Florida Family Spent $6 Million on Fake Warhols, Lawsuit Claims

The first warning that there might be something wrong with the Andy Warhols that a family of art collectors had been buying through a Miami gallery came last December. When the family decided to sell some of the works, it said in a lawsuit filed Thursday, Christie’s, the auction house, questioned their authenticity.

The family’s art dealer, Leslie Roberts of Miami Fine Art Gallery, went to extraordinary lengths to try to reassure them that they were authentic, the lawsuit said.

An email from a person that the gallery said was its contact at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts claimed that the works were legitimate, the filing says. And two people came to the family’s Florida home with business cards claiming that they were appraisers from a rival auction house, Phillips, the suit said, and proclaimed the works to be authentic Warhols.

But those assurances fell apart on closer examination, according to the lawsuit that the family — Matthew, Judy and Richard Perlman — filed against Mr. Roberts and the gallery in state court in Miami.

The email address claiming to be from the contact at the Warhol foundation was apparently fake, ending in “@andywarholfoundation.co,” while the real foundation’s email domain is “@warholfoundation.org,” the filing said. And Phillips said that it did not employ the two people who visited the family’s home to appraise the works, and that the business cards they had presented were fakes, the filing said.

“Les Roberts and Miami Fine Art Gallery are fraudsters,” reads the lawsuit, which accuses the defendants of duping the family into paying more than $6 million for fraudulent Warhols.