Good morning.

Ryan Wedding smiled as he entered a courtroom just outside Los Angeles on Monday, shackled, handcuffed and wearing prison garb.

How exactly he came to be there isn’t entirely clear.

The former B.C. man, a member of Canada’s snowboarding team at the Salt Lake City Olympics, was arrested on Jan. 22. He was the subject of an increasingly targeted manhunt after U.S. authorities arrested seven Canadians they claim were his henchmen last November.

FBI Director Kash Patel cast Wedding among the world’s most violent and notorious drug traffickers. He accused Wedding of orchestrating multiple murders and an attempted murder – all in Southern Ontario.

Wedding was believed to be hiding out in Mexico under the protection of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

On Friday morning, Patel was joined by RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme to announce that Wedding had been taken into custody the night before.

But Patel wouldn’t say how Wedding was captured, only that U.S. authorities were helped by their Mexican counterparts.

A statement from the Mexican government said a Canadian citizen had “voluntarily” turned himself in at the U.S. embassy in Mexico on Thursday night.

On Monday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated that Wedding surrendered at the American embassy last Thursday on his own volition. Sheinbaum told reporters at the National Palace that Wedding must have done so because “he considered it better to surrender than to continue being hunted.”

She also stated that her government did not participate in any joint operation with the United States to capture Wedding.

Mexico’s Attorney-General, Ernestina Godoy Ramos, also released a statement Monday saying Wedding gave himself up after “intense pressure” from her government.

Criminal defence lawyer Anthony Colombo, who is representing Wedding, disputed that characterization.

“He was apprehended,” the lawyer said, describing statements by Mexican authorities as “spin.”

“If there’s anybody in a position to know how his arrest and apprehension went down, it’s his counsel,” Colombo said.

How Wedding came to be apprehended is important. Only hours after Mexican authorities say he turned himself in, news photographers on Friday afternoon caught pictures showing Wedding, flanked by FBI agents, deplaning in Los Angeles.

The extradition process, it seems, moved lightning quick.

Robert Currie, a professor of law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, warned about the implications of apparently disregarding extradition proceedings.

“There is a due-process problem when we sacrifice extradition just because the alleged offender is supposed to be very dangerous,” Currie said. “If you start down that slope, there will always be reasons we shouldn’t follow ordinary procedures.”

He added that if lawful processes are being devalued by the U.S. and Mexico, it could devalue extradition treaties elsewhere – including Canada.

Colombo noted that no extradition hearing had been held prior to sending Wedding from Mexico.

He referenced the U.S.’s recent capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

“We’re in a bold new era with regard to international relations,” he said, pointing out that no extradition hearing had been held prior to removing Wedding from Mexico.

Wedding’s arrival in Los Angeles marks another chapter in his progression from snowboarding star to one of the FBI’s Top 10 most wanted fugitives.

As Mike Hager reported this weekend, Wedding had been under the eye of law enforcement in British Columbia decades earlier as one of the many middling profiteers in Metro Vancouver’s massive underground cannabis trade.

In 2006, Mounties raided a farm in Maple Ridge and found thousands of pot plants and dozens of kilograms of dried flower, worth roughly $10-million at the time. Wedding was never charged. Local officers from that era remember him as being on their radar but not a large enough player to devote resources to investigate further.

Two years later, he was arrested in Los Angeles trying to buy 24 kilograms of cocaine and sentenced to a brief stay in federal prison, which one of the FBI agents who arrested him described to Rolling Stone magazine as giving Mr. Wedding an “Oxford” education in the ins and outs of international drug smuggling.

After he was released and deported in 2011, he relocated to Montreal and, in 2015, was charged after the RCMP alleged he worked with the infamous Sinaloa cartel to ship $750-million worth of cocaine from Colombia and Mexico into Canada.

He was never arrested on those charges and began a decade on the lam.

Now, Wedding is back in California once again, and what happens next will likely be as convoluted as his early years.

Asked on the courthouse steps how he responded to allegations that his client participated in a conspiracy to murder, Colombo replied: “You heard him plead ‘not guilty,’ right? That’s how I’d respond.”

This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this o