Miami Dealer Sentenced Over Fake Warhols

Miami art dealer Leslie Roberts has been sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for a scheme involving more than $2.58m in sales of counterfeit paintings passed off as works by Andy Warhol.

Roberts, the former owner of Miami Fine Art Gallery in Coconut Grove, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in June. Prosecutors said he sold fake Warhols using forged invoices, counterfeit stamps and identification numbers inscribed on the reverse, while telling buyers the works came from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Emails purporting to come from the Warhol Foundation were sent from an address ending .co; the foundation uses .org. The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, whose representatives’ signatures Roberts forged, had not existed since 2011, when the foundation disbanded it under the weight of litigation.

On 2 October, US District Judge Roy Altman sentenced Roberts to 46 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and entered a forfeiture judgment of $2,581,465. Restitution will be decided in January 2027. Remaining charges, including money laundering, were dismissed under his plea agreement.

Carlos Rodriguez Melendez, who posed as an auction-house employee to vouch for the works, was charged alongside Roberts and later received a year’s probation and a $5,000 restitution order.

Separate civil proceedings were already under way. Property investor and collector Richard Perlman and his family sued Roberts in 2024, saying they had paid $6.7m for more than 200 fakes after Christie’s specialists queried the collection in late 2023. When confronted, Roberts sent two other men posing as Phillips specialists to pronounce the works genuine, but the family exposed the ruse by calling the auction house. The lawsuit was settled out of court in January 2026. The Perlmans have since brought a separate case against individuals they allege supplied Roberts with forged Warhols.

It was not Roberts’s first offence. He served 22 months for selling forged Peter Max works in 2015, and his supervised release was later revoked after he tried to sell a fake Basquiat. He had also presented himself as a New Yorker who studied at NYU and interned at Sotheby’s. In reality, he was born in Miami and dropped out of the University of Miami after two semesters. ‘One of my proudest moments was acquiring rare art from the Andy Warhol Foundation,’ he told Artnet’s gallery network in 2024.

While on bail, Roberts opened a shop a few hundred feet from the shuttered gallery, first as the Miami Fine Art Gallery Gift Shop and then as Labubu Headquarters, selling the Pop Mart collectibles from $35 upward. His bond conditions barred him from selling art or working in the art industry. Pop Mart told Miami New Times, which broke the story in October 2025, that the shop was not an authorised seller; reporters who bought one of the figures could not establish whether it was genuine or a counterfeit ‘Lafufu’.

Florida has supplied a steady run of such cases. Palm Beach dealer Daniel Elie Bouaziz was given 27 months in 2023 for laundering proceeds from reproductions bought online, among them a $495 ‘Basquiat’ he offered an undercover agent for $12m. In 2022, the FBI seized 25 disputed Basquiats from the Orlando Museum of Art mid-exhibition.

The Basquiat authentication committee had also disbanded, in 2012, a year after Warhol’s. Without such bodies, questions of authenticity fall back on provenance, catalogue raisonnés and the opinions of dealers, auction houses and specialists. Roberts appears to have understood that system well: he supplied not only fake paintings but the paperwork and supposed expert opinion that made them look real.

Roberts could yet receive a reduced sentence. His lawyer, Jason Wandner, says his assistance to federal investigators has helped secure search warrants connected to a wider network of alleged art fraud. 

‘My client’s significant efforts were critical in the government exposing this network,’ Wandner told The Art Newspaper. No further arrests have yet been made.