Mike Danton and the alleged plot to kill David Frost: One of the strangest scandals in Ice Hockey
Mike Danton was a promising young ice hockey player until he got involved with his agent David Frost. What happened next is the stuff of mystery novels and great cinema. It seems there was a plot brewing to kill Frost and Danton was the mastermind behind
it all. There was also a love connection that was revealed and also dodgy practices in Frost’s past. This incident, where the whole truth has never been uncovered even after the trial and sentencing, led to the destruction of two lives and two promising sports
careers. What exactly happened during this interesting story needs to be looked at in further detail.
Mike Danton started his ice hockey career as a young boy. At one point he was enrolled in his agent, David Frost’s hockey camp before playing in the NHL. He played in a few junior teams before joining the American Hockey League (AHL) team of the Albany River
Rats. The AHL is used as a development league for players to move up to the NHL. In 2000, Danton joined the New Jersey Devils and played a lot of games in the team’s 2003-2004 season. He ended up becoming estranged from his family, which prompted him to change
his surname from Jefferson to Danton and he managed to have a feud with the Devil’s general manager. As a result of this he was suspended and he eventually ended up in the St. Louis Blues. It was around this time, soon after his trade that the events of the
scandal unfolded.
Danton’s agent David Frost is another interesting character in this story. He ran an ice hockey camp to train young players to play the game in order for them to move to the big leagues one day. He coached Danton and many other players at this camp. Frost
was the recipient of his own scandalous affair when he was put on trial for the alleged sexual exploitation of children aged 14-16 who were part of his camp. He was eventually acquitted of the crime after not enough evidence was presented. Prosecutors of his
case were accused of not bringing up more witnesses to prove Frost’s guilt. But the case involving Danton and Frost is what brings us here.
In early 2004, the Blues player was arrested on conspiracy to commit murder. It turned out that he had tried to hire the services of a hitman to try and have Frost murdered. The hitman turned out to be an undercover police officer and Danton was caught red
handed. The ice hockey player later pled guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. Danton eventually served a little more than five years in prison and was paroled in 2009. It later emerged that Danton and Frost had
a very strange relationship which saw Frost controlling every aspect of the player’s life and may also have been his lover. Sources have said that Frost was the reason Danton cut off ties with his family and he telephoned Danton a week after his arrest and
told him to plead guilty. To this day Frost denies that he was the intended target and Danton has said recently that the target was actually his estranged father, Steve Jefferson.
This case gets stranger still because in 2008 a newspaper article that appeared in the Denver Post showed that the lawyer who represented Danton during his trial, Howard Kieffer, had not graduated from law school and was ineligible to practice law because
he did not possess a valid law license. This simply cast further doubt and heaped more uncertainty over this shady affair.
Well, the conclusion of the story is a little bit happier than the climax. While Danton was incarcerated, he took correspondence courses at Queen’s University and upon his release he returned to study and attended Saint Mary’s University. He joined the university
in January 2010, and was selected to play for the ice hockey team, the Saint Mary Huskies. He has been working extremely hard at university trying to turn his life around by achieving a 3.9 GPA for his senior year and being named an Academic All-Canadian hockey
player. After a long time, the talented hockey player and troubled young man seems to have gotten his life back on track.
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