Ex-wife of pastor accused of taking more than $182K from church

CRYSTAL RIVER, Fla. — The ex-wife of a Florida pastor is accused of taking more than $182,000 over a four-year period, primarily using the funds to make unauthorized Amazon purchases on a church credit card.

According to Citrus County Sheriff’s Office online booking records, Nancy Ellen Mitchell Bertine, 74, of Hernando, is charged with scheme to defraud to obtain property valued more than $50,000 and grand theft of more than $100,000, according to Citrus County court records.

Deputies arrested Bertine on July 24 after a months-long investigation, the Citrus County Chronicle reported. The probe revealed hundreds of personal purchases made with the nonprofit business account of the Gulf to Lake Baptist Church in Crystal River, the newspaper reported.

According to a criminal complaint, the church’s financial department discovered that numerous fraudulent transactions had been made on their Amazon account by Bertine.

Deputies began a criminal investigation on Feb. 5 into the grand theft, in which $182,610.16 was missing, court documents state.

The dissolution of a marriage earlier this year between Bertine and Lloyd Bertine, the head pastor who founded the church in January 1995, led to the discovery of the alleged embezzled funds.

Court documents state that the pastor had learned his wife was having an extramarital affair. She had been helping to manage the finances of the church but was fired from her position.

“Pastor Bertine and finance staff ... quickly realized that on the defendants’ church office computer, there was an Amazon account opened in the defendants’ name solely,” court documents stated.

An investigation determined that Nancy Bertine was using the church’s nonprofit credit card, through Capital One, to make purchases for herself.

Some of the items included women’s clothing items, hair products and hair dye kits, cosmetics, dog food and cat food, documents stated. There were also more than $37,000 in fraudulent purchases from Amazon between 2022 and 2024.

“Yeah, I did it, I ordered those items, just like I ordered all the other items for the church that people asked me to order,” Nancy Bertine told investigators, according to the criminal complaint. “I’ve ordered a lot of stuff; I mean a lot! I didn’t even think about it at the time I was ordering those things, I just ordered them and the church would pay the bill.”

After pulling financial records, detectives learned that the defendant had made 1,433 purchases from Amazon from 2021 to 2024 that totaled $46,516.36. There were 2,098 charges made to the church’s credit card, the Chronicle reported.

She allegedly spent $196,000 but has paid back nearly $14,000 of the personal expenses.

“What happened was falsifying the records of what was being purchased and that’s why we never knew,” Lloyd Bertine told WFLA-TV.

The pastor said his ex-wife has given written notice that she will repay the funds and has money in her account to do so.

“She has the money from selling our house that she can use to repay everything,” he told the television station.

Nancy Bertine is scheduled to appear in court on Aug. 8.

Crystal River is 80 miles north of Tampa and 86 miles west of Orlando.

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