Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday announced additional charges against Ryan Wedding, a former Canadian Olympic athlete accused of drug trafficking, and said the reward for his capture has been raised to $15 million.
Wedding, a snowboarder who competed for Team Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah, is accused of moving large quantities of cocaine into the United States and Canada through Colombia and Mexico.
He is alleged to have planned the killing of a witness in Colombia in 2025, along with other murders tied to drug trafficking since he was first linked to the trade in 2006. In 2015, he was charged with drug offenses in Nova Scotia and fled prosecution.
Wedding was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list last March, and the State Department issued a $10 million reward for information that leads to his arrest or conviction, which was raised to $15 million Wednesday.
Speaking at a news conference with FBI Director Kash Patel and Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Michael Duheme, Bondi said the Justice Department is charging Wedding with two additional counts of witness tampering and intimidation, money laundering and drug trafficking.
She said Wedding "controls one of the most prolific and violent drug trafficking organizations in this world" and added, "Protecting federal witnesses from retaliation is core to the department's mission. It is about individual safety, but more, it is about protecting the rule of law itself."
Patel compared Wedding to drug kingpins Pablo Escobar and Joaquin Archivaldo Guzman Loera, known as El Chapo.
Wedding "is responsible for engineering a narco-trafficking and narco-terrorism program that we have not seen in a long time," Patel said.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.