Читать книгу Notorious: The Maddest and Baddest Sportsmen on the Planet - Richard Bath - Страница 24

The circumstances in which NHL (National Hockey League) star Mike Danton was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for trying to have his agent killed are bizarre in the extreme. In fact, so twisted is the Canadian ice hockey forward’s relationship with David Frost, the agent and mentor who Danton paid $10,000 to have assassinated, that the truth may never really be known. ‘I do not believe in over 18 years on the bench I have been faced with a case as bizarre as this one,’ said federal Judge William D. Stiehl.

Danton first met Frost as a ten-year-old, while the coach was 25, and over the years the two hockey-obsessives formed an unnaturally close bond. Eventually, the teenage player, alienated and estranged from his parents, was persuaded by Frost to move out of his parents’ house and move in with Frost and three other promising young players in what the court later heard was a cult-like atmosphere. Frost even persuaded the player to change his name from that of his parents, Jefferson, to Danton, which was the name of a kid at hockey camp. Frost, who was under police investigation for the sexual exploitation of three 16-and 17-year-old girls and would later come under investigation for punching one of his players while he was on the bench for an NHL side, had already banned Danton from hugging his parents after matches, and Danton now cut off all contact with his worried mother and father.

Eventually, Danton began to spread his wings and, by the time he established himself as a forward for the St Louis Blues, Frost was struggling to maintain control of a player who was gorging on booze and groupies. In an effort to keep his grip, Frost put pressure on Danton to pay back $25,000 he owed his agent (ie Frost), implying that he would tell the Blues about Danton’s promiscuity, his mis-use of painkillers and sleeping pills, plus his drink-problem, if he didn’t. That’s when Danton, never the most stable of souls, snapped.

Using his unwitting 19-year-old girlfriend Katie Wolfmeyer as a go-between, Danton offered a would-be hit man $10,000 to remove Frost from the face of the earth. Only later, after hit man Justin Jones went to the police—not too difficult as he was a police dispatcher—did it emerge that Danton had already tried to hire an assassin on two previous occasions. After initially pretending that he only wanted to have Frost beaten up, Danton came clean and admitted his guilt.

The really spooky bit came during the trial when Frost, despite overwhelming evidence, continued to deny that he was the intended target of the hit man. ‘I know for a fact it wasn’t me. It was a hit man. He hired a hit man because he thought a hit man was coming to get him.’ Even spookier was the fact that Frost had to be barred from talking to Danton, so assiduously was the svengali trying to coach his young charge to engineer a plea of diminished responsibility. If someone had tried to have you killed three times, would you help them get off the murder rap?

Danton still hasn’t changed his name back and refuses to speak to his parents or answer their letters. He is, though, still in the throes of a truly bizarre love-hate relationship with his mentor Frost.