A Florida family was sold over 200 forged Andy Warhol artworks by an international network of suppliers, authenticators, dealers, and distributors, as alleged in a civil racketeering lawsuit filed on September 9.
Real-estate investor Richard Perlman filed the suit in a Miami-Dade county court, stating that he, along with his wife and son, spent over $6.7 million between 2023 and 2024 on fraudulent Warhol prints of Superman, Queen Elizabeth, and other famous figures. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, the complaint alleges that the works were painted in Peru, smuggled into the United States, and falsely authenticated as genuine pieces by a network of art dealers.
“This case involves a multi-million-dollar art fraud built on a repeated lie: that the artworks Defendants supplied to the Plaintiffs originated from or were authenticated by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,” the suit reads. (The Foundation’s authentication board faced accusations of price inflation in a 2007 antitrust suit and shuttered four years later, citing financial strain.)
The Perlmans’ ordeal began in 2023, when the family bought purported Warhol artworks from Leslie Roberts, the owner of Miami Fine Art Gallery (MFAG). After Christie’s “expressed concerns about the authenticity of the works,” according to the lawsuit, the Perlmans sued Roberts in 2024 and settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. While he maintains the sale was an honest mistake, Roberts will be sentenced on related wire fraud charges later this month, according to the Journal.
Another art dealer accused in the suit is Nathan Isen, who was convicted in 2015 for money laundering and whose Philadelphia gallery, Dane Fine Art, was raided by FBI agents in July. The suit states that Isen abetted Robert in his sale of the sham works, along with two other Florida-based art dealers: Oscar Cordova, who allegedly sold Roberts fake Andy Warhol canvases, and Edward Kurstak, who supposedly affixed phony authentication stamps to the artworks.
Besides the art dealers, retired Florida dentist Allan Dampf is accused of pushing false provenance for the artworks in Roberts’s inventory. Dampf was the defendant in a private civil lawsuit in 2012, having acquired limited-edition Warhol prints in exchange for two of his Marc Chagall watercolor paintings. (In the suit, Sotheby’s described the works as “flat-out fakes.”)
The last supply channel in the proclaimed “pipeline of fraudulent works flowing across state and international lines” is fake artworks that were supposedly painted in Peru and shipped directly to MFAG for as little as $30.
The Perlmans’ complaint is the latest in a spate of similar lawsuits involving the late Pop art pioneer of the 1960s.
In 2024, Italian police seized over 2,100 fakes, including Warhol pieces, after uncovering a 38-person international forgery operation. That same year, Massachusetts conman Brian Walshe was sentenced to over three years in prison for selling two counterfeit paintings marketed as Warhol’s original work. And in April, a father and daughter pleaded guilty in a Brooklyn court for selling artworks that included fraudulent paintings deliberately misattributed to the late artist.
“The enterprise was distinct from each Defendant and had an ascertainable structure. Each participant performed a defined and necessary role,” the suit continues. “The scheme depended on the coordinated performance of these roles.”
