fajrdrako | From the Ottawa Citizen: Mike Danton...

There was a special article in The Ottawa Citizen yesterday that interested me. It was about Mike Danton, a Canadian hockey player who is in prison in New Jersey for hiring a hitman to kill his agent, David Frost. Or trying to hire a hitman to do so. This was a couple of years ago. Danton was caught, pleaded guilty, gave no explanation, and went to jail for 7 years. He's still there, still silent.

In this article, the reporter looked into Danton's relationship with Frost when Danton was a teenager in Deseronto, Ontario, playing minor league hockey, with Frost as his coach. Frost had been in trouble in various (minor) ways in numerous other towns before coming to Deseronto as coach with a group of teens. He revived their struggling minor league hockey team, making them local heroes. Some of his kids were billeted with locals, some lived with him in a hotel, but none of them befriended anyone local. One boy had a girlfriend for a while, but his teammates told her to get lost. They were tough and aggressive hockey players, conscientious in school, considered something of a mystery or a cult by other people in the town. Danton was known to do anything Frost asked of him with instant obedience. A bus driver reported Danton giving Frost a half-naked neck rub in the bus - for an hour.

An hour? Wow. Those athletes. Strong hands.

Anyway, though the reporter was drawing no untoward conclusions, just reporting his findings, the thing that caught my interest is that it sounded to me like Falcone with his pirates and proteges in the Karin Lowachee books I liked so much, Warchild, Burndive, and Cagebird. Absolute control of a group of teen-aged boys by a strong, manipulative adult.

That may or may not be the sort of thing that really happened, and it isn't clear whether Danton was like Jos (who got away, but was still driven by hate and fear of the man who abused him) or Yuri, who didn't get away, and remained in the cage.