The hit man called himself Mr.
He had been given the list.
He wanted the easiest one first.
Courtesy of the FBI
Hed also need a getaway car, a fake ID, and a place to drop the gun.
The man who hired him went by Mero Wero.
He said he would take care of all of that, plus any expenses.
Driveway job, Mero Wero said.
Hed pay $100,000.
The ginger was a redhead named Randy Fader.
He was 29 years old and recently married, with two little blonde girls.
He kept his hair in a tight fade and his red beard neatly trimmed.
Had tattoos up and down his arm, none of which looked all that expensive.
He was easy to spot and easy to find.
He lived right by the river, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.
They arrested Randy, his dad, his mom, and his sister.
Drive over Niagara and blow this guys top off, Mero Wero instructed.
Last April 1, a little after 6 p.m., Mr. Or so it seemed.
Unfortunately for Mero Wero and Mr.
Perfect, the getaway plan and disposal of evidence had been far from perfect.
CCTV footage in Toronto showed Mr.
Perfect exiting the Audi, getting into the Explorer, and driving off.
About two weeks after the murder, police pulled over the Explorer in Toronto.
Perfect was behind the wheel.
Roughly a week later, Mr.
Besides Mero Wero and Mr.
Perfect, 10 other members of the organization had been arrested.
Only four remained at large, including its alleged leader.
His name was Ryan Wedding.
The photo was 11 years old and came from his drivers license.
But it was the best the FBI could do.
For more than a decade, Wedding had been wanted by police.
For a time, according to court records, he was one of El Chapos men in Canada.
Wedding was currently under the protection of the Sinaloa Cartel, Estrada said.
For all intents and purposes, he was a ghost.
It may hold the clues to where he is now, or what he might do next.
At 7,000 feet the air was cold and dry.
The white slopes were almost blinding.
Usually, when Wedding raced, his parents and maybe a couple of fans showed up to watch.
This was the 2002 WinterOlympicsin Salt Lake City, Utah, the first round of the parallel giant slalom.
Now he was at the third gate, and his strategy was wrong, but it was too late.
Hed beensnowboardingsince the age of 12, and it had all built to this moment.
He had missed the next round by a little more than a second.
His potential was awesome, Ross Rebagliati, snowboarding racings first gold medalist, told me.
He had everything in place to make it happen.
But youve got to want it, and Ryan wanted something else.
Instead, he was awaiting trial on a federal drug trafficking charge.
The story never ran, and the draft sat on my desktop for more than a decade.
But it doesnt mean youre a bad person.
Ryan spent his early childhood in Thunder Bay, a working-class town on Lake Superior.
Most people worked in logging or at the paper mill at the edge of town.
Nearly every family had a cabin, or camp, somewhere in the woods.
As a kid, Ryan was an early riser, obsessed with model airplanes and trucks and engines.
He preferred being alone, riding his little motorcycle on the old logging trails until the snow came.
The Olympics had seemed almost destined for Wedding.
They hold something back, because theres a little bit of fear there of falling.
Ryan had none of that.
They hold something back, because theres a little bit of fear there of falling.
Ryan had none of that.
Ryan had switched to snowboarding and won the first race he entered at the age of 12.
But Ryan didnt have that.
His parents were right there.
We enjoyed the road a different way than he did.
At the age of 15, Wedding made the Canadian national team.
During the opening ceremonies he called his mom, who was watching from home.
Hey, can you guys see me?
He hadnt even been expected to make that team because of his age.
His future seemed so bright.
FOR A YOUNG MAN with ambition in the early 2000s, Vancouver presented unique opportunities.
It sat just 25 miles from the longest unprotected border in North America.
Weddings path into this world began innocently enough.
Legalization of marijuana in the United States was still a decade away, and B.C.
bud was considered the best pot in the world, or at least in the Western Hemisphere.
It wasnt hard for police to spot them: designer hoodies, Dolce&Gabbana loafers, armor-plated cars.
They came from the suburbs like Wedding did, often from well-off families like his.
Other bouncers started wearing bulletproof vests.
Wedding told his mom he didnt need one.
It was the opposite: He was intrigued.
Many of these were upper-middle-class kids.
They went to good schools.
What drew them to it was the image.
I cant think of anyone who couldnt post bail and be out in a few days.
Here, theres more of an emphasis on rehabilitation than just locking someone up and throwing away the keys.
Weddings descent into this world was no different from how one gains entree into any legitimate industry.
