An Art Fraud Case That Is Bonkers Even by Florida Standards

In December 2021, FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation agents arrived on the posh Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida, an island home to more than 60 billionaires, to raid a gallery called Danieli Fine Art. FBI agents stormed the premises, covered the windows with brown paper, and answered very few questions. As it turned out, the gallery’s owner, Daniel Elie Bouaziz, had sold an undercover agent what he said was a legit Jean-Michel Basquiat for $12 million. As an investigation would later reveal, it was actually a forgery Bouaziz bought for $495. He was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison by Judge Aileen Cannon—a Florida icon if there ever was one, if perhaps for the wrong reasons—and was locked up until October 2024.

Just a few months later, in decidedly less posh Orlando, the FBI was on hand to raid another emporium of paintings, this time the Orlando Museum of Art, which had just opened a massive blockbuster show of purportedly long-lost works by Basquiat, works said to have been found in a storage locker and forgotten about. Spoiler alert: The Feds deemed them fakes too, and the raid kicked off a long legal saga that I covered for this magazine in 2023, a tale that ended up being one of the most massive museum scandals in American history.

Last week, the FBI visited the Sunshine State once again. A man named Leslie Roberts was arrested in Coconut Grove, the boho-chic Miami suburb that’s long been an art-collecting hub nestled in the tropics, far from the gallery districts of New York and Los Angeles. Agents swarmed the Roberts-founded Miami Fine Art Gallery under the cover of darkness last Tuesday night and remained there until mid-morning Wednesday, perplexing locals restaurant owners and passersby. Helicopters hovered above, capturing b-roll for the nightly report.

The FBI was “doing its best to conceal its efforts, setting up tents so it can work and covering up windows with paper,” said reporter Liane Morejon, on WPLG Local 10.

The Justice Department released the charges soon after: Roberts stands accused of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering for selling fake works by Andy Warhol, and lying about their provenance. It wasn’t entirely a surprise; the criminal charges seem to stem from an earlier civil suit. Last year, Roberts was named in a civil suit filed by, among other parties, several members of the Perlman family, local art collectors who alleged that he had connected them to a fictitious representative of the Andy Warhol estate who sold them $6 million in works that turned out to be completely fake, and then refused to return the money. (“I don’t believe anything was a forgery—everything looked good to me,” Roberts told The New York Times last August in response to that suit, which is still ongoing after Roberts filed for bankruptcy and filed a petition for relief this month.) Now Roberts is facing up to 30 years in prison. Another man, Carlos Miguel Rodriguez Melendez, was indicted in the case for his alleged participation in the wire fraud conspiracy—according to the civil suit, Melendez allegedly arrived at the home of the Warhol collectors and pretended to be an employee of the auction house Phillips, trying to authenticate the works once the Perlmans started having their doubts. From there, the scheme quickly unraveled.

The general public has long had an obsession with art crime, whether it has to do with a heist at a museum where masterpieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer get lost forever, or market manipulation by shifty dealers that reinforce such notions that this whole art market thing is smoke and mirrors. But nothing gets people going like a good accusation of forgery, and in the last few years, a single state in the union has cornered the market in such tales.

But even by Florida standards, the narrative of Leslie Roberts is something beyond. Charging documents and previous legal filings paint a portrait of a man who has spent more than 15 years manufacturing identities for himself, opening galleries under increasingly absurd names, and getting entangled with the law over and over due to his inability to stop scamming unsuspecting art buyers with fake art. It was a family business—his wife, Silvia Castro Roberts, was in on it, as were their children, Leslie Roberts III and Brittany Lynn Roberts. And it all plays out in the inherently surface-level art scene in sparkly make-believe Miami, where you can will a Warhol into existence and find someone to trust that it’s real.

The first thing you notice about Leslie Roberts are the eyebrows: two thick busy things, as demonstrated on his oddly captivating TikTok channel. He’s slight of build, reported to be five foot three when he was in his 20s. He’s gone through a series of names: now it’s Les Roberts, but it used to be Howard Roberts. And what’s the deal with his TikTok? It’s mostly just him in his apartment overlooking Brickell Key, lip syncing to songs, pretending to play guitar, with some FaceTune effects thrown in for good measure. He somehow has 566,000 followers. The last post went up March 27, days before the raid.

