Drake Reflects On 2009 Robbery On "From Florida With Love" Off New Mixtape

Drake‘s new mixtape, Dark Lane Demo Tapes, dropped on Friday, and the project is full of hidden gems. A collection of previously leaked tracks and brand new joints, DLDT was, for the most part, a surprise for fans. Whispers of a new Drake project only started circulating a few hours before he dropped the tape at midnight on Friday (May 1st), and even then, it was relatively unknown what he would be bringing to the table. One of the most widely discussed cuts off DLDT is the third-to-last track, “From Florida With Love,” largely due to Drake’s reference to a famous incident in 2009 in which the rapper was robbed at gunpoint.

Drake and his date were walking back to his SUV on Beatrice Street in Toronto on May 31st, when two armed men approached them and ordered Drake to give up all his money and jewelry. He ended up losing $2,000 in cash, an AP watch, and a diamond chain Lil Wayne had gifted him, the latter of which serves as the track’s segway into the subject of the robbery.

John Phillips/Getty Images

On “From Florida With Love,” Drake raps about the same moment that he spoke about during his infamous Rap Radar interview in 2019, in which he met the late Kobe Bryant on Wayne’s tour bus before he was gifted the chain. “Weezy played that sh*t for me and Kobe on the bus/Went and got a chain for me, I had to give it up,” he spits, before going into detail about the actual moment he was forced to give up the piece of jewelry.

“N*ggas had they pistols loaded pointed at my truck,” he raps. “And you know that lesson stuck/From that day I never touched the road without a (Plug)/Ayy, from that day I never saw the point in talkin’ tough/Hasn’t happened since, I guess you n*ggas know what’s up.” Drake opened up about the unfortunate incident in his GQ cover story the following year. “I knew it was a setup, because I had on a sweater and a jacket,” he said. “but when they banged on the car window with a gun and opened the door, the first thing he said was, ‘Yo, run that chain.’ They didn’t rob her, and her purse was sitting right there. So I was like, ‘OK, yup—you set the whole thing up.'”