NYT19980225.0505 NEWS NEWSWIRE The Rev. Henry J. Lyons, 55, president of the nation's largest predominately black religious denomination, was arrested in St. Petersburg, Fla., Wednesday and charged by state authorities with racketeering and theft, stemming from charges that he allegedly misused his position for personal gain. According to a copy of the complaint against him, Lyons tried to defraud several corporations and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which donated more than $225,000 to the denomination to rebuild churches destroyed in a rash of suspicious fires at black churches across the South in 1995 and 1996. One of the charges against Lyons accuses him of trying to illegally obtain more than $100,000 given by the Anti-Defamation League to help rebuild the churches. Within hours of Lyons's arrest, one of his associates, Bernice V. Edwards, with whom he co-owned a $700,000 waterfront house near St. Petersburg, was arrested at her home in Milwaukee, Wis., on a warrant issued in Pinellas County, Fla., Milwaukee police said. She was charged with racketeering. Lyons, elected to lead the National Baptist Convention U.S.A., Inc., in 1994, was released on $100,000 bail, law-enforcement officials in Florida said. The police in Milwaukee said Ms. Edwards was jailed in lieu of $50,000 bail. They also said that the Pinellas County Sheriff's Department would move to have her extradited to Florida. The complaint filed against Lyons and Ms. Edwards, called in Florida an issue capias, charges them with conspiring to defraud a bank, an insurance company and other businesses. The document includes an affidavit by David Kurash, an investigator with the Florida state attorney's office, who said that shortly after being elected president of the National Baptist Convention in 1994, Lyons opened a secret convention bank account and, with the help of others, from early 1995 through July 1997, engaged in schemes ``to defraud several large corporations.'' His affidavit said the inquiry had determined there had been ``a large theft of funds'' from the Anti-Defamation League. The charges against Lyons and Ms. Edwards come eight months after revelations that the minister had been living a lavish lifestyle and that Ms. Edwards, whom he had hired in 1995 as the denomination's public relations director, had pleaded guilty to conspiring to embezzle. These details came to light after Lyons's wife, Deborah, was arrested on charges of setting fire to the waterfront house. She initially said she believed her husband was having an affair, but later recanted the accusation. Lyons has denied any romantic involvement with Ms. Edwards, with whom he shared a checking account and co-owned a 1987 Rolls-Royce. Marianne Pasha, a spokeswoman for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Department said Lyons surrendered to law-enforcement officials there after a warrant was issued for his arrest, based on an 82-page affidavit that the state attorney's office presented to a Florida circuit judge. Once a nationally prominent religious figure widely courted by politicians and consulted for his views on racial matters by President Clinton, Lyons saw his reputation diminish and a shadow cast over his denomination after reports about his lifestyle and association with Ms. Edwards became public. He rejected calls from some ministers within the denomination that he resign and instead won a vote of confidence from delegates at the National Baptist Convention's annual meeting in Denver last September, despite concerted efforts by his opponents to oust him. But given that he now faces felony charges, Lyons's ability to retain his office will be severely tested. Regina Cooper, a public relations agent retained by Lyons's lawyers, said the minister would hold a news conference on Thursday in Nashville, Tenn., at the National Baptist Convention's headquarters, together with the denomination's board of directors. The board has been strongly supportive of Lyons in the past. The denomination _ a loose association of 33,000 autonomous churches that together support a publishing house and missionaries _ has endured internal strife before Lyons was elected to a five-year term as its president. In 1961, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a number of other younger ministers quit the denomination to found a new organization, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, out of frustration with their inability to oust the denomination's president, whom they considered to be slow to speak out for civil rights. More recently, Lyons's predecessor, the Rev. Theodore J. Jemison, was criticized for spending $12 million on a new headquarters building and for siding with Mike Tyson after the boxer had been charged with rape.