Shearn Moody Jr. was accused of making Moody Foundation grants to himself, and the IRS sought $14 million

W.L. Moody Jr. and his wife Libbie chartered the Moody Foundation in 1942; Fortune put the initial endowment at $400 million. Its income came from dividends of American National Insurance, which the foundation and a family trust controlled^†. Grandson Shearn Moody Jr., born in 1933, sat on the board. Ousted from his own insurance company in 1972, he was later jailed for bankruptcy fraud. In 1987 a federal jury convicted him of mail and wire fraud in schemes to defraud the foundation; an appeals court overturned the conviction^†. The IRS charged that he made tens of millions of dollars of grants that benefited one Texan, himself, and claimed more than $14 million in taxes and penalties for self-dealing. At the 1995 Tax Court trial in Dallas he testified about a song he commissioned mocking the legal profession; his lawyer asked him not to sing it. The judge found him "naive and lackadaisical" but "not a mastermind," a victim of grantees who exploited his fear of plots, and cut the bill to about $1.4 million. He said he had hired and fired "several hundred" lawyers, including Roy Cohn. He died in 1996. In 2024 the foundation held $3.53 billion; chair Frances Moody-Dahlberg was paid $214,973 and trustee Elizabeth Moody $271,355.