hunter in the Toronto Sun.

Wedding has used Canadian trucking companies to move his goods…

If you follow the news of the busts, and we do at the Toronto Sun, you’ve likely seen the regular notices of truckers getting busted trying to smuggle cocaine. That’s what we see, that’s what we find at the border.

There is a lot more that gets through.

One of the best in the business on stories like this is Sam Cooper at The Bureau. Sam has been writing about Wedding’s network for some time including his use of Indo-Canadian trucking companies.

Investigators say massive shipments from Wedding’s network continue to flood into Canada through Indo-Canadian commercial trucking firms, while fentanyl precursors flow south from Vancouver on the same trucking platforms.

“You see it at the Rainbow Bridge and the Port Huron–Sarnia crossing — though it’s not in the news much,” an American investigator said. “But then you hear: 680 kilos of coke seized one week, 300 kilos the next. And that’s just Ontario — there’s just as much going into Alberta and B.C., and even through the Akwesasne lands into Quebec.”

Give the whole piece a read if you want to know more including how Cooper documents that the FBI and other American agencies have been frustrated by a lack of cooperation from the RCMP and other Canadian agencies on this file.

Canada’s history as a drug smuggling route…

I’ll say one last word on this that links it back to the beginning of this topic about Canada being a narco state.

Canadians recoiled in horror when Donald Trump said fentanyl was coming across the border into the United States. This despite the superlab and other busts that were well documented before Trump’s comments.

The truth is, Canada has long been a conduit for drugs being smuggled into the United States, and yes, I know it goes both ways. Several years ago there was a great book by Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys called The Sixth Family.

It documented the rise of the Rizutto crime family in Montreal to become so powerful that they were one of the main drug suppliers for the famous Five Families of the Mafia in New York. Often, those drugs came through Canada and filtered down in the United States.

If you want a good insight into the Canadian mafia, or a slice of it, this is the book for you.