Popular Florida-born rapper Kodak Black won’t be facing criminal charges because of his Orange County drug trafficking arrest after prosecutors decided they didn’t have enough evidence to prove the drugs were his.
The 29-year-old rapper, whose real name is Bill Kapri, was arrested May 6 by Orange County sheriff’s deputies on a charge of trafficking MDMA. Reports of gunshots led police to drugs in a Lamborghini, which detectives tried to link to Kapri using his past posts on Instagram.
But the posts seem to have not been enough, as prosecutors on Friday filed a court notice saying they wouldn’t be filing charges against Kapri given that the available evidence couldn’t prove possession of the drugs.
It’s the latest legal victory for the rapper, who on Tuesday had another criminal charge he was facing in Broward County dismissed by a judge.
Kapri has a history of legal woes, with an Orange judge noting in May that he had 12 previous felony convictions. In 2021, President Donald Trump commuted Kapri’s federal prison sentence. He had served half of the three-year sentence for falsifying information on a document used to buy guns from a gun shop in Miami.
The Central Florida drug trafficking investigation began Nov. 24, when Orlando police responded to reports of gunshots at the Children’s Safety Village nonprofit near Mercy Drive in west Orlando, court records show.
Police arrived around 1 a.m. and found several people gathered around two running cars. Officers searched the first car and found 56 grams of marijuana, a pill that tested positive for MDMA, better known as molly or ecstasy, and $60 in cash. Kapri walked up and began observing the search, according to his arrest warrant affidavit.
Read more Orlando-area Week 4 high school football scoreboard
Officers then searched the second car, a green Lamborghini SUV, and found a pink bag in the back seat containing 25 grams of MDMA and $37,000. The bag also contained documents with Kapri’s name on them, including a prison card and a distinctive lighter shaped like a handgun, the affidavit said.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirmed the bag’s contents as MDMA on April 17, just a few weeks before Kapri’s arrest. Orlando police then secured an arrest warrant.
Previous Instagram posts Kapri had made appeared to show him with the same pink bag and lighter. He denied the bag or its contents were his, but tried to have officers turn over the money to him, saying it belonged to his business, according to the affidavit. Also found in the car were two rings and a pair of pink scissors that also appear to be seen in Kapri’s Instagram posts.
He pleaded not guilty and was quickly released on a $75,000 bond.
Kapri’s attorney, Bradford Cohen, argued in court the day following the arrest that neither vehicle at the scene was registered to his client, that latent fingerprints pulled from items in the pink bag containing in the MDMA didn’t trace back to Kapri and that the bag was discovered near a different man who was asleep in the back of the Lamborghini.
The Orlando Police Department at the time declined to confirm whether the Lamborghini belonged to Kapri.
Read more Former Orlando pastor sentenced in Osceola for raping congregant