“We knew we were giving Wedding all the contacts he needed to return to a life of crime, but there was nothing we could do about it.”
Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarding prospect who became an FBI Most Wanted fugitive tied to El Chapo’s cartel. The quote is from an FBI agent who watched helplessly as the justice system connected Wedding with cartel contacts while he was in custody. This is a story about how a promising athlete became a drug lord, and how the system designed to stop him accidentally helped him network his way up.