Body Check: The Coach Who Controlled Everything Before Anyone Stepped In

Before David Frost became an NHL agent representing his own former junior players, he had already pleaded guilty to assaulting one of them and been suspended for forging a hockey official’s signature. No governing body used that record to limit what came next.

The Camp

Mike Danton was born Michael Jefferson. He met David Frost as a young child through a youth hockey camp Frost organized in Ontario, and Frost’s role in his life expanded from there, first as a coach, later as something closer to a full-time manager of every part of Danton’s career and personal life. In 2002, while playing major junior hockey, Danton legally changed his surname, taking the name of a player he had met at that same camp. His parents have said the relationship with Frost coincided with his estrangement from his birth family.

The Record Before the Headlines

Frost’s disciplinary history did not begin with anything involving Danton. During the 1996-97 season, while coaching the Quinte Hawks junior team in Deseronto, Ontario, Frost pleaded guilty to punching one of his own players in the face during a playoff game, for which he received a conditional discharge. In the same period, the Metro Toronto Hockey League suspended him for forging a general manager’s signature. Both incidents were part of the public record years before Frost’s name became widely known outside junior hockey circles.

What Danton Pleaded Guilty To

By 2004, Frost was Danton’s NHL agent, the same man who had coached him as a minor now negotiating his professional contracts as an adult. In April 2004, days after the St. Louis Blues were eliminated from the playoffs, FBI agents arrested Danton near San Jose, California, for conspiring to hire a hit man to kill Frost. The plot unraveled when the intended hit man, a police dispatcher, went to authorities with recorded conversations. Danton pleaded guilty that July to a federal conspiracy to commit murder for hire and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. He was paroled in September 2009. A letter Danton later wrote, submitted as evidence in an unrelated case involving Frost, stated that Frost and his wife held power of attorney over his finances, a detail that outlines the scope of control at issue independent of any disputed allegation.

The Charges That Came After

Danton’s arrest brought renewed attention to Frost’s earlier coaching tenure. The Ontario Provincial Police opened an investigation that ran roughly two and a half years, and in 2006 charged Frost with sexual exploitation involving players from the 1996-97 Quinte Hawks season. Frost pleaded not guilty and stood trial in 2008. On November 28, 2008, Ontario Court of Justice Judge Geoff Griffin acquitted Frost on all counts, finding credibility problems with some of the testimony. Griffin’s ruling nonetheless stated that the trial “exposed a dark and very unhealthy side of hockey” that must be denounced. Frost was later charged in a separate matter involving alleged fraudulent use of one of Danton’s credit cards and was acquitted of those charges as well, in February 2009, after Danton himself told the court Frost had permission to use the card under the same power-of-attorney arrangement.

Why This Case Matters

This installment’s sibling piece on the Von Erich family examined what happens when a coach, employer, and parent are the same unsupervised person. This case is a variation on that same structural gap. Frost was never a parent, but he functioned as coach, manager, and eventually financial power of attorney for the same athlete across two decades, with a documented disciplinary record sitting in the file the entire time. No hockey governing body appears to have used that record to intervene. It took one of his own players committing a serious federal crime against him to bring any outside scrutiny at all, and even then, the scrutiny that followed ended in an acquittal rather than a clear institutional accounting of how someone with that record kept the access he had for as long as he did.