Submitted by The Bureau’s Sam Cooper,
In the aftermath of their second Ryan Wedding indictment bombshell, the FBI’s Los Angeles field office dropped one of the most surreal photos of the Giant Slalom case this week: a silver, open-top Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR roadster — valued at roughly US$13 million — parked under fluorescent lights in a federal impound warehouse.
Agents say the 2002 Mercedes CLK-GTR was seized from the organization of Ryan James Wedding, the former Canadian Olympic snowboarder now on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.
Other stunning details in the new indictment — which alleges that a Canadian lawyer advised Wedding to kill a federal witness, whom The Bureau has identified as a convicted fentanyl trafficker from Montreal who ran a cartel network whose “sole purpose” was exporting narcotics including MDMA from Canada to the United States — include claims that Wedding is allegedly protected by a Mexican businessman with ties to senior Mexican government officials.
As one of The Bureau’s U.S. sources put it, that allegation suggests the Mexican businessman is viewed as a more important Sinaloa Cartel boss than Wedding himself.
As for the Mercedes, online records show it is one of only six CLK-GTR roadsters ever built worldwide, making it one of the rarest and most valuable cars the U.S. government has ever confiscated.
The car itself is a relic from the wildest corner of 1990s motorsport.
Mercedes and AMG created the CLK-GTR for the FIA GT1 series — essentially a Le Mans race car thinly disguised as a road car.
The road-legal “Straßenversion” models were hand-assembled at AMG’s facility in Affalterbach, Germany, in the late 1990s, with a small batch of six roofless roadsters completed from 2002 onward. Under the carbon-fiber skin sits a 6.9-liter V-12 making around 600 horsepower, good for 0–100 km/h in about 3.8 seconds and a top speed of roughly 200 mph.
When new, the CLK-GTR was listed by Guinness World Records as the most expensive production car on sale, at about US$1.5 million; recent auction results put similar roadsters around US$10.2 million, with pre-sale estimates up to US$13 million.
For U.S. authorities, this is evidence. The U.S. Treasury Department, which has now sanctioned Wedding and a string of associates, says he “has laundered his illicit profits through an extensive transatlantic network of businesses and associates, channeling drug proceeds into luxury assets such as cars and motorcycles that are concealed around the world.” Treasury identifies two key money men behind that network: Toronto jeweller Rolan Sokolovski and former Italian special forces member Gianluca Tiepolo.
Sokolovski, Treasury says, handled the books for Wedding’s organization and washed its funds through his Toronto jewelry company, 2351885 Ontario Inc., which trades as Diamond Tsar, while also moving millions in drug proceeds via cryptocurrency to mask the origin of the money.
Tiepolo allegedly “worked closely with Sokolovski to procure and manage Wedding’s physical assets, including high-end vehicles,” and held “millions of dollars in Wedding’s property under his own name to conceal these assets from authorities.”
Tiepolo owns Italian and U.K. firms — Stile Italiano S.R.L. and TMR Ltd. — that trade in luxury motorcycles and cars, and he founded Windrose Tactical, a training outfit that has hosted Wedding’s alleged hitmen.
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