Purchase Interruptus: Drake Made a Deal to Buy a Rare Mercedes in Miami. What Went Wrong?

It's not every day that one of the world's biggest and wealthiest rap stars sets his sights on a pricey bauble and then doesn't follow through, but that's what apparently happened earlier this year.

Naturally, it happened in Miami.

And, perhaps predictably, when the news got out, some of the people involved claimed it was incorrectly reported.

Drake isn't talking, but some facts appear not to be in dispute:

• The bauble in question is an exceedingly rare Mercedes-Benz AMG CLK GTR roadster — one of only six such homologations of a famous race car the famed German automaker designed in the late 1990s.
  
  
• Curated, an auto showroom in Edgewater that specializes in vintage European supercars from the 1970s to the early 2000s, managed to locate one of those babies in the United Arab Emirates — with a mere 22 kilometers on the odometer — and arranged to procure it from a sheikh.
  
  
• The rapper wasn't buying after all, leaving the boutique dealership with the awkward prospect of holding the multiple-million-dollar bag — and then some.

Word of Drake's purchase interruptus surfaced in mid-October in a since-deleted story on Supercar Blondie, an automotive news and entertainment website. According to Supercar Blondie's version of events, in order to consummate the deal, the seller — said to be a member of an Abu Dhabi royal family — insisted on throwing in a Lamborghini Reventon, and the rapper refused to pony up for the Lambo throw-in. 

If that sounds very un-Drake-like to you, you aren't the only one.

When New Times asked Rebeca Kaplan, Curated's senior marketing and user experience manager, to set the record straight, Kaplan said, "Unfortunately, most publications have been reporting inaccurate information on this topic."

Beyond clarifying that the dollar amounts mentioned in the previous coverage — $12 million for the Benz, $1 million for the Reventon — are approximate retail values, Kaplan declined to elaborate on the record. Instead, she suggested we consult Supercar Blondie's brief published retraction, which also includes an embed of a 16-minute video (see below) wherein Curated cofounder John Temerian and sales lead Hershel Zelcer describe in detail what transpired.

The Curated Video, Distilled (and Curated)

For Temerian, the quest to help Drake own this iconic car begins when Curated associate Gabe Nakash brings the rapper to the team's attention with an entirely different automobile in mind.

"Drake was looking for a Ferrari Enzo for a photoshoot. Gabe shows up to the photoshoot with an Enzo that we had just sold to one of his clients," Temerian narrates in the video. And not long after, "Drake makes a post about a CLK GTR [hardtop] and basically says he needs one."

The chase is on. Curated tracks down a CLK GTR roadster — a rarer version of the Mercedes than the hardtop Drake had publicly coveted on Instagram — owned by Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi.

"With Drake's excitement, Gabe's excitement, we ended up putting our hand up for a CLK GTR roadster," Temerian recounts.

It is at this juncture that uncertainty enters the chat.
"Unfortunately," Temerian says, "Drake did not commit to the car. But we had verbally committed to this car."

That verbal commitment sets off a chain reaction of effort and negotiations on Curated's part as the dealer resolves to follow through on the purchase.

"We jumped through hoops. We ended up finding a buyer. We ended up having to renegotiate," Temerian says, adding that he nearly abandoned the effort.

"There was a moment where I gave up. I threw in the towel," he says. "I said, 'You know what, I don't know if I can take this amount of pressure. This is a lot of money. This is a lot of risk for the company.'"
But Hershel Zelcer isn't about to abandon the mission. "Hershel did not give up — his sort of, I would say, steadfast pursuit of doing the right thing," Temerian asserts.

Zelcer uses the same word — pursuit — in telling the story from his own perspective. "Sometimes the chase is as epic as the vehicle itself. This one, in particular, was probably one of the more difficult pursuits I've had," he says.

"I said to Gabe, 'Well, let's go ahead and let's get Drake to sign up and make his commitment.' I've already committed to the car."

"There might have been some miscommunication, but Drake didn't show up to the party," Zelcer adds.

Curated opts to stick with it. "Once we give our word, we're going to purchase something. We have to follow through," Zelcer explains, describing how he traveled to Dubai in an effort to close the deal.

"About a month after that, we finally come to an agreement, and we buy the car," he says.
Drake could not be reached for comment. Curated declined to elaborate on the video beyond confirming that the dealership did indeed find a home for the rare roadster.

The Lambo Reventon, too, is categorized as "sold" on the company's website.