No. 253: MIKE DANTON, DAVID FROST et al / My specialty is psychopathology & family dysfunction in what passes for Canada's national game, but this had it all--a cult, teen orgies, a murder plot etc.

Hard to sort out perpetrators from victims in this story. Certainly no heroes.

Illustration that accompanied my story about the Mike Danton, David Frost and the Quinte Hawks from a 2004 issue of Toro. Yeah, kind of a regrettable location for the fold between pages, but metaphorically on point, with those slipping through the cracks. The Hawks operation folded the year after Danton and Frost came and left and this illustration was based on photos I took of the dressing room in the Deseronto arena in the summer of 2004. The nameplates for players on the team in ‘98 were still above the stalls, including those of a few who had played with Danton and for Frost the season before.

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BACK in 2003, back when people picked up hard copies of rags and mags, ESPN The Magazine had a circulation of two-million, but that numbers wouldn’t have included a newsstand sale in Canada—there might have been a few thousand subscribers who waited for issues in the mail, but you couldn’t find an issue on a newsstand, not even in downtown Toronto, where better bookstores carried Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Asahi Shimbun, the Jerusalem Post and the Sydney Morning Herald, as well as dailies and monthlies from the most obscure corners of the world.

Believe me, I tried to find a copy of ESPN The Magazine on the newsstand, having sold my first feature to the biweekly in May of that year and being unable to give out copies to friends and family. I was told it was a falling-out with a distributing company, one that never repaired in my eight-plus years working for the outfit often labeled the Worldwide Leader..

My first story was a profile of a teenage hockey phenom named Patrick O’Sullivan, whose father had served time in jail for physically assaulting him. I’ll get around to telling the story behind that story down the line on this SubStack—in a weird turn I had known Patrick’s father when we were teenagers and worked beside each other in a factory.

When we closed that issue of the magazine, my editor, a gent named Mark Giles, told me he was shaken when he read about the abuse that Patrick endured. “I never imagined it could get that dark behind the scenes in a game like hockey,” he said.

“There are all kinds of dark places,” I told him. “Pretty much any rink you walk into.”

Mike Danton struggled to win a regular spot with New Jersey, but looked like he was establishing himself as a NHLer in St Louis.

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As if I were calling a shot, not even a year later a young NHL player named Mike Danton (né Mike Jefferson) was arrested by the feds in St Louis for plotting a murder with his girlfriend, a 19-year-old community-college student named Katie Wolfmeyer, as an indicted accessory.

Danton’s mugshot.

As it rolled out, the details of the story beggared belief. The identity of the intended target would become a matter of dispute later, the feds believing it was Danton’s agent, David Frost, while the player would insist that it his father, Steve Jefferson, who drove a catering truck in Toronto. (Mentioning that Frost sometimes introduced himself as Danton’s father only further muddles matters here.) For his part, Levi Jones, the supposed hitman hired by Wolfmeyer, thought he was being paid to gun down another hitman, out to collect on a bad debt. Wolfmeyer, who had met Danton when she was working at the St Louis Blues’ practice rink, didn’t get references when she hired Jones and had no idea he was a wannabe cop, who had done a two-semester internship with the local police during his senior year of high school before moving on to answering phones as a part-time dispatcher for a tiny western Illinois PD. He dreamed of joining the FBI, and spun tales to impress the girls.

Release the hounds and with them the scribes who specialize in psychopathology, family dysfunction and what passes for Canada’s national game. The Mike Danton-David Frost story was a next-level black comedy. I wound up writing “Easy Prey,” an investigative piece for ESPN The Magazine (linked here) that read not so much like a standard procedural, so much as Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

(Though his name isn’t attached to the online piece here, Bruce Feldman also did reporting on “Easy Prey” in St Louis. I worked with Jeremy Schaap on a broadcast feature for the network as well, Kory Kozak producing. Also deserving credit for research is my daughter Laura, then 13, who sat with me in a Brampton, Ontario, library and leafed through the city’s old high-school yearbooks looking for images of Frost, Danton and others and helped me compile a list of classmates, teachers, coaches and neighbours of the agent and players in the story. I’d interview 132 people for the story, including doorstep and parking-lot ambush jobs on those who didn’t return calls.)

