The Off the Ice: Hockey's Criminal Cases The Hitman and the Svengali

On April 16, 2004, two days after the San Jose Sharks eliminated the St. Louis Blues from the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the FBI arrested Blues forward Mike Danton on conspiracy to commit murder charges.The would-be hitman was a police dispatcher who immediately reported the plot to his chief.The alleged target was Danton's own agent - David Frost, the coach who had been the dominant figure in Danton's life since Danton was ten years old.The federal judge who sentenced Danton to seven and a half years said he had never faced "a case as bizarre as this one" in nearly two decades on the bench.The Hitman and the Svengali tells the complete story of one of the strangest true crime cases in professional sports history.Mike Jefferson was born in Brampton, Ontario in 1980. He had the talent and toughness to make the NHL from the fifth round of the draft. At age ten, he met David Frost, a 25-year-old hockey coach who took an unusual interest in him. By age sixteen, Jefferson was living away from his family, at parties in a Deseronto motel suite that had a "town-wide reputation" for sexual encounters organized by his coach. By age twenty-one, he had changed his name to Mike Danton - "Danton" taken from the last name of a boy he'd met at one of Frost's hockey camps - to sever his last nominal connection to who he'd been.David Frost had a specific method: identify talented young players, make himself indispensable, and gradually displace their families as the central adult authority in their lives. He was barred from the Ontario Hockey Association for his team's undisciplined play, suspended by another league for falsifying documents, and pleaded guilty to assaulting one of his own players during a playoff game. Each time, he came back.By 2003, Danton was an NHL player calling his agent from the locker room before games, unable to conduct routine business without checking in with Frost, asking teammates what legal filings were required to fire an agent. He was looking for an exit from the relationship he was in and could not find one through normal means.In 2004, he tried to pay $10,000 to make the problem disappear. He chose a 19-year-old community college student as his intermediary and a police dispatcher as his hitman.Five years into his sentence, Danton claimed the real target was not Frost but his estranged father, Steve Jefferson. The FBI disputed this. The photograph given to identify the target was of Frost, not of Jefferson.One week after the arrest, Frost called Danton in jail. At the end of the call, the CBC Fifth Estate obtained recordings showing, Frost demanded that Danton say "I love you." Danton said it.David Frost was later charged with 12 counts of sexual exploitation for alleged conduct during the Deseronto season. He was acquitted of every count.This is the first book in the Off the Ice series: hockey's criminal cases told in full.