A Florida art dealer, Leslie Roberts, has been charged in federal court with allegedly conspiring to sell forged art, including paintings falsely said to be by Pop icon Andy Warhol, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.
Roberts’s Miami Fine Art Gallery, in Coconut Grove, was raided by the FBI last week. An attorney for Roberts declined to comment. The 62-year-old dealer used fraudulent invoices and authentication documents to sell the works, officials claim.
A 37-year-old named Carlos Miguel Rodriguez Melendez, of Sunny Isles, has also been charged with wire fraud in connection with the alleged conspiracy. Rodriguez Melendez’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two men were arrested last week, and are currently free on bail pending an April 21 arraignment. If convicted of wire fraud, the defendants face up to 20 years in federal prison.
The federal indictment claims that Roberts fraudulently represented fake Warhols as the genuine article, saying that they were from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Rodriguez Melendez is said to have falsely claimed to work at a New York auction house in order to convince alleged victims that the works were real.
Authorities claim that Roberts engaged in money laundering by transferring wire fraud proceeds from the gallery’s bank account to one of his personal accounts in amounts totaling $40,000, $50,000, and $150,000. He faces 10 years on that charge.
A detailed report in the Miami New Times notes that “a quick Google search” for Roberts “would have uncovered eye-opening traces” of a “life of deception, previous criminal convictions, and stretches behind prison bars.”
According to the New York Times, a family of art collectors, Matthew, Judy, and Richard Perlman, filed a civil lawsuit against Roberts last summer, alleging that he fraudulently induced them to shell out more than $6 million for hundreds of fake Warhols.
The Perlmans’ suit alleges that Roberts told the family he could acquire certain Warhols at a discounted price because of his relationship with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Perelman family acquired more than 250 works, and paid $325,000 for a collection of depictions of Mao Zedong, one of Warhol’s most popular subjects.
The alleged fraud came to light when the Perelmans approached Christie’s about selling some of the artworks and the auction house expressed concerns about their authenticity. Their lawsuit says that two people subsequently visited their Florida residence claiming to be staffers of the Phillips auction house. The pair allegedly declared that the works were, in fact, authentic.
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