One of the Warhol forgeries sold by Leslie Roberts
A Florida art dealer has been charged with conspiring to sell fake works of art, including forgeries passed off as originals by Andy Warhol.
Leslie Roberts operates Roberts Miami Fine Art Gallery in Coconut Grove, Florida. The location was raided by the FBI last week after evidence revealed that he was likely knowingly selling fakes and forgeries. According to the FBI, he used fake invoices and authentication documents purportedly from the Andy Warhol Foundation to pass the works off as originals. Investigators claim that Roberts laundered large amounts of money from his business to his personal accounts as part of the scheme, amounting to about $240,000. He is currently out on bail awaiting his arraignment on April 21st.
This conspiracy began to unravel in the summer of 2024 when Roberts became the defendant in a lawsuit brought by the Perlman family. According to the suit, Roberts allegedly sold the family around two hundred fifty paintings and prints supposedly by the famous pop artist for what he told the Perlmans was a discounted price made possible through his connections to the Warhol Foundation. When the family brought some of these works to Christie’s hoping to sell them at auction, specialists doubted their authenticity. Furthermore, they also realized a discrepancy in the emails they received from the Warhol Foundation. The organization uses email addresses ending in @warholfoundation.org, while the emails they received had been sent from an address ending in @andywarholfoundation.co. Another man named Carlos Miguel Rodriguez Melendez has also been charged in connection with the scheme. They further claim that Rodriguez Melendez posed as an employee of the auction house Phillips to tell the Perlman family that the works were genuine.
This is not the first time that Roberts has been involved in art-related fraud. He claims to have attended New York University and worked at Sotheby’s. However, he dropped out of the University of Miami after two semesters, creating fake report cards to fool his own family into thinking he was still enrolled. He was arrested for the first time in 1986 for mail fraud while working at a penny stock company. There, he drained nearly half the money from his great-uncle’s stock portfolio. By 2010, he was selling fake works of art. In that year, he was caught selling forgeries purportedly by the Brazilian artist Romero Britto. The artist secured a permanent injunction from a federal court to prevent Roberts from selling these works online and in his Coconut Grove gallery space. 2015 marked the first time Roberts was criminally convicted of a similar scheme to sell Peter Max forgeries. He received twenty-two months in prison but was given three years of supervised release. This sentence was revoked after he was caught trying to sell a fake Basquiat painting for $75,000. The Miami New Times published a far more thorough account of Roberts’s criminal history on April 14th.
Roberts and Rodriguez Melendez each face up to a decade in prison for wire fraud and money laundering.