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.)…