Mike Danton made the NHL, then tried to have someone killed. The hitman was a cop wearing a wire. But the person he wanted dead was the one man who had controlled every corner of his life since childhood.
In April 2004, Mike Danton was 23 years old and playing for the St. Louis Blues in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. While his team was in San Jose, he was making phone calls from his apartment, asking a woman he’d been dating if she knew anyone who would do anything for $10,000.
She handed the phone to a part-time police dispatcher named Justin Jones. Danton said someone was coming to kill him over a debt and he needed that person dealt with first. Jones played along, then immediately called the FBI. They fitted him with a wire and sent him to Danton’s apartment, where the man who answered the door wasn’t Danton at all. It was David Frost. His agent. His former coach. The target.
Within 48 hours, Danton was arrested at the San Jose airport. But the crime wasn’t the strange part. The real question was what could drive a professional athlete to that level of desperation, and the answer started thirteen years earlier, when a 10-year-old named Mike Jefferson met a man named David Frost.
The Man Who Took Over His Life
Frost coached peewee hockey in Toronto, running a school in Brampton with an intensity that stood out even by hockey standards. He promised parents he could take their sons to the NHL. One of his first rules: don’t talk to your parents about hockey, because they don’t know anything about the game.
By the time Mike was 15, his relationship with his family had collapsed. He moved in with Frost and, at 21, legally changed his name to Michael Sage Danton, cutting off all contact with his parents, his brother Tom, and his entire extended family. He referred to his biological parents only as “Steve and Sue.”
Frost became Danton’s NHLPA-certified agent in 2002, despite having been banned from an amateur league for forging documents and pleading guilty to assaulting one of his own players. The control that started on the ice now extended to every corner of Danton’s life. Other players in Frost’s orbit showed the same patterns; teammates called them “cancers,” not because they couldn’t play, but because they couldn’t think for themselves.
Then in the summer of 2000, Danton’s younger brother Tom, 13 years old, visited Frost’s cottage. He came home withdrawn. When his parents obtained photographs from the trip, one showed Frost pointing a rifle at the boy, another showed Tom bound to a bed with duct tape. Authorities investigated. Frost dismissed it as a hazing ritual. The case was closed. Mike saw those photographs. He knew what Frost was. And he still couldn’t leave.
Seven Years, And The First Honest Conversation Of His Life
On July 16, 2004, Danton pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven and a half years with no possibility of parole. He never said a word against Frost in any courtroom. In recorded calls from custody that the CBC later obtained, Frost coached Danton on what to say to lawyers and counselors, managing the narrative from the outside. At the end of one call, he demanded Danton say “I love you” before hanging up. Danton said it sitting in a cell, facing seven years, still performing for the man who put him there.
Inside Sandstone Federal Correctional Institution, something began to shift. For the first time, Danton worked with a psychiatrist who helped him examine his relationship with Frost without Frost in the room. He took university courses, became a certified first aid responder, and by every account became a model prisoner. In September 2009, the parole board granted his release, on two conditions: no contact with his biological father, and no face-to-face meetings with David Frost.
What He Built After
Saint Mary’s University in Halifax took a chance on him. Athletic director Steve Sarty put it simply: “If we say no to Mike Danton, who are we going to say yes to?” Danton enrolled in January 2010, scored in his first game back, and that March helped the Huskies win their first national championship. He graduated summa cum laude in 2016 with a double major in psychology and criminology, played professionally across Europe while studying remotely, and went on to run his own hockey academy, coaching on a philosophy built on respect and accountability, the opposite of everything Frost had taught him.
During a game in Sweden, his teammate collapsed on the ice with convulsions. Danton used the first aid training he’d learned in prison to clear his airway and keep him from choking. The skills he acquired while locked up for planning to take a life ended up saving one.
David Frost was acquitted on all charges and was later found operating under an alias at a hockey academy in California. He has never accepted responsibility for anything.
