COLUMN ONE : Murder for Hire in Moscow : A wave of contract killings has Russians on edge. Businessmen are the prime targets of brazen hit men, who style themselves after American gangsters.

Thugs had been demanding protection money from the businessman for some time. Then one recent day, his wife opened the door of their apartment and a bomb went off. She bled to death in front of their two small children.

At Russia’s fortress-like police headquarters, Officer Vladimir A. Petukhov, the harried and dour veteran lawman in charge of investigating contract killings, estimated that 100 to 150 businessmen have been murdered this year by extortionists, gangsters and free-lance hit men. As for the gangland-style bombing at the home of the manager of a Russian-Swiss venture, it raised no eyebrows.

“I wish I could tell you something,” Petukhov said. “But, unfortunately, we have so many of such cases these days, I just don’t remember it.”

Moscow has become a lawless place, where former KGB agents hire themselves out as bodyguards to jittery Western business executives and where machine-gun slayings are a near-daily event. Muscovites compare their staid, gray city to Al Capone’s Chicago--with onion domes.

But to Russians, no new crime is more exotic, more thrillingly American, more chilling than murder for hire. Contract killing, especially of businessmen, has become emblematic of the broader breakdown of authority and the evolution of a market-driven economic free-for-all.

Capitalism thrives in the death-for-dollars racket. Some of the killers have been hired by business rivals to eliminate the competition.

The price for snuffing out a life ranges from a bottle of vodka--if the deal is among friends--up to several thousand dollars for a prominent or well-defended target, Petukhov said. The killings have terrified the entrepreneurs who are supposed to be investing in Russia’s new economy but who now must also invest in bodyguards and security systems. Though no foreign businessmen have been assassinated, there are growing concerns that the tide of crime may discourage their interest in Russian projects.

Five senior Russian bankers recently wrote an open letter to President Boris N. Yeltsin pleading for protection against a wave of intimidation and murder by mobsters.

Gangsters have commissioned the killings of at least 10 bankers in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Ekaterinburg (an emerging Urals business center that was formerly known as Sverdlovsk) in an attempt to gain control over large commercial banks, according to the letter, signed by the president of the Russian Banking Assn. and four others and published in the Trud newspaper.

“This terror campaign is an attempt by the criminal world to control the developing commercial structures in Russia,” said Konstantin N. Borovoi, another leading businessman and chairman of the new, pro-business Economic Freedom Party. “The state can do nothing to protect private enterprise from an all-out attack by the Mafia. All this paralyzes the will and initiative of many businessmen. It is especially damaging at this stage when private business is not yet on firm footing.”

Crime of all kinds began skyrocketing across the former Soviet Union as soon as Big Brother stopped watching. Russia’s murder rate has almost tripled since perestroika began and stood at 19.9 per 100,000 residents in the first six months of this year--double the American rate but about a third lower than in Los Angeles.

As in Southern California, gangs are blamed for much of the crime wave. Police say Russia has almost 3,300 organized crime groups, some armed with Kalashnikov submachine guns, hand grenades and other leftovers from the splintered Soviet army.

The new Mafiosi are easy to spot in Moscow’s pricier restaurants. They shamelessly ape every cliche of the Hollywood gangster movie. They favor Italianate zoot suits and bottle-blondes in Lycra. They sneer through clouds of cigarette smoke and speak an incomprehensible slang.

Their violent conduct is even more jarring: In one bloody week in July, they staged gangland shootouts in Moscow that killed eight people and wounded six more.

Four people were killed when seven men from Chechnya--the southern republic that is gaining a reputation as the Sicily of Russia--drove up to a Russian-Italian auto dealership on Leninsky Prospekt and started shooting in apparent retaliation for the business’s failure to pay protection money. A police spokeswoman said that security guards inside the dealership returned fire; an Alfa Romeo also was riddled with bullets.

Until glasnost , Soviet police could and did arrest hooligans--and dissidents--for tuneyastvo , or failure to work, a crime usually punished by a year at hard labor. Now, beleaguered authorities are overrun by brazen narcotics traffickers, kidnapers, bombers, counterfeiters and even train robbers--and arrest and conviction rates are dropping. (Expressing concern about the possibilities of the Russian crime wave becoming an export, American and German law enforcement officials this week offered their aid and know-how to their counterparts in Moscow.)

While most of Russia struggles to convert to capitalism, the bad guys have quickly found their market niche.

In the Soviet Union, murder for hire was simply unheard of, except in decadent Western crime thrillers. Now, the Russian press runs splashy interviews with hit men known by the English word killer.

“Before,” Petukhov said, “this was only in the realm of fantasy.”