He made friends who became connections.
The line between his work as a bouncer and his life in the suburbs blurred.
He was becoming someone else.
He became obsessed with bulking up.
Maybe at some point, hed go back, he told his mom.
He might even return to Alpine racing.
For now, there was money to be made in real estate.
Ryan flipped the house and made a couple hundred thousand dollars on the deal.
He was growing pot, one of them told me when I visited Vancouver in 2009.
He stuffed the garage with a Hummer, snowmobiles, a Ducati, and a BMW M-5.
Every two weeks, Wedding harvested the plants and sold them to a broker, the informant said.
The farm earned Wedding and his partner hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, maybe more.
The total haul: an estimated $10 million.
It was the largest marijuana grow op ever discovered in Maple Ridge.
But Wedding didnt appear nervous, the agent says.
He acted like he was on vacation.
After a couple of days, they got the call that the deal was on.
If it was good, he would call them and theyd buy the rest.
But Krapchan never made it back.
The buy was a setup.
Wedding was dead to rights, says Brett Kalina, a former FBI agent who arrested him.
He was on the recordings from the second he stepped down on U.S. soil.
Shirani was sentenced to 18 months, and Krapchan was given 30 months.
(Shirani and Krapchan could not be reached for comment.)
But Wedding had no interest in cooperating.
He was very controlled, Kalina remembers.
Once we read him his rights, he didnt say anything.
And Im standing there, and he looks at me and calls me a faggot for watching him.
He had no plans to play nice.
Kalina and the lead prosecutor on the case wondered if Wedding was even taking the charges seriously.
In court, a rotating cast of girlfriends showed up for his various pretrial appearances.
One got in trouble for flashing Wedding in the visiting room at jail, Kalina says.
He had this attitude like this was water on a ducks back.
Nothing was going to stick.
Wedding took the case to trial and was found guilty of conspiring to traffic cocaine.
The minimum mandatory sentence was 10 years.
Youve got people that are in that facility that have amazing drug-world connections, Kalina says.
Other suburban kids who had been drawn into the Vancouver underworld had been far less lucky.
Some were dead; others in jail.
But Kalina heard something else on recorded phone calls from prison while Wedding was awaiting trial.
But according to records from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Wedding caused no problems at Reeves.
They call it being solid, says Edwards.
For a criminal, its like hed gone to grad school.
Hed gone to Oxford, and now he was ready to move up to the big leagues.
IN 2013, MONTREALS UNDERWORLD was in a state of flux.
The Hells Angels were reorganizing, too.
At the same time, Chapo Guzman had made inroads into Canada that had caught the DEA off guard.
In Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal it went for more than $35,000 a kilo.
There was another reason El Chapo was drawn to Canada.
It was a perfect match…hindered law enforcement and an insatiable Canadian appetite for high-grade coke.
Its much more entrepreneurial.
From the time Wedding left U.S. custody, he had a plan, Kalina says.
He knew he was never gonna be some community civic leader after what happened.
They were planning to import at least 1,000 kilos of cocaine from the Caribbean to Newfoundland.
Eventually, the investigation led to Wedding.
In fact, hed been seen in Montreal with the wife of El Chapos right-hand man, Alex Cifuentes-Villa.
According to court records, Kollaros said hed brought the man in charge.
His former boss had been gunned down in White Rock, B.C., the year before.
The new boss, Kollaros said, was Ryan Wedding.
Wedding introduced himself as an importer of cocaine.
He mentioned a previous deal out of St. Kitts.
Hed been receiving updates the whole time.
From there, theyd transfer the cocaine into trucks headed for Montreal.
Perhaps hed been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Somehow, hed gotten mixed up with the wrong people.
That was nearly 15 years ago.
Even his attorneys from the San Diego case declined comment.
Being connected to an Olympian caught up in a bungled cocaine deal was one thing.
His activities over the past decade are a mystery, and at this point, unproven allegations.
There are, however, clues about his activities since 2015 in recently filed court records.
This informant seems to have been one of Weddings most trusted lieutenants.
Bonilla is currently in custody and has pleaded not guilty.
His attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
How long Wedding can evade capture is an open question.
Its pretty hard to hide a six-foot-four white guy, Kalina says.
Weddings organization was one of the larger cocaine trafficking operations in Canada.
On Nov. 14, the FBI released an updated picture of Wedding taken sometime in 2024.
The long, stringy hair has been cut short, and he looks older, his facial features hardened.
