Missing Millionaire Has Moscow Puzzled : Crime: Do the Soviets have Mafia problems? An intriguing case of the disappearing art collector suggests they do.

In a cramped, dingy room in a hotel overlooking Red Square, Garig Basmadjan, an urbane French-Armenian millionaire, Jerusalem-born poet and art collector, took a phone call that would usher in one of the strangest mysteries ever to hit this city full of strange mysteries.

A whodunit featuring mobsters and smuggled icons and worthy of the best-seller list began on that summer Saturday morning, a thriller that has left Moscow’s foreign community buzzing with curiosity, wonderment and a touch of fear.

Basmadjan hung up the telephone, abruptly broke off a meeting with three Soviet business associates and 10 minutes later sped away in a waiting Russian-made Zhiguli automobile, vanishing as if into thin air. He has not been seen since by friends or family.

KGB agents, government investigators and 25 police detectives have been working full time on the case since Basmadjan’s July 29 disappearance--an enormous effort that officials say is necessary because the payoff could be big: the unmasking of the Moscow Mafia.

Scarce and often contradictory clues to the riddle of the missing Armenian share one common thread. They all point to the capital’s network of organized criminals, who have become increasingly daring, powerful and dangerous in the climate of economic entrepreneurship encouraged under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“This case could lead straight to the core of the Mafia leadership and we could blow the whole thing wide open,” one investigator said with barely contained excitement.

“If we can solve it,” he added softly after a moment’s pause.

The investigators are struggling, so far inconclusively, to find out who telephoned Basmadjan, why he suddenly left the Rossiya Hotel and where he is today. Foreigners rarely disappear in the Soviet Union, where their movements are generally monitored.

But perhaps more to the crux of the mystery, they also are trying to determine who this Basmadjan is: a philanthropist with a driving passion for his Armenian homeland or a greedy businessman with shadowy connections to the burgeoning Soviet underworld?

“We cannot be sure of anything right now,” said Sergei V. Mitrofanov, chief of the police investigative team. “We aren’t even sure that Mr. Basmadjan was a victim of a crime.

“As to his character, there are many contradictory opinions. But most people say he was rather cautious, so we believe he knew the driver of the car who took him away from his hotel.”

Organized crime, thought to be the villain in this story, has become an acknowledged social problem for the Soviet Union in the last two years, supported first and foremost by extortion.

Authorities use the Italian word in referring to the Soviet organized crime world as their own Mafia, although its connections to international mobsters are slight.

“With perestroika (Gorbachev’s restructuring of Soviet society), individual enterprises are becoming more economically independent. These are the prime targets for the growing Mafia network,” said Lt. Col. Mikhail K. Yegorov, a specialist in the Mafia with the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

“The Mafia can collect protection money from these semi-private businesses more easily than it could from the state,” Yegorov said in an interview.

As the Mafia has become stronger, its reach has extended.

Mobsters in Moscow today can speedily supply stolen art treasures and the phony documentation needed to take the items out of the country, Yegorov said. In return, they are paid in sought-after foreign currency.

Detectives, speaking privately, say they believe Basmadjan may have been linked to the unlawful export of Russian religious icons and other art items, and this may have brought him into contact with the Moscow underworld.

They decline to reveal the source of their information, but it is known that investigators have pored over a personal telephone book that Basmadjan left behind in his hotel room--a phone book someone apparently did not want police to see.

On Tuesday, Aug. 1, three days after Basmadjan disappeared, a man telephoned the Rossiya, asked if Basmadjan’s things were still in his room and said the Armenian wanted to reserve the room another week. But by then Basmadjan had already been reported missing, so the police were notified.

Basmadjan’s family and friends deny that he could have been involved in smuggling and say if he had any contacts with mobsters, it was only as a result of what they describe as his friendly, trusting nature.

But about Basmadjan’s nature not all agree.