Roberts grew up in Perrine, Florida, a suburb of Miami, and his family was rocked early on by a shocking crime. His parents fought often, sometimes violently, and in October 1975, when he was 13, his mother shot his father in the head while he was sleeping, killing him. She was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Roberts reportedly dropped out of the University of Miami after two semesters and worked at the local movie theater, where, according to The New York Times, he was fired for skimming cash off his customers. He found work at a penny stock outfit based in Denver, working out of the Miami office. At a certain point, he convinced his great-uncle, local concrete poohbah Frank Gory, to play the markets with him—Gory had sold his lucrative Gory Roof Tile Manufacturing Inc. a few years earlier, and handed over forkloads of cash to Roberts. The young trader parlayed a few bonanza trades into a gig at E.F. Hutton, where he quickly became one of the firm’s hottest stockbrokers and was lured to Merrill Lynch with a big contract. The only problem? His sales were fake, and the transaction sheets were printed on his home computer—at the end of the day he had falsified a reported $47 million in stock trading tips. In reality he was losing his great-uncle enormous sums on the way to a total loss of $9 million. He was arrested in February 1986, and by April 1987 he had pleaded guilty to three counts of mail fraud and conspiracy, and was and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

By the mid ’90s, however, he was out of prison and had transitioned to selling art. In an interview with Artnet News just weeks before he was hit with a lawsuit by the Perlman family, he says that he first opened a gallery in Orlando before moving to Miami in 1997.

“Noticing a surge of people moving to Miami for investment and permanent residency, I saw an opportunity to cater to their growing interest in art,” Roberts said in the interview. “This inspired me to establish Miami Fine Art Gallery, and now we have three locations in Miami aiming to attract new collectors and enthusiasts by showcasing diverse and compelling artworks.”

In this narrative, he was no longer a University of Miami dropout—he went to New York University, and then Sotheby’s, before starting his gallery. But by the time of the Q&A with Artnet, he wasn’t just hiding the wire fraud that cost his great-uncle $9 million. In 2013, Courthouse News reported that Roberts and his wife had earlier been accused of selling counterfeits of works by the Miami-based Brazilian Cubist-street artist Romero Britto to a dealer based in Minnesota. Britto himself also sued. (According to the Miami New Times, Britto won a permanent injunction barring Roberts from selling his work and the Minnesota dealer’s suit was dismissed during one of Roberts’s bankruptcy cases.)

By 2010, according to a criminal complaint, Roberts had branded his operations as Max in the Grove and began selling what he purported were the works of pop artist and ’60s icon Peter Max. In 2015, he pleaded guilty to mail fraud and was sentenced to 22 months in prison after being accused, along with his children, of forging Max’s works as well. After Roberts was released, the court stipulated that he could not work as an art dealer in any way imaginable—he could not, as the court put it, “own, operate, act as a consultant, be employed in, or participate in any manner, in any art or painting sales or related concerns.”

Roberts was released in 2017 and in the following years has faced new lawsuits including one from a client who alleged he’d sold them, among other things, fake works he had attributed to the street artist Invader. In July 2023, Roberts filed for bankruptcy; the lawsuit related to those allegedly forged works was dismissed as part of those proceedings.

That year, the Perlman family walked into Miami Fine Art Galleries. They were, according to their later civil suit, impressed by the outfit’s represented connections to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Roberts was able to connect them with a figure he said was his contact at the foundation, supposedly named Alex Herman. Soon they decided to start a joint venture in which they would purchase Warhols together through the foundation at discounted prices.

The Perlmans say they spent more than $6 million on Warhols. The trouble began when Christie’s took a look at the works for the Perlmans and questioned their authenticity. The suit claims the defendants then sent over representatives from a rival auction house, Phillips, who declared the works authentic.

But something was still off. The suit claims that its plaintiffs eventually realized the works’ invoice differed from the Warhol foundation’s usual format. Then there was the email address, [email protected]. The foundation can be found on the world wide web at warholfoundation.org. When the Perlmans contacted Phillips about who, precisely, had authenticated their work, the auction house denied any relationship with the purported employees.

“Upon information and belief, the individual named Alex Herman is simply an email address that Roberts created and operates to impersonate a supposed Warhol Foundation employee,” the lawsuit states.

In an interview with The New York Times in the days after the suit was filed, Roberts maintained his innocence, and insisted the works were real.

“I don’t believe anything was a forgery—everything looked good to me,” Mr. Roberts said, later adding, “I don’t know where the authority is they say it’s fake.” (The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board disbanded in 2012.) In a statement to the Times, one of Roberts’ lawyers added, “we intend to vigorously defend against the baseless and misleading allegations in the complaint.”

When I reached out this week following the indictment, Roberts’s attorney said, “There is no comment.”

As recently as last month, Roberts was talking to a journalist at the Coconut Grove Spotlight who stopped by the gallery. Roberts denied much of the accusations that had been leveled at him by the Perlman family months earlier. A third-party was the one to impersonate Herman, not him. Perhaps some of the Warhols were fakes, but not all of them.

“I’ve had to be squeaky clean since the 2014 case,” Roberts told the reporter.

Then came the SWAT teams. The raid shut the gallery for the foreseeable future, and Roberts was held in custody until he posted bail. He’s now facing up to 20 years for wire fraud conspiracy, and as many as 10 years for money laundering.

His arraignment is set for Monday.

