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There are a number of professional athletes who’ve had their careers cut short for some pretty wild reasons, but it’s pretty hard to top the almost unbelievable tale of Mike Danton, an NHL player who ended up in prison for trying to hire a hitman.
Danton was still known as “Mike Jefferson when” he was selected by the New Jersey Devils with the 135th overall pick in the 2000 NHL Draft, but the Ontario native butted heads with the team’s GM and was eventually shipped off to the Blues midway through the 2003-04 campaign.
By that point, he’d changed his last name to Danton after a falling out with his family—a development that didn’t exactly make national news at the time.
However, it turned out to be a fairly significant decision thanks to what unfolded a couple of years later courtesy of a story that was responsible for plenty of headlines.
The wild tale of Mike Danton, the NHL player who was sent to prison for trying to hire a hitman
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On April 15, 2006, Danton and the Blues saw their season come to an end after they were eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs in five games at the hands of the San Jose Sharks.
The following day, the team headed to the airport to hop back on a flight to St. Louis, and things took quite a turn when FBI agents apprehended Danton and charged him with attempting to hire a hitman who he offered $10,000 to murder an unidentified man he claimed was coming to kill him.
Federal agents said the playoffs series was still ongoing when Danton asked a female friend if she knew anyone who’d be willing to carry out the deed. She reached out to a man she knew who was working as a part-time police dispatcher, who received a call from Danton where he outlined a plan to make the proposed hit look like a robbery and subsequently contacted the FBI with the recordings.
The initial complaint named the target as a “male acquaintance” and asserted he’d gotten into an argument with him over his “promiscuity and use of alcohol.” It also noted Danton seemed concerned the man was going to contact the Blues and was afraid he was “going to leave him,” so while there was no explicit mention of a homosexual relationship, it was pretty hard to ignore the subtext of the charges—an unsubstantiated narrative a number of tabloids nontheless ran with.
The original investigation concluded that the target in question was David Frost, who served as Danton’s agent at the time (he’d actually taken his new last name from a player at a youth hockey camp organized by Frost) and had taken him under his wing after he left his family behind and decided to pursue a career in hockey.
Authorities believed Danton thought Frost had unspecified information he thought his agent was going to give to the Blues in an attempt to destroy his career and subsequently scrambled to silence him (Frost dismissed that notion and said Danton was a victim of bipolar delusions).
However, Danton would eventually claim he’d wanted to pay for a hitman to murder his estranged father Steve Jefferson, who painted a somewhat concerning picture of the relationship Danton and Frost had (which included claims Frost had regularly organized out-of-control parties for Danton and other hockey players at a motel when they were teenagers).
When everything was said and done, Danton pled guilty to the charges and spent more than five years in prison before he was released on parole in 2009.
In 2006, Frost was arrested and subsequently put on trial for a litany of charges after being accussed of grooming Danton and other teenagers (both male and female) between the ages of 14 and 16 when he was coaching the junior hockey team a number of eventual NHL players had belonged to, although he was ultimately acquitted of all of them.
Danton never played another game in the NHL, but he mounted a comeback with a college team in Canada following his release and played for a number of international clubs before his professional career came to an end when he retired in 2017.