Canadian ex-Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wedding allegedly ordered the January murder of a key witness in a case pinning him as a criminal drug lord behind a murderous cross-border cocaine ring, a newly unsealed indictment alleges.
The court documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice at a news conference on Wednesday provide a detailed story of the murder and how Wedding was allegedly at the helm of a billion-dollar drug trafficking organization.
The organization sourced its cocaine from Colombia and used planes and boats to move hundreds of kilograms of cocaine to Mexico, where it was then smuggled into the United States in semitrucks, and eventually brought into Canada.
In April, several of the organization’s shipments were intercepted by authorities and so Wedding and his right-hand man Andrew Clark, allegedly turned to a well-known GTA defence lawyer, 62-year-old Deepak Balwant Paradkar, to monitor the situation and uncover what could be leading to the busts, the indictment states.
On Oct. 17, 2024, the FBI announced the largest series of arrests yet against the group and for the first time, identified Wedding as the leader of the criminal enterprise. The indictment says that Wedding sought Paradkar’s help again, and soon they learned that the FBI had a inside man, a co-operating witness – a man who would be murdered just months after being identified.
According to the documents released on Wednesday, Paradkar advised Wedding that if the witness was killed it would lead to the dismissal of the federal indictment against them and related extradition proceedings.
Following that advice, the FBI said Wedding allegedly placed a million-dollar bounty on the witness and enlisted the services of alleged Montreal organized crime leader Atna Ohna, 40, and Colombian citizen Carmen Yelinet Valoyes Florez, who was allegedly a member of Wedding’s operation and led a network of commercial sex workers.
Wedding also allegedly enlisted the help of a Calgary resident Allistair Chapman, 33, to get a Canadian crime blog called the “The Dirty Newz” to publicly share information about the witness to help locate and kill him. On Nov. 5, 2024, the blog’s operator Gursewak Singh Bal, 31, allegedly posted a photograph of the witness and his spouse online, accompanied by screenshots of text messages from Chapman, calling the witness “a snitch” and asking for his whereabouts.
The same day, Bal allegedly posted an Instagram story with the following message: “This guy single-handedly (rat emoji) out one of the strongest underworld networks that this (world emoji) has seen. Good chance he’ll never be found again.”
In mid-November 2024, Ohna allegedly recruited fellow Montreal resident Tommy Demorizi, 31, to help find the informant. Demorizi allegedly paid 31-year-old Edwin Basora-Hernandez of Quebec $500 to $1000 for the witness’s phone number and email address.
That same month, Wedding allegedly asked one of Florez’s associates to travel to Colombia to lure the witness to a location to be killed in exchange for the payment of her mortgage and cosmetic surgery, the document alleges.
In December 2024, or before, the indictment says Wedding paid around $18,000 for a tool to intercept and track the witness’s cellphone, though it is unclear from the documents whether that led to anything. In January, Wedding and Clark allegedly had an associate of their enterprise, a Canadian man named Ahmad Nabil Zitoun, fly to both Medellin, Colombia, and Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to find the witness. While Zitoun was in Mecca, he was offered the contract to kill the witness, but he allegedly declined and was paid $40,000 for attempting to locate the witness, the documents state.
On Jan. 29, 2025, Wedding allegedly sent Clark surveillance footage of the witness and his associate in Medellin, the documents state. Two days later, on Jan. 31, one of several unnamed suspects followed the witness on a motorcycle to a restaurant inside a Medellin shopping centre. A second suspect dropped a third suspect off at the restaurant and that third suspect entered the restaurant, approached the table where the victim was eating and shot him approximately five times in the head, killing hm instantly, the documents state.
The third suspect fled from the restaurant on a motorcycle and met with the second suspect at a nearby rendezvous point, at which the third suspect abandoned the motorcycle and continued his escape in the second suspect’s car.
Meanwhile, a fourth suspect photographed the victim’s body and fled from the murder scene using the same route as the third suspect. Also, that same day, Wedding informed Clark that the witness was dead and sent him a photograph of the victim’s corpse, the documents state. The indictment says the purpose of the photo was to circulate it throughout the criminal underworld as a warning.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that 10 suspects, seven of whom are Canadian, were arrested on Tuesday. The new charges laid include drug trafficking, murder, and witness tampering. Wedding’s lawyer, Thornhill, Ont., resident Paradkar, is listed among those in custody. Others arrested include Ohna, Bal, Chapman, Zitoun, Florez, Tejada and Basora-Hernandez.
The indictment alleges that Rolan Sokolovski, a 37-year-old jeweler from Toronto, “made a bejeweled necklace” for Ohna “as a reward for his role” in the murder of the key witness. Sokolovski is now facing charges for allegedly laundering illicit funds on behalf of the Wedding Criminal Enterprise through his jewelry business, 2351885 Ontario Inc, which maintains a storefront in downtown Toronto under the name ‘Diamond Tsar."
Four suspects, including Wedding, who is believed to be living in Mexico, are still at-large. The DOJ said it plans to extradite the Canadians arrested on Tuesday to the U.S. to stand trial and that the reward for information leading to Wedding’s arrest has increased from US$10 million to $15 million.