THE RUNDOWN

Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…We’re starting to get a picture of the all-important spring auctions coming to New York this May. Today, Sotheby’s announced that it would be selling a trove of 40 pieces from Roy Lichtenstein’s personal collection of works that he kept back, still in his possession when he died in 1997. “I’ll let art historians speak about the loftier aspects of my father’s work, but what I most appreciate is the sense of humor embedded in all of it,” his son Mitchell Lichtenstein said. “It’s a wry humor that was part of who he was every day.” Together the works are expected to bring in between $30 million and $40 million, and their sale should kick off a yearlong Lichtenstein celebration that will culminate in the retrospective opening at the Whitney in 2026, curated by museum director Scott Rothkopf, curator Meg Onli, and artist Alex Da Corte.

…And over at Christie’s, the house will sell one of the paintings that Claude Monet made of the poplar trees near the banks of the Epte river near Giverny, with the work reportedly estimated to bring in anywhere between $30 million and $50 million. Two other paintings from the series have brought in more than $30 million at auction in the last three years, and this particular poplar painting has been in the same collection for 60 years. And the 21st Century Evening Sale at Christie’s will be led by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Baby Boom, a triptych that is estimated to sell for $20 million to $30 million. It’s a great Basquiat—I saw it on the Lévy Gorvy booth at Art Basel in Basel in 2017, on sale for $35 million and consigned by newsprint billionaire Peter Brant.

…Pharrell Williams on the cover of Vogue, painted by Henry Taylor, for the Met Gala issue. A$AP Rocky on another in the split run ahead of this year’s Costume Institute exhibit, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, this one shot by Tyler Mitchell at Langston Hughes’s house in Harlem. That is the way to do a magazine cover, people! Plus the story on Taylor in the magazine opens with the artist smoking a joint while talking to Dodie Kazanjian over Zoom, walking around his studio, eating avocado toast, listening to reggae. “I’m a Rasta, man. I woke up playing Bob Marley,” Taylor says. Incredible stuff.

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…Lorde’s new single “What Was That” features artwork by the photographer Talia Chetrit. Great choice, Ella!

…Fun stuff happening around town this week. On Monday there was a seder on the top floor of one of those incredible ancient Chinatown buildings you walk by and stare up at—one with a freight elevator so slow they got a guy to play the bassoon to entertain those crawling up. Organized by the performance art biennial Performa and hosted by the artist Wyatt Kahn and Benjamin Blumberg, the evening featured a fully kosher feast by Jacqueline Lobel of Shtick, and readings by the legendary downtown poet Bob Holman. Chag Sameach!

…On Wednesday night the Guggenheim opened an invite-only preview of Rashid Johnson’s whole-building-spanning show “A Poem for Deep Thinkers.” Reader, this is the blockbuster museum show of the year, an enormous, intellectually rigorous, aesthetically gorgeous survey of a truly vital mid-career artist. This was just the VIP opening, and the queue wheeled well down Museum Mile, with museum directors and collectors and Griffin Dunne and Bobby Flay all waiting patiently in line. Inside the rotunda it was as packed as I’ve ever seen the place, seemingly the entire art world in one venue, with Knicks big man Karl-Anthony Towns snapping pictures with fans, Johnson chatting with an adequately awed Julian Schnabel, and Chelsea Clinton hanging with Dustin Yellin. Cocktails followed at The Grill, where Guggenheim director Mariët Westermann called Johnson’s installation of the potted plants that often feature in his work, all hanging from the center of the rotunda, to be “the most amazing hanging gardens since Babylon.” But like… they actually are?

…Ralph Lauren hosted its fall 2025 women’s collection Thursday afternoon at Jack Shainman’s opulent Tribeca gallery, which is currently between shows: Nick Cave closed last month, and Toyin Ojih Odutola opens May 6.

…The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently launched the Vanguard Council, an innovative new board that brings together young and young-at-heart thinkers to contribute to museum programming, and to the overall vision of the nation’s great cultural citadel. The Vanguard is strictly invitation only, as was its inaugural dinner Tuesday night, hosted by Hannah Howe, the Met’s deputy chief development officer of individual giving, as well as council cochairs Sophia Cohen and Arielle Patrick. And the thing was catered by Bridges, the new Chinatown restaurant that absolutely oozes hip, its downtown-viral comte tart airlifted from Chatham Square to the middle of the marble Engelhard Court.

…And a quick mention that a whole lot was going on in Dallas last weekend. I was in town to give a quick talk, and there were two fairs going on. There’s the Dallas Art Fair, still the preeminent art expo in Texas, and the newer Dallas Invitational, a hotel fair that took place at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, founded by local gallerist James Cope. There were openings at institutions such as the Power Station and Dallas Contemporary, a great group show at The Warehouse of work from the Rachofsky collection and the Hartland-Mackie collection, a new hang of works at the Joule Hotel downtown, and plenty of people trekked over to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where Alex Da Corte, who we mentioned way at the top of this double-sized rundown—hey, we’re off next week, so might as well!—has a survey of his paintings. They say Dallas is recession proof. Is it? We shall see!

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