One group of free-lance hit men told the magazine Ogonyok that two-thirds of their clients are women who want to do in their men. Any person can be killed, even Yeltsin himself, they boasted, “if only it is paid for.”

While state-inspired fear once made Soviet citizens law-abiding, the anarchic Russian democracy has come to mean liberation for criminals, a license to make money by importing the seamiest aspects of Western culture. Prime-time television carries commercials for gas pistols, brass knuckles and other weapons; hard-core pornography is sold openly a few steps away from the once-dreaded KGB headquarters.

“All the social and law-enforcement structures that used to restrain people were liquidated by ‘democracy,’ ” Petukhov said.

By July, at least 32 Russians had been killed by paid assassins, Stolitsa magazine reported. The victims included two imprisoned gang kingpins, three lawmakers, a factory director and the head of a military academy.

Russians who do business with the West--including emigres who come back to help cinch deals for their foreign employers--are presumed to be awash in hard currency and are at special risk for extortion, muggings, kidnap and murder.

In the past month, the 36-year-old director of a Russian-Canadian firm and a partner in the Russian-American Tren-Mos restaurant here, were each murdered in what appeared to be professional hits.

At Tren-Mos, a joint venture between natives of Trenton, N.J., and Moscow, Ray Marini, the American general manager, said he was baffled by the killing of restaurant partner Sergei Goryachev, 58, a former city council member. The restaurant had received one extortion threat over a year ago but refused to pay and had encountered no trouble since, Marini said.

Goryachev had not confided any problems to friends. His body was found in his garage; he had been shot three times--apparently with a silencer-equipped pistol. “I have 1,001 opinions” about who might have killed Goryachev, said Marini. “And they change by the hour.”

Some of the new victims clearly are gangsters or former black-marketeers with shady connections. But businessmen complain that law enforcement has been too quick to assume that anyone preyed upon by gangsters must be one of them.

In the early days of perestroika, police considered businessmen to be economic criminals and were slow to protect them. The image of businessmen as speculators, parasites and Mafiosi is still widespread.

“There is a very anti-business tendency in Russia today,” said a friend of the woman murdered in the bomb attack. “I can’t say people are reading these articles (about slain businessmen) with sorrow and pity.” He said the prevailing attitude is, “You drive a Mercedes, you are killed. Too bad for you.”

In February, Yeltsin said publicly that 40% of Russian business leaders and two-thirds of all companies had organized crime ties.

But businessmen counter that many government officials are either paid off by or in business with mobsters. The charge is impossible to prove or disprove. However, widespread corruption coupled with economic hardship have arguably become Yeltsin’s top political liabilities.

In 1992, 2,000 government officials were found to have been doing business on the side, which is forbidden by Russian law. And 900 civil servants were found guilty of corruption, of whom nearly 200 were police officers, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

There is sketchy evidence that some slain entrepreneurs may have run afoul of bureaucrat-Mafia joint ventures.

In Minsk--once a snoozing provincial city and now capital of independent Belarus--Alexander Lisnichuk, a former city council member-turned-entrepreneur, was shot to death in his car in May as he was about to drive away from his export firm.

The murder weapon, which was found after it had been discarded in the stairwell of a neighboring building, was a German carbine with an optical targeting device and a silencer, leading police to suspect a professional job.

Kommersant newspaper, a racier Russian version of the Wall Street Journal, concluded that the killing of Lisnichuk, 35, had probably been ordered by rivals in the export business. The newspaper suggested that the competitors may include civil servants, alleging that in Belarus “the top levels of organized crime are staffed by members of the government bureaucracy.”

“The Lisnichuk murder, in all likelihood, has become one of the first results of the cooperation between corrupt civil servants and the enterprises that use their services on the one hand, and organized crime bosses on the other,” Kommersant said.

The line between legitimate and shady business is unquestionably blurred. Russia lacks clear property laws, a rational tax code, a coherent export control policy and a justice system to enforce them. This throws the door wide open to extortion, kickbacks, strong-arm business tactics and every kind of corruption, experts say.

Both Russian and Western businessmen say privately that in Russia it is difficult to function without bribing bureaucrats, evading taxes that would otherwise take more than 90% of their profits, or paying gangsters for “protection.” Even new entrepreneurs with clean hands have little choice but to pay their “shadow tax,” because the police have proven powerless to protect them.

“Most of the murder-for-hire hits are crimes of vengeance against businessmen who resolutely refuse to pay protection money,” said Borovoi, the Economic Freedom Party chairman. “Of course, there are cases where crooked businessmen hire thugs to remove their more successful opponents. But such cases are comparatively rare. They largely testify to the fact that we are still going through an uncivilized period of business creation.”