Leslie Roberts, the owner and founder of Miami Fine Art Gallery in Florida, has been indicted for allegedly selling forged Andy Warhols. On 9 April, agents from the FBI’s Art Crime Team entered Roberts’s gallery in Miami, removing art and hauling it away in cardboard boxes, covering the windows to prevent the public from peeking in.
Roberts and an associate, Carlos Miguel Rodriguez Melendez, were arrested and charged. Their arraignment is scheduled for 21 April. They each face up to 20 years in prison for wire fraud conspiracy; Roberts could get an additional ten years for money laundering.
Since 1997, Miami Fine Art Gallery has brought an array of modern and contemporary art to the city—including works by blue-chip stars like Pablo Picasso, Jeff Koons and KAWS. “One of my proudest moments was acquiring rare art from the Andy Warhol Foundation,” Roberts told Artnet last year. “This milestone underscored our gallery’s dedication to curating exceptional works.” This relationship with the Pop artist’s foundation appears to have been part of his alleged fraud.
In August 2024, a family of Florida art collectors—Matthew, Judy and Richard Perlman—filed a complaint accusing Roberts of an elaborate scheme to sell them counterfeit Warhols. The Perlmans realised they had been tricked into spending $6m on the fakes after a Christie’s appraisal found that the works were forgeries.
The Perlmans confronted Roberts about this, and they allege that he sent two specialists from Phillips to conduct a separate appraisal. These “experts” confirmed all the works were originals; unconvinced, the family contacted Phillips directly, only to learn that the two appraisers were not company employees and had presented fake business cards. (Rodriguez Melendez, Roberts’s associate, appears to have posed as one of the Phillips experts.)
“Roberts betrayed the Perlmans’ trust and went to great lengths to cover up his fraud,” Luke Nikas, the Perlman family’s lawyer, tells The Art Newspaper. “He is exactly the kind of art dealer who needs to be held accountable—for the sake of the Perlmans, his potential future victims and the art market itself.” (Roberts’s lawyer, Jonathan Marc Davidoff, declined to comment.)
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