“Nearly 30 years ago, as a zealous, eager young entrepreneur, I made a mistake. I was convicted and served a sentence,” Mr. Gordon says of this period in his life. “I have diligently and honorably been an entrepreneur, inventor and businessman for almost three decades. I created jobs and career opportunities for thousands of people.”

After moving to Los Angeles in 1983, he worked as a business consultant throughout the ’80s, according to reports in Los Angeles business publications at the time. Mr. Gordon then engineered yet another act in his business career: facilitating credit card transactions over the phone.

According to reports in trade journals at the time, he appears to have started by processing credit cards for 1-900 and other telephone services, mail orders and television infomercials. He also became among the first to process transactions on the Web.

At the time, the credit card industry was aghast at Web transactions since they were not face-to-face dealings. In addition, many of the early Web commerce operators were so-called high-risk merchants, like pornographers and online gambling companies. Banks charge higher rates for these transactions because people tend to contest those items on their bill, perhaps to mollify an angry spouse.

While other payment processors avoided the stigma and high rates, Mr. Gordon saw opportunity. His companies in the ’90s, including Electronic Card Systems, devised ways to mitigate the risk. One method involved creating databases of unreliable customers and then refusing troublesome users when they returned to the Web to make purchases.

Mr. Gordon “was a pioneer,” said Jeffrey D. De Petro, who worked as a risk manager for Electronic Card Systems from 1995 to 1998. “We came up with different ways to monitor e-commerce transactions, and I think it defined the pros and cons of the industry.”

Mr. De Petro and five other former employees from this time say that CryptoLogic, an early Canadian online gambling network, was one large client. They also say that Mr. Gordon processed credit card transactions for ClubLove and other sites owned by the Internet Entertainment Group, now defunct, which offered pornographic photographs and videos for a monthly membership fee.

“He was the house for Internet porn in the early days,” said Steven Peisner, a veteran of the card processing industry who worked for Electronic Card Systems in 1997. “At that time, if you had anything to do with Internet porn, you called Electronic Card Systems.”

Mr. Gordon’s employees from the time remember extravagantly decorated offices on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors of the Luckman Building on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. There was fine art on the walls and a constant supply of fresh flowers in the lobby. Mr. Gordon held sumptuous parties for employees at his home in the Hollywood Hills and drove a Bentley.

He appears to have created and run many companies in the ’90s, though they were all related and shared office space, according to Mr. Peisner and other former employees. In addition to Electronic Card Systems and a related entity, Electronic Authorization Systems, Mr. Gordon was involved with magazine publishing, long-distance telephone service and an interior decorating company, among other pursuits.

In 1999, to take advantage of the dot-com gold rush, Mr. Gordon combined many of these companies into a single entity, CreditCards.com, according to a company press release at the time. But the company was having financial problems. Former employees say they remember paychecks occasionally bouncing and leased furniture being repossessed.

According to documents filed with the bankruptcy appellate panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Mr. Gordon brought in new partners from Nashville in 1999 and borrowed several million dollars from them, using his stock as collateral.

The documents, filed as part of litigation relating to business disputes at the company, say that when Mr. Gordon could not pay his partners back, they removed him. The company is now called iPayment and is based in Nashville.

“He played so many games that eventually he got played himself,” says Masih Madani, the former chief technology officer of CreditCards.com, referring to Mr. Gordon.

But Mr. Gordon didn’t walk away from the enterprise empty-handed. The new owners paid him $2 million to settle his lawsuit against them, according to court documents. Mr. Gordon also ultimately rescued one other prized asset from this first Internet foray: his relationship with Wataru Takahashi and DTI.

RICHARD GORDON has one other man to thank for helping him land on his feet after the CreditCards.com debacle: Paul Irwin, the head of the American Bible Society, who from 1996 to 2004 was chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States.

In his two decades preaching animal rights, Dr. Irwin, an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church, turned the Humane Society into the largest animal welfare charity in the world. But his tenure was also pockmarked by scandal.

USA Today reported in 1987 that the society spent $85,000 renovating Dr. Irwin’s vacation cabin in Maine. A decade later, a judge ordered the organization to pay $1 million to the Humane Society of Canada for soliciting donations in Canada and then transferring funds to the United States.

It was toward the end of his tenure, in April 2003, that Dr. Irwin first hired Mr. Gordon. Tax returns for the Humane Society show that the organization paid $881,000 to Mr. Gordon’s new venture, Exciting New Technologies.

In May 2003, according to a press release at the time, Mr. Gordon also hired Dr. Irwin’s son, Christopher, as director of business development at Exciting New Technologies. The younger Mr. Irwin could not be reached for comment, and it is not clear how long he worked there.

Dr. Irwin said in an interview that Exciting New Technologies built a “technology platform” that allowed the Humane Society to become the top publicly supported animal charity offering help after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A spokesman for the Humane Society says that Dr. Irwin canceled the software project in 2004 and that the organization bought the technology from another company.

Nevertheless, when Dr. Irwin left the Humane Society and took the reins of the American Bible Society, he hired Mr. Gordon again. Dr. Irwin said the organization had multiple Web sites — “everyone and his brother had one” — that needed to be streamlined.

BETWEEN July 2005 and June 2007, tax documents indicate, the Christian charity paid Exciting New Technologies more than $5 million. A spokesman for the philanthropy said that the $5 million in payments involved projects other than Web design, including e-mail marketing and digitizing the Bible, that were performed by subcontractors.

Dr. Irwin said those charges were expensive, but that the organization needed to catch up quickly on the Web. “It was so far behind the curve on Internet development that we simply were in the process of rapidly ramping up,” he said. “The tax form will show next year that we spent a lot less, and the year after that will show we will continue to spend a lot less.”

But questions have been raised inside the Bible society about the payments to Mr. Gordon. One employee — who requested anonymity to avoid Dr. Irwin’s ire — said the tax documents disclose what is “fairly widely known within the walls of A.B.S., and yes, the exorbitant costs have been questioned from the start.”

This person also said that “there have been attempts made to determine where the money is going.”

Dr. Irwin said he was unaware of Mr. Gordon’s ties to the pornography industry. “I have absolutely no knowledge of Richard Gordon’s involvement in pornography,” he said. “If anyone can provide me evidence that he is involved in pornography, then I want you to know he will be out of the American Bible Society today.”

On Friday, after being questioned about its dealings with Mr. Gordon, the society said “the American Bible Society and Richard Gordon have mutually agreed to terminate all existing business relationships.” The society added that it was continuing to investigate Mr. Gordon and his business with the organization.

Dr. Irwin and Mr. Gordon have also apparently intersected on other business transactions as well.

In March 2007, the two men considered redeveloping valuable property that the American Bible Society owns at 1865 Broadway, near Columbus Circle in Manhattan, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Dr. Irwin and Mr. Gordon met with executives at Sonnenblick Goldman, the real estate investment banking firm, about the project, according to a person at the bank who was privy to the discussions but didn’t want to be named disclosing details about a confidential business matter.