Posted on 04/24/2004 11:00:52 AM PDT by Loyalist
The lives of Mike Danton and David Frost have been intertwined since their days in minor hockey, and their relationship has raised concerns wherever they have gone
DESERONTO, ONT.; ST. LOUIS, MO.; TORONTO -- The Bayview Inn is a bland brick building on the outskirts of Deseronto, a tiny town bordering Mohawk territory near the north shore of Lake Ontario. It's the kind of place where fishing buddies feel comfortable parking their gear, and out-of-town hockey teams like to roost when invited to tournaments at the arena around the corner.
Seven years ago, one of the rooms at the hotel was a meeting place for a few select members of the Quinte Hawks, a Tier 2 junior team on which Mike Danton was a rough-and-tumble player whose main job was to protect the top goal scorers. The role would eventually land him a job with the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League.
Mr. Danton, who was Mike Jefferson in those days, was one of the regulars at the hotel. On the nights the team wasn't playing, he would eat his dinner at the home of Elena Phillips, the motherly woman with whom he boarded, then head over to the hotel.
The folks who billeted the young Hawks players say the team was the most exciting thing that had happened to the town in years. But they had serious concerns about what was going on in that hotel room. There were girls, they said. And the players, although generally good students, would sometimes skip school to spend the day there.
Mike, who was 16 at the time, would never stay out late, Ms. Phillips said. But she worried about how he was spending his evenings.
"One night, he came back and his face was all red and he had welts," she recounted this week as she sat at her comfortable kitchen table. "I came up the stairs and I said 'What's the matter Mike?' and he said nothing, and then he just went into his room and closed the door."
Today, Mike Danton is behind the closed door of a California jail cell. Earlier this week, U.S. district attorney Ronald Tenpas announced that Mr. Danton and his friend Katie Wolfmeyer had been formally indicted on charges of arranging a murder, an offence punishable by as much as 10 years in prison.
Mr. Danton's story has emerged as a film noir counterpoint to the gossamer fantasy of the NHL playoffs. With allegations of promiscuity, drugs and attempted murder for hire, Mr. Danton's case is unique, yet it highlights what some see as systemic problems with the modern game of hockey.
"There's something seriously wrong with the way that we approach the sport," said Ed Arnold, author of the book Whose Puck Is It, Anyway?
"A lot of people seem to have forgotten that it's just a game. A huge amount of pressure is placed on extremely young kids. And the money is obscene."
The criminal complaint filed in the Illinois court has led to widespread speculation about Mr. Danton's troubled relationship with his former coach and agent David Frost. In the document, FBI Special Agent John Jimenez says Mr. Danton became concerned during an argument last week that a male acquaintance was going to tell the management of the St. Louis Blues about his dissolute lifestyle, which involved drug use and promiscuity.
Although the male acquaintance is not named in the affidavit, police sources in St. Louis say it is Mr. Frost. According to the affidavit, Mr. Danton "broke down and sobbed. . . . Danton explained that he felt backed into a corner and also felt that the acquaintance was going to leave him. Danton did not want to allow the acquaintance to leave him, therefore decided to have him killed."
The tale of Mike Danton begins in Brampton, Ont., back in the days when Mr. Frost coached him and a group of talented 11-year-olds on a triple-A team that was part of the giant Metro Toronto Hockey League.
Even then, observers say, Mr. Frost was demanding, controlling and manipulative, particularly when it came to his favourite players. Mike Jefferson was one of his favourites.
It wasn't until 2002 that Mike Jefferson changed his name to Danton -- reportedly after a boy he met in hockey camp -- swearing that he would never play in the big leagues with the name Jefferson on his back. Steve Jefferson, Mr. Danton's estranged father, believes he lost his son when he was 15.
Back then, the newly founded Quinte Hawks needed good players, and co-owner Marty Abrams, now coach of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, along with his brother Kevin Abrams, then the Hawks general manager, wanted a winning team.
