BECOMING EL JEFF

Before Ryan Wedding landed on the FBI's Most Wanted list as a high-level associate of El Chapo, he was a bright-eyed kid from Thunder Bay. The inside story of how an Olympic snowboarding prodigy became one of the world's most dangerous and powerful drug lords

- BY SIMON LEWSEN

From the moment he was born, Ryan Wedding was the family darling. He belonged to a sporty, tightly knit clan with a shared love of the outdoors. In the 1960s, his grandparents, Laurence and Marlyn Spiess, had purchased the Mount Baldy Ski Area, a ski club near Thunder Bay. Their ambitions were modest. Marlyn sat behind the ticketing desk, and Laurence, who carried a key ring befitting a prison warden, did triple duty as manager, landscaper and handyman. Mount Baldy wasn’t a ritzy destination resort but a scrappy hub for local families. It had an old rope lift, a T-bar pulley, and a chalet that sold hot dogs and Molson Canadian. Skiing was the family religion. The Spiess’s son, Craig, coached the women’s national alpine ski team in the early ’90s; their daughter, Karen, married an engineer named Rene Wedding who'd skied competitively in university. Ryan Wedding was born on September 14, 1981, the first son of the third generation. Laurence had him on skis almost as soon as he could walk.

As a child, Ryan was daring and adventurous, with a capacity for intense focus. He'd sit behind his father’s drafting table for hours, drawing perfectly scaled buildings, then go out on his bike, alone, to explore the logging trails that wended through the surrounding boreal forest. When Ryan was still young, his grandfather put him behind the wheel of the family car and showed him how to work the transmission. He learned how to use the pedals before his feet could even reach them. But his appetite for risk went beyond family-sanctioned activities. Occasionally, he'd disappear, and his parents would find that he’d snuck into a neighbour’s garage to rummage through their tools.