The FBI spotted Ryan Wedding in 2024. Why wasn’t he arrested?

It was like a ghost sighting. And the FBI agents had to be sure they weren’t mistaken. 

The investigators, conducting surveillance near a Starbucks in Mexico City on Jan. 22, 2024, had just seen two men walk in.

One of them, a hulking six-foot-three-inch figure, may just have been the ghost they’d been hunting.

They checked a 2013 Quebec driver’s licence photo to be certain. He looked different, all these years later. But there was little doubt when the man was later heard inside, using his real first name. 

“Ryan.”

The FBI had managed to get eyes on Ryan James Wedding, a Canadian they suspected of running a violent cocaine-smuggling operation across South and North America.

The episode at the coffee shop — described by U.S. prosecutors in court documents summarizing their case against Wedding — amounts to the only sighting that authorities have confirmed publicly, since Wedding first fled criminal charges in 2015.

So, why didn’t they arrest him, then and there?

The question has been swirling on social media since U.S. federal authorities earlier this month announced new charges against Wedding, 44, and his alleged associates and increased the bounty for his capture to $15 million.

For starters, there’s the jurisdiction issue. Any arrest in Mexico would have to be carried out by Mexican authorities, says retired FBI special agent Kenneth Gray.

“Even if the FBI had location information on Wedding, and the information was provided to the Mexican authorities, there is no guarantee that they would move on this information in a timely manner and make an arrest,” said Gray, now a professor in the criminal justice department at the University of New Haven, Conn.

But there’s another reason, as laid out in the hundreds of pages of indictments, extradition-related documents and other court records reviewed by CBC News over the past year.

It was the RCMP who had sought Wedding in 2015, when he was living in Montreal. Born in Thunder Bay, Ont., Wedding disappeared after he was charged in a large-scale conspiracy that involved bringing boat loads of cocaine from South America to Atlantic Canada. 

By 2024, Wedding had surfaced in Mexico — living under aliases such as James Conrad King, Jesse King and Public Enemy — and was on the FBI’s radar. His drug-smuggling network, now linked to dozens of murders, had allegedly grown to a transnational empire, raking in $1 billion US a year.