They negotiated with Mr. Frost to bring Mike, Sheldon Keefe, Shawn Cation, Larry Barron and Darryl Tiveron from Brampton. Mr. Frost, who had recently been suspended from the MTHL for helping to falsify documents that would release his players, came along in the bargain, and once they were in Deseronto, Ryan Barnes joined the other five as one of his special players.
Although his title was assistant, it was quickly clear that Mr. Frost, and not coach Greg Royce, controlled the team.
The people here say Mr. Jefferson was a regular at the arena, even though his home is a good three hours drive away. But he was allowed no contact with his son before or after the games.
Mr. Jefferson said that edict was handed down by Mr. Frost. If he tried to talk to his son in the parking lot outside the rink, "Mr. Frost would tell Mike, 'keep your head down, just go straight to the bus.' "
Despite the wall erected around his son, Mr. Jefferson was a big supporter of the coach's methods. He told one reporter that David Frost was the best thing that had ever happened to Mike.
He doesn't think that way today.
"He's a monster," Mr. Jefferson said of Mr. Frost. "He stole Michael from us and now he's taken Michael's mind from him. Since Michael was 15 years old, Michael has never said a word that came out of his own mind. He's just a tape recording. It was his words and Dave's thoughts."
Mr. Frost did not return phone calls for this story. But his supporters have said previously that Mike was rescued from a bad situation at home and turned into a player of professional calibre.
In a 1999 interview with the Toronto Sun, Mr. Frost defended his approach. "I've heard it said I'm controlling these kids," he told columnist Steve Simmons. "But I won't apologize for it. If having too much influence means my players go to school, they maintain 75-plus averages, they work hard in games, they don't stay out at night, they never break curfew -- if that means too much influence, then I'm guilty."
By all accounts, Mr. Frost was an excellent technical coach who produced winning teams. But his approach was jarring.
Annalee Fuller was the wife of the team trainer and president of the fan club, and also billeted players. "None of us liked the way Frosty dealt with things. None of us particularly liked his way. He was gruff. He would be rude. He was a nasty, nasty man," she said.
"He yelled at them. He'd come up behind them, he'd get his finger in their face, he'd scream at them. A couple of times he go up and smack some of them on the back of the helmet."
Even stranger, Ms. Fuller said, was the control he exercised over the boys who were his pet players.
"Whenever there was something going on, they weren't allowed to go unless he was there," she said. "They had to be under his watchful eye at all times. He had to know where they were, what they were wearing, what they ate."
Other families who billeted the five Hawks say the same thing.
Shawn Cation lived with Daryl and Penny Smart. "If you were eating dinner and Frosty wanted you now, it was out the door," Ms. Smart said.
There were three Hawks who boarded with the Smarts but Shawn wasn't like the others. "He wasn't really allowed to really get to become part of the family and the group," she said. "It wasn't as if he wasn't with others of his team."
Ms. Phillips found the same to be true of Mike Jefferson.
"Mike was totally controlled by Frost," she said. "It amazed me. It frightened me and shocked me. I talked with him saying he had to learn to think for himself and to make his own decisions. It shouldn't be up to another man to rule his life. His parents should have more say in his upbringing than what they had. I'd never seen anything quite like it before."
Ms. Phillips said the boys were not allowed to socialize with other people. She returned home one weekend to find Mike, Mr. Frost and the other boys barbecuing burgers on the deck. She urged them to stay and enjoy themselves, saying she would go about her business elsewhere in the house.
"And they all started getting their hamburgers and wrapping them up. Dave Frost just looked at me, he never said a word. The boys never said a word. And I said 'Mike, are you staying?' and he just said 'No.' It was the strangest thing."
Even then, she was concerned about the distance that was being put between Mike Jefferson and his parents. There was very little communication, Ms. Phillips said, but it was obvious that Mike loved his dad. One night, when Steve Jefferson set out in a terrible blizzard for Deseronto to watch his son play, Mike "phoned and phoned and phoned until he found out his dad was okay," she said.
