Miami Lawsuit Alleges $6.7M Fake Warhol Network

A new Miami civil complaint alleges that an international supply chain sold the Perlman family more than $6.7 million in purported Andy Warhol paintings and prints, supported by false provenance and authentication materials. The accusation reaches from a Miami gallery to Pennsylvania dealers and alleged suppliers in Peru, but it remains a set of civil claims: no court has ruled that every work is counterfeit or that every newly named defendant participated knowingly.

 
 

What the New Warhol Lawsuit Actually Alleges

The filing, made in Miami during the week of September 7, expands a dispute that began with purchases from Leslie Roberts’s Miami Fine Art Gallery. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on September 13 that Richard and Judy Perlman are suing Nathan “Nicky” Isen and others over an alleged network of suppliers, false authenticators, and distributors extending through Florida, Pennsylvania, and Peru. Isen’s attorney, Patrick Egan, categorically denied wrongdoing and any connection to an alleged conspiracy.

The scale comes from the plaintiffs’ account, not a judicial finding. An Electronic Times report published September 14, citing The Wall Street Journal, says the family bought more than 200 purported Warhol works over roughly 10 months beginning in 2023 and paid about $6.7 million. Reported subjects included Queen Elizabeth II, Debbie Harry, Superman, and Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe imagery—precisely the recognizable motifs that can make an object seem plausible before its edition, materials, and ownership history are tested.

The alleged deception concerned the paper trail as much as the pictures. The plaintiffs say Roberts represented that the works came from the Andy Warhol Foundation, while documents and intermediaries supplied assurances of authenticity. Earlier allegations described a supposed Foundation contact named “Alex Herman” and people who allegedly presented themselves as Phillips specialists after Christie’s raised concerns about some works. Vanity Fair’s April 18, 2025 account of the earlier complaint reported that the “Herman” email used an andywarholfoundation.co address, while the Foundation’s published site is warholfoundation.org; Phillips reportedly denied that the purported evaluators worked for the auction house.

The new complaint adds an alleged upstream supply story. Reports of the filing say some canvases were made in Peru, shipped with values as low as $30 on customs paperwork, and later presented with signatures or Foundation-style stamps. Those assertions are untested. They matter because they describe a proposed mechanism for creating both an object and its apparent institutional history, rather than merely alleging that a dealer misidentified a work.

 

Andy Warhol signing autographs at the opening of his Pasadena Art Museum retrospective in 1970. Photograph by the Los Angeles Times, UCLA Library, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; cropped.

 
 

A Timeline That Separates Allegations From Court Records

The chronology prevents three different proceedings from collapsing into one claim of guilt.

1. 2023–2024: The Perlmans bought the disputed works through Roberts’s gallery. According to accounts of the earlier complaint, Christie’s later raised authenticity concerns; the plaintiffs allege that purported Phillips representatives then vouched for the works.
2. August 2024: Members of the Perlman family filed their earlier civil action against Roberts and Miami Fine Art Gallery. Roberts denied that the collection was forged and said he believed the works were genuine.
3. April 10, 2025: The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida announced that Roberts and Carlos Miguel Rodriguez Melendez had been indicted. Prosecutors alleged that Roberts falsely claimed direct Foundation provenance and that Melendez posed as an auction-company employee. An indictment was an accusation, not a conviction.
4. June 23, 2025: A federal court report recorded Melendez’s guilty plea to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and recommended that it be accepted. That plea concerns Melendez’s conduct; it does not establish liability for all parties later named in the new civil case.
5. January 2026: The earlier Perlman-Roberts civil dispute settled for an undisclosed sum, according to the Inquirer’s account of Wall Street Journal reporting.
6. July 29, 2026: The FBI carried out what its Philadelphia office called “court-authorized law enforcement activity” at Dane Fine Art in Pennsylvania. The agency did not disclose the purpose, and no public statement has connected that activity to the Perlman complaint.
7. September 2026: The new Miami complaint extended the alleged supply chain beyond Roberts. The Inquirer reported that Roberts had separately pleaded guilty in the federal art-fraud case and was awaiting sentencing later in September.

The legal positions can be reduced to a useful distinction:

Actor	Present status
Richard and Judy Perlman	Plaintiffs alleging a loss exceeding $6.7 million; their complaint is not a verdict.
Nathan Isen and Dane Fine Art	Accused of supplying works and documentation; Isen denies wrongdoing and any conspiracy.
Leslie Roberts	Seller in the earlier civil dispute; his reported federal guilty plea is separate from the still-unresolved claims against the new defendants.
Carlos Miguel Rodriguez Melendez	Entered a guilty plea in the federal wire-fraud conspiracy case; that plea concerns his conduct, not the authenticity of every object.

The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is independent of the Warhol Foundation. Photo: Popscreenshot / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

 
 

Why the Foundation Claim Is the Critical Provenance Test

The official record supplies a check that the sales pitch itself allegedly tried to bypass. The Andy Warhol Foundation’s current FAQ says its Art Authentication Board was authorized to cease operations in 2011 and no longer exists. The Foundation says it does not offer authenticity opinions or certificates and will not predict whether a work will enter a future catalogue raisonné volume.

That does not mean a Warhol can no longer be researched. The Foundation identifies the catalogue raisonné of paintings, sculptures, and drawings as a definitive record and points separately to the catalogue of prints. For works by an artist as prolific as Andy Warhol, however, a familiar image or signature cannot by itself establish that a particular object belongs to the documented edition or came through the ownership chain claimed by a seller.

The Foundation also states that Christie’s handles private-sale inquiries for original works from its collection, while its own eBay charity store offers selected drawings, printed material, and vintage posters. That published structure does not prove that a private seller lacked a legitimate work. It does mean that a claim of privileged Foundation access, a Foundation-issued certificate, or a Foundation “authenticator” could be checked against the institution before money changed hands.

The alleged scheme is therefore more revealing as an authority problem than as a test of connoisseurship. According to the complaints described in the press, the assurances borrowed two trusted identities: the Foundation as the supposed source and an auction house as the supposed verifier. If proven, that combination would show how false provenance can be constructed around an object even when the organization being invoked publicly says it does not authenticate.

 
 

More Than 200 Works Remain Legally Unresolved

The new filing establishes that the Perlmans have widened their civil claims to an alleged Florida-Pennsylvania-Peru supply chain; it does not establish the defendants’ liability. The Foundation’s own policy does establish that it did not operate an authentication board during the 2023–2024 purchases and does not issue certificates of authenticity.

The federal record separately establishes Melendez’s guilty plea, while the Inquirer reports a guilty plea by Roberts; neither resolves Isen’s denial or proves the origin of every disputed work. The FBI has not said whether its July activity at Dane Fine Art relates to these Warhol allegations. The number of objects that independent specialists have definitively rejected, and whether any works in the group are genuine, remain undisclosed.