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Before You Read The Full Story — Three Things To Know

• Leslie Roberts, the Coconut Grove gallery owner who sold forged Andy Warhol prints, didn't show up to his own sentencing hearing.
• A federal judge in Florida pushed the hearing back a week while prosecutors and Roberts' own attorney try to find him.
• Roberts has done this kind of thing before — he already served time once for selling a different set of fake paintings.

By Samuel López | USA Herald

A man doesn't miss his own sentencing by accident. Not usually. And when Leslie Roberts didn't walk into a Miami federal courtroom on Friday, the judge overseeing his case had no choice but to reschedule — one week, while the government and Roberts' own lawyer try to figure out where he went.

Roberts, 62, ran Miami Fine Art Gallery out of Coconut Grove. For years he sold prints to collectors, telling them the pieces came straight from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, complete with authentication numbers stamped on the back. There was one problem. That foundation stopped authenticating anything in 2011. The board that supposedly blessed these pieces was dissolved more than a decade ago amid legal disputes, so it hadn't operated in years. The stamps were fake. The paperwork was fake. According to federal investigators, Roberts used fraudulent identification numbers and fake stamps to make the pieces look real.

He didn't do it alone. Carlos Miguel Rodriguez Melendez, 37, of Sunny Isles, was charged alongside him, and prosecutors say Melendez played a specific role — he claimed to work for a New York auction house so he could "authenticate" the forged pieces and hide what they really were. That part of the scheme is already closed out. Melendez pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced in September 2025 to a year of probation. DOJ

Roberts pleaded guilty too — to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The dollar figures in the case aren't small. Investigators tied six payments totaling nearly $600,000 from one victim to the scheme, plus another $60,000 from a second buyer, and separately say Roberts moved roughly $240,000 in fraud proceeds out of his gallery's bank account into his own personal account. A civil lawsuit filed by a family of collectors puts their own losses at $6.7 million in forged Warhol pieces — Marilyn Monroe prints, Debbie Harry prints, the kind of images that made Warhol's screen-printing famous in the first place. That family says they got suspicious after noticing the Warhol Foundation emails they'd received came from an address ending in ".co," not the foundation's actual ".org" site.

None of this is Roberts' first rodeo. He already did time once before, after a 2015 case involving faked Peter Max paintings landed him a prison sentence and several years of supervised release. That release didn't survive contact with more art deals — it was revoked in 2018 after he tried to broker the sale of a Basquiat painting worth $75,000, and he ended up back behind bars for it.

Now he's facing a wire fraud conspiracy charge that alone can carry up to 20 years, on top of additional exposure for money laundering. That's the kind of number that gives a person reasons to disappear before a judge reads out a sentence. Whether that's what happened here, nobody's saying outright yet — Roberts' own attorney told the court Friday that he didn't know where his client was. The rescheduled hearing is set for next week. Whether Roberts is in that courtroom will say a lot on its own.

About The Author

Samuel López is a reporter and news correspondent for USA Herald, where he has covered the publication's legal and courts beat since 2022. Before turning to journalism, López spent more than two decades working in the legal and insurance sectors, analyzing state and federal litigation and handling complex legal matters — background that shapes how he covers fraud cases like Roberts', where the paper trail often tells the real story.

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