In the end, Mr. Frost did not last a full season behind the Hawks bench. With a crowd of 1,000 looking on during a game, he punched player Darryl Tiveron with a blow that left the boy bleeding.
He was charged with assault and later pleaded guilty but claimed the incident never happened. Darryl, who in later years went to work for Mr. Frost at his Elite Hockey School, also denied the assault occurred. But many people, including two off-duty police officers, said they saw it.
"We all yelled and jeered at him. I was flabbergasted," Ms. Phillips said. "He belted him one."
Ms. Fuller, who was fed up with what she had seen, was among those who wanted Mr. Frost to be charged. "We were actually chastised by some of the other players' parents for sticking our noses in something that was none of our business," she said.
Penny Smart agrees. The parents of some players were willing to ignore warnings from others if it meant their son had a shot at the top echelons of hockey, she said. "I think it had a lot to do with 'I can get your boys to succeed, I can get your boys to the NHL.' And I think that's too bad because the boys suffer in the end."
Even though Mr. Frost was no longer coaching, he remained in Deseronto for the rest of the season, using hand signals to instruct his players from the stands.
The youths were split up during the 1997-98 season and Mike Jefferson went to play with the Sarnia Sting in the Ontario Hockey League. Mr. Frost went with him, again coaching him with his hands from the sidelines.
Sarnia owner Rob Ciccarelli has said he didn't want to let Mike go, but the situation eventually became intolerable and, before the year was out, he traded him to the St. Michael's Majors.
The next year, Mike was reunited with Mr. Frost's other favourites -- Shawn Cation, Sheldon Keefe and Ryan Barnes -- who all ended up with the Majors. Again, they kept to themselves, following a regime laid out by Mr. Frost, who was still guiding them from the stands.
By all accounts, they were good students. But Mr. Frost told them they didn't have to go to school on game days. That didn't sit well with the Majors and they were traded, as a group, to the Barrie Colts.
Hockey officials do not want to talk about the situation on the record. But a man associated with the Colts said the influence that Mr. Frost exercised over the four was astounding. Again they were isolated from the rest of their teammates. And again he used hand signals to coach from the stands.
In the summer of 2002, Mr. Frost received his certification to represent NHL players as their agent, a job that more often goes to accountants or lawyers. His clients included Sheldon Keefe and Mike Jefferson, who by that time had changed his last name to Danton.
Mr. Danton landed a contract with the New Jersey Devils and was sent to their farm team in Albany, N.Y., but failed to show up. He said he had suffered a stomach injury during a collision with Eric Lindros of the New York Rangers and had gone to California to get a second medical opinion.
This season, Mr. Danton landed in St. Louis, where he was an enforcer on the fourth line. He had seven goals, 12 points and 141 penalty minutes. But some believed he was turning his professional life around.
He lived in a townhouse-style apartment complex in Brentwood, a suburb of St. Louis, where $1,545 a month buys a spacious, upscale unit with high ceilings and large windows. It's a new development, still partly under construction, with mounds of dirt in the front yard and unfinished buildings still missing their stucco exteriors.
He also developed a relationship with Ms. Wolfmeyer, the blond 19-year-old who allegedly helped Mr. Danton arrange a killing. She was an honours student in the nursing program at a college near her home where she was on an athletic scholarship, and a regular fixture at her church youth group. She also seems to have had a steady boyfriend.
"It's so puzzling," said her uncle, John Wolfmeyer. "She's never had a parking ticket, never had a problem at home, never anything remotely major about her being in trouble."
The root of the trouble, author Ed Arnold said, is a "pot of gold" syndrome: the huge NHL salaries that have led to the recruitment of potential stars at ever-younger ages.
"It's all about a future in hockey, instead of the game itself," he said. "Now you see agents talking to 11-year-old boys, and the parents think it's great. It's not great. The parents should be kicking the agents out of the rink."
