4 May 1-7, 2025 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? How Leslie Roberts’ lust for wealth broke his kids. BY NAOMI FEINSTEIN A t a bar outside Sum- merdale, Alabama, Brittney Lynn Roberts tops well whiskey with diet soda and slides a rocks glass across the wooden high-top. An eleven-hour drive from the South Florida hometown where she can no longer afford to live, the single mother of a nine and 16-year-old works at the bar in the rural town of just over 1,500 inhabitants to make ends meet. Upon her nightly return to the small brick home her great-grandfather built, the 39-year-old unboxes Pokémon cards for her 1,300 followers on Drip, an online collectibles marketplace. It’s a side hustle to generate in- come to pay her share of restitution for an art fraud scheme she says her art-dealer father, Leslie Roberts, orchestrated more than a de- cade ago. Seven hundred miles away in glitzy Mi- ami, Leslie, 62, has enjoyed a decidedly more glamorous existence. Until recently, the five- foot-three proprietor of Miami Fine Arts Gal- lery in Coconut Grove could be seen sporting around in his Bentley, or on TikTok, singing and plinking on a grand piano inside his high- rise apartment. The music came to a stop on April 9, when the FBI raided Leslie’s gallery, hauling away what appeared to be boxes of artworks. A day later, federal prosecutors charged the galler- ist with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering for allegedly selling fake Andy Warhol artwork. Leslie’s legal troubles date back to the 1980s, when he was charged and convicted of defrauding his great-uncle while managing his stock portfolio. In the following years, Leslie, entrenched in the art world, faced more skirmishes with the law — this time for selling customers forged paintings. The hard time didn’t seem to deter him from repeating past mistakes, as he later faced lawsuits with allegations that he sold inauthentic art pieces. He has repeatedly de- clared bankruptcy while presenting as a wealthy, sophisticated art dealer. Like the unsuspecting art buffs who trusted Leslie to deliver works from big-name artists, Brittney and her brother, Leslie Rob- erts III, became collateral damage in their dad’s lifelong pursuit of the finer things. Despite his brushes with the law, Brittney holds onto the memories of her father that any child would cherish — the laughter, ad- ventures, and moments that made him feel like just dad. The Sometimes Dad Brittney’s mother, Tracie, was only 18 when she married Leslie, whom she’d known since middle school. She became pregnant with Brittney shortly after they wed in 1984. Brittney was three months old when FBI agents raided the family’s Boca Raton man- sion, guns drawn, in the wee hours of a Febru- ary morning in 1986. “My mom said I was asleep on the bed, so she just looked and said, ‘Can I just go get my daughter?’” she recalls her mother recounting. The FBI arrested Leslie, 23 at the time, on 19 counts of mail fraud for draining his great-un- cle’s stock portfolio while working at various fi- nancial firms. An archived New York Times story indicates that Roberts pleaded guilty to three counts of mail fraud and conspiracy and was sentenced to 15 years behind bars. Brittney says her father served six years at a U.S. Air Force base camp near Panama City, where the family relocated for weekly visits. “I saw my dad constantly,” she says. After his release, though, her parents di- vorced, and times were tough. Brittney re- calls living with her mother in a double-wide trailer before moving in with her grandmother in Miami Lakes. “My mom did her best to keep everything afloat,” Brittney says. Meanwhile, Leslie moved to Orlando with a new partner and cycled through a string of ventures — from vending ma- chines and a mall puppet kiosk to a hand-carved Gothic furniture shop called Castle Designs. During spring break, Brittney and her brother, three years younger, would visit their dad and enjoy a typical American holiday: vis- its to Disney World, squirt-gun fights in the pool, wearing one another out on the back- yard trampoline. At one point, hoping to mold her into his “little childhood prodigy,” Leslie built Brittney a recording studio and bought her the rights to a country song. She says he be- came angry when she told him she wasn’t in- terested in the genre. In seventh grade, she went to live with her father, who enrolled her in a private school. But after just four months, she says, he sent her back to live with her mother, where she stayed until she finished high school. And so went the yo-yo of Leslie’s affection toward his daughter, who would suddenly win his approval, only to lose it just as abruptly. The pattern continued into adult- hood. Brittney followed her father to Orlando to help with his furniture store. Soon after, he relocated to Miami, where he met the woman who’d become his second wife, a Brazilian ten years his junior. Brittney moved back to Miami and attended the wedding. But Brittney says even Leslie’s whirlwind ro- mance with Silvia Castro Roberts, whom he wed in 2008, was motivated by money. “Your dad thought I was rich,” Brittney re- calls her step-mom telling her. “I am, but all my money is tied up in real estate.” Her mom and grandmother had warned Brittney of Leslie’s obsession with wealth, but she finally saw it for herself. “He only cares about money,” she says. “He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.” A Family Business After her father remarried, Brittney, 22 years old at the time, says he approached her and her brother about starting a family business in Mi- ami. She says she was thrilled at the opportu- nity to bond with her dad. “I thought this was the greatest thing in the world,” she recalls. Her father took over a former baby bou- tique in Coral Gables and turned it into an art gallery, she says. Pregnant with her son, she remembers stripping wallpaper and “putting in work at the store.” “We used to go to this place in Pompano that sold wholesale art, and then we would stretch it on the canvases, hang it up, put a nice frame on it, and we sold it. We had a legit good business,” she says. But a fight between Brittney and Leslie III estranged her from the gallery for a time, un- til her brother asked if she could create cus- tom pieces instead. “He goes, ‘You’re the only one who’s really good at that stuff,’ and I was like, ‘Sure, I’ll do it,’” Brittney tells New Times. “My dad was paying me, and I needed the money for my son.” She says they’d give her a picture — any- thing from characters to pop art — which she’d replicate onto a canvas. “I didn’t even know anything about art, like big artists, or anything like that,” she says. “So I started painting paint- ings, whatever image they wanted me to do.” Then, in 2012, law enforcement raided her father’s gallery. She later learned that he was selling her paintings as Peter Max originals. “I’m like, ‘No, I want nothing to do with this if this is what you guys are doing with my paint- ings. Absolutely not,’” she tells New Times. “I’m not a criminal.” Brittney stopped speaking to her father and took up a waitressing job at Scarlett’s Cabaret in Hollywood. Brittney Roberts says her father was “a big kid himself” while raising his two children. Roberts family photos | METRO | “HE ONLY CARES ABOUT MONEY, HE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT ANYBODY BUT HIMSELF.” >> p6
