A Miami art dealer received a 46-month federal prison sentence on Thursday in a long-running case centered around his efforts to sell fake Andy Warhol works.
Leslie Roberts is now facing his second prison sentence since he opened his Miami Fine Art Gallery in 1997. In 2015, he received a 22-month sentence for a case involving faked Romero Britto and Peter Max paintings. He was given three years of supervised release, but the agreement was voided in 2018, after he was accused of trying to negotiate the sale of a faked Basquiat painting, and he returned to prison.
This time around, a family claimed in a 2024 lawsuit that they had spent $6 million on Warhols that Roberts had sold them. These works featured images of people who had recurred across the Pop artist’s oeuvre: the actress Marilyn Monroe and Blondie singer Debbie Harry, among others.
But the family said that it began to doubt they possessed actual Warhols, and they noticed, upon reviewing email correspondence, that they had been messaging with email accounts that ended with @andywarholfoundation.co addresses. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the organization that manages the artist’s legacy, uses a .org address.
Roberts insisted that the works were real and that the the Warhol Foundation had said as much to him. But the Warhol Foundation has not had an authentication committee since 2011, the year that it disbanded amid legal pressure.
Thursday’s release about the sentencing from the Federal Bureau of Investigation referred to Roberts’s “fraudulent invoices, fabricated authentication documents, and counterfeit stamps,” and alleged that he had even undertaken efforts to make the forgeries appear genuine, placing faux identification numbers from the Warhol Foundation on the back of the works.
“He exploited the trust that collectors place in art dealers and the authenticity of the works they purchase,” Jason A. Reding Quiñones, a US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in a statement. “Today’s 46-month prison sentence sends a clear message: fraud is fraud, whether it happens on Wall Street or in an art gallery. Those who profit through deception will be held accountable.”
Carlos Rodriguez Melendez, who was accused of working with Roberts to sell the works, has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.