Miami Art Dealer Leslie Roberts Gets 46 Months for Fake Warhols

A Miami art dealer received a 46-month federal prison sentence on Thursday for trying to sell fake Andy Warhol paintings. Leslie Roberts now faces his second prison term since he opened his Miami Fine Art Gallery in 1997.

The sentence closes a case built on a family's 2024 lawsuit. The buyers claimed they had spent $6 million on Warhols sold by Roberts, including works featuring Marilyn Monroe and Blondie singer Debbie Harry, figures who recur across the Pop artist's oeuvre. The works were not real.

How was the fraud discovered?

The family began to doubt that they possessed actual Warhols. Reviewing their email correspondence, they noticed they had been messaging with accounts ending in @andywarholfoundation.co. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the organization that manages the artist's legacy, uses a .org address.

Roberts insisted the works were real and that the Warhol Foundation had confirmed it to him. That claim could not hold. The Warhol Foundation has not had an authentication committee since 2011, the year it disbanded amid legal pressure.

What did the investigation find?

The FBI's sentencing release on Thursday described Roberts's "fraudulent invoices, fabricated authentication documents, and counterfeit stamps." The bureau alleged that he went further, placing faux identification numbers from the Warhol Foundation on the back of the works to make the forgeries appear genuine.

A second defendant is also implicated. Carlos Rodriguez Melendez, who was accused of working with Roberts to sell the works, has pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

A second sentence for the same kind of crime

This is not Roberts's first conviction. In 2015, he received a 22-month sentence in a case involving faked Romero Britto and Peter Max paintings. He was given three years of supervised release. That 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.

What does this change for collectors?

Prosecutors framed the sentence as a warning to the trade. "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."

The case also exposes a structural gap in the market. With the Warhol Foundation's authentication committee gone since 2011, buyers must rely on documentation that dealers themselves can fabricate. A single letter in an email address, .co instead of .org, separated six million dollars of forgeries from the real thing.