Snow King: Surrender or Snatched?
Lawyer claims Ryan Wedding didn't hand himself in and cites Maduro case; Sheinbaum says he did and shows contested Instagram post
Para leer en español click aquí.
The lawyer of Ryan Wedding, the Olympic snow boarder turned alleged cocaine king, dropped a bomb at court in California on Monday saying that his client didn’t surrender and citing U.S. special forces seizing Nicolás Maduro as a precedent. The claim, made as Wedding entered a plea of not guilty to charges of murder and cocaine trafficking, throws more intrigue into an already tangled and slightly surreal case and puts the question of Mexico’s sovereignty into the spotlight.
“Any spin that the government of Mexico is putting on this that he surrendered is inaccurate,” said lawyer Anthony Colombo - who to add even more spice is reported to be the grandson of a New York mafia boss and defended the son of narco kingpin El Mencho.
“The Trump administration with the apprehension of Maduro has made clear that we are in a bold new era with regard to international relations,” Colombo told reporters outside the court in Santa Ana, where the case was moved because of anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. “If the U.S. government is unilaterally going into a sovereign country and apprehending somebody you can understand the concern that sovereign entity might have.”
Colombo’s suggestion of a U.S. arrest on Mexican soil offers a third version of the detention of Wedding in Mexico City last week. FBI head Kash Patel, who was in Mexico during the operation, claimed that Mexican security forces nabbed Wedding and handed him into U.S. custody after a tense negotiation. However, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, issued a statement saying that, “The surrender of Ryan Wedding was a direct result of pressure applied by Mexican and U.S. law enforcement.”
Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum in her news conference on Monday said that it was a surrender straight to the U.S. embassy, which her security chief Omar García Harfuch had first stated. She then displayed an Instagram post supposedly of Wedding before he handed himself in.
“What is the best proof that he surrendered?” Sheinbaum said. “Well a publication that he made himself.”
However, a CBC News investigation concluded that the Instagram account is not really run by Wedding but is a fake and says that tests determined that the photo was AI generated.
Wedding’s demeanor in the courtroom was perhaps surprising. Speaking to CrashOut after the session, Toronto Star reporter Calvi Leon said that Wedding showed no signs…
Sorry folks, you need to subscribe to read the rest of this story. But it’s only the price of a cuppa coffee and you get the complete archive including exclusive interviews with top players and maps of cartel territory, and I will be following the tumultuous events with reports you can trust.