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 income to pay her share of restitution for an art fraud scheme she says her art-dealer father, Leslie Roberts, orchestrated more than a decade ago.
Seven hundred miles away in glitzy Miami, Leslie, 62, has enjoyed a decidedly more glamorous existence. Until recently, the five-foot-three proprietor of Miami Fine Arts Gallery 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 gallerist 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 declared 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 Roberts 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, adventures, 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 mansion, guns drawn, in the wee hours of a February 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-uncle's stock portfolio while working at various financial 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 divorced, and times were tough. Brittney recalls 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 machines 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: visits to Disney World, squirt-gun fights in the pool, wearing one another out on the backyard 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 became angry when she told him she wasn't interested 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 adulthood.
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 romance with Silvia Castro Roberts, whom he wed in 2008, was motivated by money.
"Your dad thought I was rich," Brittney recalls 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 Miami. She says she was thrilled at the opportunity to bond with her dad. "I thought this was the greatest thing in the world," she recalls.Her father took over a former baby boutique 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, until her brother asked if she could create custom 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 — anything 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 paintings, 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 paintings. 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.
About a year later, the FBI came calling. "I was four months pregnant doing the door since I was showing, and the FBI called me from my brother's phone," she recounts. They'd already visited Leslie III.
The FBI advised Brittney to hire a lawyer. Confused and in tears, she called her father. "I was like, 'What did you do? I have the FBI coming to me, Dad, and I don't know what's going on,'" she says now. "And he goes, 'I don't know what's going on either. Nobody contacted me.' But that was a lie."
"I don't know what you did," she recalls telling her dad. "But I'm four months pregnant with my daughter right now."
It would be the last time the two would speak for more than a decade.
She says her father had offered to pay for a lawyer but never followed through. She later discovered that Roberts, facing 25 years in prison, accepted a plea deal in exchange for information that led to the prosecutions of her and Leslie III. Court documents confirm that he assisted the government.
"You never think your parents would do that to you. I never thought in a million years my dad would get me involved in something criminal. They're supposed to protect," she says now.
Leslie pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison. Brittney and her brother pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in 2015. They were sentenced to three years probation and six months of home confinement with GPS monitoring. Additionally, the siblings and their father were jointly ordered to pay restitution of more than $800,000 — a sum Brittney and her brother are still paying off. (She believes her father's bankruptcy proceeding has gotten him off the hook for now.)
"He's scot-free, but my brother and I are in debt because of it," Brittney says.
New Times asked Brittney to contact her brother on the publication's behalf, and she relayed that he did not want to comment for this story.
With only rare exceptions, Brittney says, she has barely spoken with her father over the last decade. She notes that she only began speaking to him again last September when she learned he was sick in bed with pneumonia.
"I was worried that I would never get to talk to him again if he died," she adds.
She says she learned about Miami Fine Art Gallery through her uncle and her father's TikTok, where he shares "tone-deaf" singing videos with his 566,000 followers, many of which appear to be bots.
As she tries to make sense of her father's most recent legal entanglements, Brittney learned that her father recently married for a third time — to a much younger Brazilian woman named Kathryn Domingues.
According to Miami-Dade County court documents, they were married on April 5, four days before the FBI raid.
"He's manipulative, an untreated narcissist, bipolar, ADHD, and a womanizer," Brittney says. "That sums up my dad."
