An art dealer from South Florida was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for operating a forgery scheme in which he sold works falsely attributed to Andy Warhol, according to a report from the Associated Press (AP) following the federal court ruling in Miami.
Leslie Howard Roberts, 63 years old and owner of Miami Fine Art Gallery in Coconut Grove, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in June of this year, which resulted in the sentence pronounced on October 2.
In addition to the prison sentence, the court imposed three years of supervised release and ordered the forfeiture of $2,581,465, an amount that Roberts himself admitted to having obtained through the fraudulent operation.
The deception was supported by a network of forged documents: fake invoices attributed to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, counterfeit authentication certificates, unauthorized signatures, invented identification numbers, and tampered seals.
Roberts told the buyers that the pieces had been obtained directly from that foundation, which is connected to the preservation of the artist's legacy, to convince them of their authenticity.
According to NBC Miami, between April 2023 and May 2024, Roberts received over 100 electronic transfers from victims, during which time he accumulated all the funds that he will now have to return.
The FBI raided Miami Fine Art Gallery on April 9, 2025, and Roberts was arrested later that month, along with a co-defendant identified as Carlos Miguel Rodríguez Meléndez, a resident of Sunny Isles.
Rodríguez Meléndez posed as an employee of an auction house based in New York to falsely authenticate the works and conceal that they were forgeries.
This co-defendant pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit electronic fraud in June 2025 and was sentenced to one year of probation, a sentence significantly lighter than that of Roberts.
The federal prosecutor for the Southern District of Florida, Jason Reding Quiñones, was straightforward in evaluating the case: "Roberts took advantage of the trust that collectors place in art dealers and in the authenticity of the pieces they purchase."
During the period of supervised release, Roberts must allow access to his financial records, obtain court approval to incur new debts, and he cannot associate with Rodríguez Meléndez or participate in businesses related to the art market.
The case is not the first of its kind in Florida. In May 2023, Daniel Elie Bouaziz was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for laundering money from the sale of forged works attributed to Warhol, Basquiat, Lichtenstein, and Banksy in galleries in Palm Beach County, with prices ranging from $75,000 to $240,000 per piece.
The luxury art market in South Florida, with its high concentration of wealthy collectors and international fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach, has proven especially vulnerable to this type of fraud, and the Roberts case represents the second major federal trial for this crime in less than four years in the state.
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