The pressure to succeed can easily lead to the kind of abuses that have been highlighted in the Danton case, Mr. Arnold said.
"There are parents who would rather see their son play a single game in the NHL than have him become a doctor. To me, that's very warped. In the 1950s and 1960s, no one thought like that. They kept the game in perspective. Now, the perspective has been lost. All that matters is making it to the NHL and getting rich."
Mr. Arnold notes that there is no oversight of agents in minor hockey.
"If you ask me, there should be age limits. You see agents at peewee games. These are 12-year-old kids. And the worst part is, the parents are thrilled. They all say, 'Wow, an agent is interested in my kid!' There's nothing there to protect these kids. It all comes down to the parents. Unfortunately, the parents are now part of the problem."
The criminal complaint filed against Mr. Danton alleges that a man, who subsequently turned FBI informant, met Ms. Wolfmeyer with her friends on April 14. The informant said Mr. Danton called her phone to say somebody was coming from Canada to kill him over a financial debt, and requested that she hire a hit man to kill the murderous Canadian. Ms. Wolfmeyer replied that she might know somebody willing to take the job, and asked the informant.
The informant didn't take her seriously, the complaint says, so she gave her cellphone to the would-be hit man and he spoke with Mr. Danton himself.
Just after midnight, the complaint says, Mr. Danton called the informant again to arrange the details in a call that the informant secretly recorded. They argued about some of the fine points of faking a burglary, and Mr. Danton described where he hid his cash in the apartment. The informant suggested that the killing might be more discreet, somewhere other than Mr. Danton's home, but the player insisted that he wanted proof of the man's death. The complaint quotes Mr. Danton saying, "I'll know it's taken care of because when I come back, obviously I'll see him there."
The complaint also quotes Mr. Danton urging the informant to do the killing immediately: "The only way that I'm going to be able to sleep tonight is knowing that the guy trying to kill me is done himself," adding, "I'm pretty much begging . . . I wouldn't resort to this if it wasn't a matter of life or death."
The informant hung up the phone and immediately called police.
Mr. Danton's lawyer said yesterday his client would plead not guilty.
Less than 48 hours before he allegedly tried to hire a hit man, Mike Danton stood nervously on the ice at the Savvis Center in downtown St. Louis and gave a live interview to a Fox television reporter. It was the evening of April 12, and the St. Louis Blues were preparing to battle the San Jose Sharks in Game 3 of a playoff series they would eventually lose.
Mr. Danton wasn't scheduled to go on-air but he'd been pacing around outside the dressing room and the reporter snagged him for some comments. Knowing that the husky brawler often spent time in the penalty box, the reporter, Joel Goldberg, asked how he would avoid giving his opponents the power play.
"There's no problem with playing hard, obviously, but there's a fine line," Mr. Danton said. "You're going to take punches in the head and you just got to skate away because this is the time of year when power plays for the opposing team can come in huge for them."
It was ordinary jock talk, but Mr. Danton's demeanour seemed unusual. His eyes moved constantly as he stood in front of the camera in his grey T-shirt and stretchy bike shorts, bouncing back and forth on his short, powerful legs. Always jittery before games, he seemed especially tense that night.
Mr. Goldberg noticed the player's unease.
"That's the story from down here," he said, signing off. "This guy is bouncing up and down, he's ready to hit somebody so I'm actually going to get out of his way."
In Deseronto, the image of a troubled Mike Danton continues to echo through the town. Some say they saw bad things coming from his experiences in junior hockey, but nobody would have predicted charges like those he now faces.
"I just got this awful feeling even back then something was very, very wrong," Ms. Fuller said. "A lot of us felt that way."
Anyone with a whit of common sense after reading this article knows exactly what was very, very wrong with Mike Danton and David Frost. But the Globe and Mail is far too politically correct to tell you.
None of this would have happened if gays were allowed to marry. </sarcasm>
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