I knew I wasn’t signing on for just one magazine feature, mind you. Still there was no foreseeing all the twists and turns—over the course of months rumours circulated, some real leads, others red herrings and some that couldn’t be firmed up enough to print.

Over four years, I wrote a slew of them, some for ESPN, some for other outlets, and the penultimate you’ll find below here: a how-did-we get-here that appeared on the network’s website in the fall of 2008. At that point, Danton had been in a U.S. federal prison for four years and Frost was in court in Napanee, Ontario, facing charges of sexual exploitation of minors.

With today’s and tomorrow’s SubStack entries, I dive down on l’affaire Danton et Frost and my chasing the story through the grime and sleaze. Though several of his associates grudgingly spoke to me, Danton declined my interview requests. I had several phone conversations with Frost, none of them particularly pleasant and a couple of them with threats in the place of Fare Thee Wells, and when I last saw him, outside the court in Napanee, he gave me the death stare and everything but the throat slash.

Frost coming out of the court in Napanee in 2008.

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When Danton walked out of prison and Frost walked out of court, I had hoped it was all over, but alas theirs is a story that unfortunately keeps on giving. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I had to revisit Danton and Frost when I wrote about Sheldon Keefe, these days the coach of the New Jersey Devils—in the story below here he was the one driving Frost to the Napanee courthouse. And when I wrote about Keefe’s hiring as coach of the Soo Greyhounds—the OHL being the first step in cleansing him of his dubious associations—he made an implausibly vague account of his severing contact with Frost. Check out: No. 107: SHELDON KEEFE / “A lot of people think I don’t deserve a chance and want me to fail," Keefe told me before his debut as an OHL coach. (You’ll need at least a trial subscription to access the archive.)

Anyway, here you go with the September 2008 ESPN story on the eve of David Frost’s.

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Frost case a study in tragedy and farce

DESERONTO, Ontario -- The trip into Deseronto makes you feel as if you've entered a time capsule rather than a town, the perfect preservation of a place left behind. Dusty junk stores occasionally open unconvincingly dressed up as antique shops. Gossip is traded over the counter at a couple of greasy spoons.

My first trip here four years ago led me to the most unsettling story I've worked on in 20 years of perching in press boxes and poking around hockey arenas in small-town Canada. The latest chapter in this saga will unfold Tuesday morning when David Frost, once the toast of Deseronto, walks into the courthouse in nearby Napanee to face four counts of sexual exploitation of teenagers and up to 10 years in prison. Frost, 41, has pleaded not guilty.

The main drag as seen on Deseronto’s rarely updated website: a kicked-in Canadian everytown-that’s-seen-better-days

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I started asking folks about Frost four years ago. That's when I first made the trek out to Deseronto, where events led to the criminal charges Frost faces. After visiting the town and writing the story in the summer of 2004, I took a needed shower. Even a shower didn't do the trick after conversations I had with Frost on the phone.

The story fascinates fans of true crime rich in violence, tragedy and, yes, farce. Violence is often an element of hockey stories, but usually it's confined to the arena. Not here. Tragedy might seem an overblown description, but then former NHL player Mike Danton, convicted in a murder-for-hire case for trying to have Frost killed, has a couple of years to run in his 7½-year U.S. federal prison sentence. "Farce" might seem a little cold, but how else do you describe Danton retaining a defense counsel who, it was revealed years later, had never graduated from law school and wasn't licensed? The judge who sentenced Danton declared: "I do not believe in over 18 years on the bench I have been faced with a case as bizarre as this one." And that was early on. Stay tuned, it only gets stranger.