Basmadjan’s personal story begins 41 years ago in Jerusalem, the then-disputed capital of Israel in which he was born and where his parents still live.

Although for many the emotional attractions of biblical Jerusalem are great, it was to the southern Soviet republic of Armenia that Basmadjan always felt drawn. It was there, in 1979, that the bearded, bespectacled intellectual went to study literature.

It was there that he became the first person to translate the poetry of T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats into Armenian.

It was also there, in the capital Yerevan, that his own poetry was published; that he met his future wife, a Parisian-born Armenian with whom he had three children; and that he made some of his closest friends in the art world, among them Shagen Khachtryan, today the director of a Yerevan art museum.

Perhaps one of the most powerful memories Khachtryan has of Basmadjan is the day in 1980, a year after the two men had met, when Basmadjan gave him a present, a painting by an Armenian artist worth $10,000.

“Today it hangs in my museum,” Khachtryan said in a telephone interview. “But Basmadjan is not listed as the donor because he wanted to be anonymous. He is very humble.”

The owner of a Paris gallery specializing in Russian art, Basmadjan also contributed money raised through art auctions to help victims of last year’s Armenian earthquake and was in the process of donating paintings by Russian and Armenian artists to the Soviet Union through the Cultural Affairs Ministry.

But his love of art and his charitable spirit were based on a strong business sense, according to his friend Andrei V. Andreyev, deputy chief of the Visual Arts Department of the Cultural Ministry.

“He was an unusual type because he was a very clever man both about art and about his business affairs,” said Andreyev. “He had all kinds of friends and he was very confident. He thought there was nothing he couldn’t handle.”

How Basmadjan came by the reputed millions that made him so prominent among the foreign community in Moscow is a piece of the mystery.

His sister, Vartouhi Basmadjan, 33, was evasive when asked, saying simply in a telephone interview from Paris that she didn’t have intimate knowledge of his financial status and thought it unimportant to the case.

“Rich or poor, he was a poet at heart who made friends easily,” she said.

But investigators say Basmadjan also made some powerful enemies. As to how and why he disappeared, there are two main theories.

The first is that Basmadjan was the victim of a recent power struggle over turf among the seven main Mafia gangs operating in Moscow. He was contacted by someone he knew, this version goes, and taken to a meeting with the chieftains of a rival organized crime group previously unknown to him--a meeting that did not go well.

The rival group may have wanted its own payoff from Basmadjan, and he may have refused, and, thus, was taken hostage, investigators speculated.

The second version suggests that Basmadjan was simply double-crossed by people he knew, by his established partners in less-than-reputable business deals.

“Maybe he had already paid for the goods and he went to pick up them up,” said one of the key investigators in the case. “He thought it would take less than an hour, because he asked his business associates to wait for him.”

But the suppliers, “maybe because they thought Basmadjan was being greedy,” didn’t hand over the goods as promised, and then things turned bad for the Armenian.

Vartouhi Basmadjan said she is certain her brother was not involved in anything illegal in Moscow.

“I think he would have told me, and even if he didn’t tell me, I probably would have known something from his attitude,” she said. “But we spoke on the telephone two days before he disappeared, and there was nothing unusual.”

As soon as she learned of his disappearance, his sister flew to Moscow, staying in the very room that Basmadjan had vacated on the 12th floor of the Rossiya Hotel. “I hoped I might feel something, or that whoever had contacted him that last time might also contact me,” she said.

But there has been no ransom request, and, except for that initial telephone call, no contact considered by authorities to be reliable.

Vartouhi Basmadjan, her voice breaking, said she can scarcely believe her brother has disappeared.

“Part of my mind doesn’t accept it, and that’s the reason I am able to survive,” she said.

The country’s foreign community also has followed the case with a bit of disbelief.

“We Westerners are used to being expelled maybe, detained by the Soviet authorities perhaps, but never falling victim to a Soviet Mafia,” said one European diplomat. “These are new times and apparently, there are new dangers.”