PHOENIX - Two former executives of the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, which collapsed in what has been called the largest nonprofit bankruptcy filing in the nation's history, have been convicted of fraud.
Prosecutors estimated 11,000 investors, most of them elderly, were defrauded in the 1980s and 1990s.
A jury on Monday found former foundation president William Crotts guilty of three counts of fraud and one count of illegally conducting an enterprise, according to the Arizona Attorney General's Office, which prosecuted the case. Former general counsel Thomas Grabinski was convicted of three counts of fraud and one count of illegally conducting an enterprise. They were acquitted of 23 counts of theft.
The foundation was created in 1948 by the Southern Baptist Convention to administer endowments to the church. It eventually grew into an independent nonprofit organization that sold individual...