Not long after the destruc tion of the World Trade Center, some New York state investigators and the NYPD intelligence unit saw a pattern.

They were looking into the sale of untaxed cigarettes in the state and found that many of the buyers who were lured into their sting operations were Middle Eastern men who ran grocery stores.

Over the next few years nearly 60 men were arrested for buying these illegal smokes.

In a talk last month, an executive of Altria, the parent of Philip Morris, maker of popular cigarette brands like Marlboro, Virginia Slims and Merit, said most counterfeit smokes came from China and that the Asia giant produces 400 billion fake cigarettes a year, robbing billions of dollars in sales from legitimate companies and untold millions in tax dollars.

The investigators also noticed that the men who were arrested — perhaps not surprisingly — had a particular interest in Middle Eastern politics, especially as it related to the terrorist group Hezbollah.

During the stings, undercover agents and confidential informants — some of whom were also from the Middle East — engaged in conversations, often in Arabic, in which those who would soon be arrested expressed what could be considered a fondness for terrorist views.

A few even admitted to agents after their arrest that money from their nefarious cigarette businesses, as well as other illegal pursuits, was being funneled back to the Middle East and helped keep Hezbollah well funded.

In the basement of some of the stores that were later raided were American flags hanging upside down, pictures of the Trade Center with drawings of planes crashing into it and even, in one case, what seemed to be an altar to Osama bin Laden.

By 2003 the New York State Tax Department had put together a flow chart of the cigarette conspiracy’s hierarchy.

Most of them have been arrested; some have fled. Several Muslims worked as confidential informants for the Tax Department when it was putting this information together.

They also helped gather the information that led to the arrest of the nearly 60 people in the cigarette scam. I’m going through all this now because Rep. Peter King (R-LI) will be chairing hearings starting today that will look into the possibility that Muslims in the US have been radicalized.

King suggested that terrorist groups were now recruiting like the Mafia would from the Italian community.

Needless to say, Rep. King’s allegations have created a furor. The lawmaker has said on TV and in newspapers that the Muslim community in the US has helped law enforcement, but not enough.

Even the White House jumped into the fray. The other day Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough went to a Virginia mosque that’s been cooperating with authorities and said, “We will not stigmatize or demonize entire communities because of the actions of a few.” No “guilt by association” in this country, McDonough said.

Who’s right? Well — everyone’s a little right.

For a few months The Post has been looking into illegal enterprises that could be funding terrorism. And it’s not just cigarettes.

So Rep. King is, in fact, correct when he points out that some segments of the Muslim community in America are trying to cause trouble both here and in the Middle East.

And these folks are raising money from ordinary Americans in ways that would surprise you, something else the congressman probably is aware of.

But it’s difficult to say if Muslims in the US are cooperating “enough” with US law enforcement. After all, the vast majority of Muslims probably live each day of their lives in the US without ever encountering anything that needs to be reported.

And I know this much, the people who have been cooperating with me during my investigation are Muslims from several Middle East countries. And these people have also been cooperating with the FBI and the police because they believe it’s the right thing to do.

These people have even contacted Rep. King.

King’s comparison of terrorist groups to the Mafia, and also to “the Westies from the Irish community” is an unfortunate one.

For one thing, the Mafia never tried to recruit me or anyone I’ve known growing up in a largely Italian community in Brooklyn. But I also chuckled back in the day when gang ster Joe Colombo tried to convince the public that there was no such thing as the Mafia.

He held rallies and — like King is doing — Colombo got a lot of attention.

Trouble was, even those of us who are of Italian descent — though we’d never been “recruited” by these gangsters — knew that such an organization existed.

Muslims, too, know there are some troublemakers in their midst. But exactly what would the congressman like them to do about it? jcrudele@nypost.com