The Holy Land Foundation first came to the attention of U.S. authorities 14 years ago, when an Illinois man detained in Israel told his interrogators that the largest American Muslim charity was really a front for Palestinian terrorists.

The year was 1993, and Holy Land, started a few years earlier as the Occupied Land Fund, had just relocated from California to Richardson.

Holy Land’s founders, all of whom were either born in the Palestinian territories or spent time growing up there, made it their mission to help poor and war-stricken Palestinian families devastated by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Or that’s what was printed on their pamphlets.

Muhammad Salah, a Palestinian-born Illinois businessman, described the charity differently.

Although he would later claim he was tortured into talking, he told Israeli agents in 1993 that Holy Land was the chief fundraising arm of the then-six-year-old Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas.

He said Holy Land was so designated by a powerful and politically savvy Palestinian immigrant living in the U.S. named Mousa Abu Marzook.

Investigators would later learn that Mr. Marzook, a doctoral student at Louisiana Tech University, was actually the head of Hamas and helped start Holy Land with hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed money. He also was married to a cousin of Ghassan Elashi, Holy Land’s board chairman and one of its founders.

Mr. Salah was this year acquitted on charges that he supported Hamas, but was sent to prison for lying about his terrorist ties in a civil suit. Still, it was his initial tip that prompted the FBI to open an intelligence investigation into Holy Land.

In October 1993, the FBI bugged a 1993 meeting at a Philadelphia hotel between Holy Land organizers and other Hamas sympathizers. They spoke about how to continue to raise money for Hamas without drawing the attention of U.S. authorities, who were on alert after the first World Trace Center attack eight months earlier.

By late 1994, Mr. Salah’s information began to leak out and was the basis for national television news accounts that for the first time publicly linked Holy Land to Hamas.

The Dallas Morning News also began an investigation on the group, and wrote stories uncovering ties between Holy Land and Hamas activists.

Muslim groups were outraged and denied the links.

Meanwhile, investigators were learning that Holy Land had a practice of flying in militant clerics, many with Hamas ties, to headline U.S. fundraisers. Those gatherings often featured calls for violent jihad, or holy war, against Israelis.

Between 1992 and 2001, investigators estimated that Holy Land raised more than $57 million.

For years, U.S. authorities focused on using Holy Land to gather intelligence, rather than launching a criminal case to shut it down. At the time, before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the FBI was under less pressure to make terrorism arrests, and there was a great reluctance to use evidence gathered during an intelligence operation in a criminal case.

But for years, Israeli citizens have been the victims of Hamas-sponsored suicide bombings, which they believed were funded largely by the millions of dollars Holy Land was funneling to the region.

In 1996, the Israelis closed Holy Land’s Jerusalem office, and they pressured the U.S. to do the same to its Texas headquarters. American authorities declined to move against the charity, even though a 1995 presidential order made it a crime for anyone inside the U.S. to send money or support to Hamas.

But around 1997, the Commerce Department learned that a Richardson-based Internet service provider and computer services firm had contacted Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq about setting up the “.iq” domain name. It was never activated, but by 1999, investigators had also learned that the firm also had been violating export laws by doing business with customers in Syria and Libya, both of which the U.S. considered state sponsors of terrorism.

The firm was InfoCom, run by Mr. Elashi’s family and also the beneficiary of Mr. Marzook’s money.

Investigators would work the InfoCom export law case for another two years — all the while continuing to monitor Holy Land — before a federal terrorism task force moved in on Sept. 5, 2001, and shut the company down.

InfoCom organizers and Muslim supporters decried the raids, and denied any links to terrorism or Holy Land. Although it wasn’t publicly disclosed at the time, FBI agents found about 20 boxes worth of Holy Land records, including correspondence, bank records and videos, being stored at InfoCom.

Investigators barely had a week to begin pouring over all that new evidence when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by Islamic militants. Eventually, agents were able to pull together eight years of intelligence and evidence on Holy Land and prepare warrants to search the charity’s offices and seize its assets.

In December 2001, President George W. Bush announced at a Rose Garden news conference that Holy Land was shut down.

Authorities believe that between 1995, when supporting Hamas became a crime, and its closing, Holy Land sent more than $12 million to the region.