The Talented Mr. Roberts

One might think a man with multiple splashy fraud convictions would have a hard time finding his way back into the art world con game. Turns out Les Roberts had just enough charisma- and more than enough chutzpah-to give it another go.

- BY JESSE HYDE ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN LUTZ

Les Roberts wasn't like other art dealers in Miami, or anywhere really.

He stood a tidy five-foot-three, spoke softly, had dark, bushy eyebrows, and wore a toupee, jet black. On TikTok, where he had more than half a million followers, he'd sit behind the grand piano in his Miami high-rise and play Billy Joel classics, or don a black-pearl-snap western shirt and strum his guitar. There was something campy about it all, but it seemed harmless. The man was all joy.

His kitschy look (head to toe black, with a pink tie, or a red one) could border on theatrical, and it was a bit odd that he served Dunkin' Donuts at art openings rather than sparkling wine like other gallerists. But it all seemed very Miami, charming even, as if he were a character who had walked out of The Birdcage. His corny TikTok videos, his ostentatious $143,000 Bentley SUV, the way he liked to sing and dance across the white marble floors of his gallery—all of it belied a cultural sophistication that had made him one of the most important figures in the Miami art world. He had grown up going to galleries and museums in his native New York City, he said in interviews, and had studied art and business at NYU, and then interned at Sotheby's.

He opened his first gallery in Miami a few years after Art Basel held its first fair in Miami Beach in 2002. The fair’s success would give birth to Miami Art Week, or simply “Miami” to those in the know: a week-long bacchanalia of dance parties, dinners, whispers about cocaine and pills, and copious amounts of alcohol that attracted hedge fund managers from New York, models from Brazil, and, of course, well-heeled art collectors, dealers, and curators. The art cognoscenti were there for the main event: two or three dozen art fairs where you could buy Basquiat, Lichtenstein, and Cindy Sherman.