A Miami art dealer has been sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for selling counterfeit Andy Warhol artworks. Leslie Howard Roberts, 63, owner of Miami Fine Art Gallery in Coconut Grove, received a 46-month sentence from US District Judge Roy K. Altman on 2 October after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He was ordered to repay about 2.6 million dollars in proceeds from the scheme and was remanded into custody immediately.

Prosecutors said Roberts told buyers he had obtained the works directly from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and backed the claim with fraudulent invoices, fabricated authentication documents and counterfeit stamps. According to the FBI, he even affixed imitation Foundation identification numbers to the backs of the pieces. The case began to unravel when one family, which said it had spent 6 million dollars on the works, grew suspicious after noticing that correspondence about the paintings used email addresses ending in @andywarholfoundation.co rather than the Foundation's genuine .org domain.

The Foundation itself disbanded its authentication committee in 2011 amid legal pressure, making Roberts's claim of direct sourcing implausible from the start. A co-conspirator, Carlos Rodriguez Melendez, posed as an employee of a New York auction company to authenticate the forgeries and obscure their origins; he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced to probation.

The sentence is Roberts's second since he opened his gallery in 1997. In 2015 he received a 22-month sentence over counterfeit paintings attributed to Romero Britto and Peter Max, and his supervised release was revoked in 2018 after he was accused of trying to sell a fake Jean-Michel Basquiat. The case follows another South Florida prosecution: in 2023, dealer Daniel Elie Bouaziz was sentenced to two years and three months for selling fake Warhols.