The disgraced Miami art dealer Leslie Roberts has been convicted and sentenced to nearly four years in prison for his role in a scheme to sell counterfeit paintings he claimed were the work of Andy Warhol.
The former owner of Miami Fine Art Gallery in the city’s Coconut Grove neighbourhood received the 46-month sentence on 2 October in federal district court, reported Antonio María Delgado of the Miami Herald. As prosecutors argued in a 2025 indictment, Roberts had used forged authentication documents, stamps and identification numbers to convince buyers that their paintings were genuine Warhols sourced directly from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Roberts pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud on 10 June, admitting to more than $2.5m in fake art sales as part of a plea deal that saw other charges for money laundering dropped. His co-conspirator Carlos Miguel Rodriguez Melendez, who posed as an employee of the auction house Phillips as part of the scheme, pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to one year of probation.
Reached for comment, Roberts’s lawyer Jason Wandner called the sentence “fair and reasonable”, noting that it came in at the bottom of the 46-to-57-month range recommended by the federal government. Wandner added that he hopes the sentence will be reduced further based on Roberts’s cooperation with federal authorities.
“We had asked for it to be lowered,” Wandner tells The Art Newspaper. “The court was clear that it was going to entertain the mitigation and cooperation at a later date, which is totally understandable.”
Reiterating claims made in a sentencing memorandum from 24 September, Wandner says that Roberts had been assisting federal authorities with uncovering more art fraud, and that the former gallerist’s “unique knowledge of the art world was beneficial to the government as it investigated a network of fake and fraudulent art dealers throughout the country”.
Although Wandner declined to give details on Roberts’s collaboration with the government, saying these would be “clarified” in the future, he noted that several search warrants were issued based on information given by Roberts. However, no arrests have been made yet.
“My client’s significant efforts were critical in the government exposing this network,” Wandner says. “We look forward to the court having all the info about his efforts on behalf of the government.”
Roberts, who already had a chequered history with the law prior to this latest conviction, is also implicated in a civil lawsuit filed by the art collector Richard Perlman and his family against a group of individuals who allegedly supplied the dealer with the forged Warhol paintings.
The Perlmans instigated suspicion into Roberts in 2024, when they filed another suit against the dealer alleging he had hoodwinked them out of $6.7m. The complaint was made after a Christie’s appraisal found the Warhols that Roberts had sold to the family had been forged, leading to a confrontation with the dealer. Roberts then sent men posing as appraisers from Phillips, whom the Perlmans discovered were a part of Roberts’s ruse when the family contacted the auction house directly after the fake appraisers falsely verified the paintings. That lawsuit was settled out of court earlier this year.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether Roberts will continue his side hustle selling Labubus, which is presumably difficult to do from prison.
