U.S. prosecutors allege Edgar Aarón Vazquez ran a subscription service that fed Ryan Wedding secret police intelligence and warning signs about impending arrests. The arrangement, they say, put a fugitive network operator inside the flow of law enforcement information and gave Wedding a steady stream of updates for a price of $100,000 a month.
The indictment against Vazquez was unveiled Tuesday, adding a sharper picture to a case that has already stretched across Mexico and North America. Prosecutors say the service was not a one-off leak but a recurring channel: for the monthly fee, Wedding allegedly received details of arrests, outstanding warrants, active investigations and more.
That is why the name Ryan Wedding is back in focus now. He was arrested in Mexico in January, but U.S. authorities still allege he had built a system to stay a step ahead of police pressure. Vazquez, they say, was part of that system and had long been tied to Wedding’s alleged cocaine empire.
Roberto Gomez is also accused of securing secret police information for Wedding, underscoring that Vazquez was not working alone. The indictment says the New Empire Cartel grew under the protection of certain Mexican authorities, and it describes Vazquez as an associate of the Sinaloa Cartel and the founder of the New Empire Cartel in Mexico City. Behind the scenes, the 42-year-old Vazquez allegedly maintained a network of corrupt public officials and private individuals with access to sensitive information held by Mexican and international law enforcement agencies.
That network ended abruptly last Thursday, when Vazquez was shot dead in what Omar García Harfuch called an exchange of gunfire with federal police. He said officers were carrying out a warrant for Vazquez’s arrest on U.S. charges. The killing also deepened the case’s contradictions: after his death, Mexican officials described Vazquez as the mastermind behind the murder of police commissioner Milton Morales Figueroa.
Vazquez had already been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department last year, which said he provided protection for the then-fugitive Wedding and used his police contacts to help locate murder targets for the drug ring. U.S. authorities now say the case offers the clearest view yet of how Wedding allegedly evaded capture. What remains unanswered is how the subscription service actually moved from police records to Wedding’s hands, and who inside the system kept it running.
