“I’m imagining a lot of gold-plated stuff and pseudotapestries,” said Wendy Goodman, the design editor of New York magazine. “Needlepoint faux 14th-century furniture and bath curtains in silk taffeta that the Manaforts were told was water-repellent. What do you think the interior of the cars look like? Was it sheer fur?”

In short order, reporters from The Weekly Standard and HuffPost identified J&J Oriental rugs as the likely location of Mr. Manafort’s spree. (J&J did not answer questions from The New York Times.) That flummoxed the small network of high-end dealers who rely on a mix of cooperation and competition when dealing with the biggest collectors, and who expressed utter disbelief that Mr. Manafort had spent this amount at what was basically a neighborhood store.

“I looked at that website, and the rugs shown there were mostly standard Iranian commercial goods from now or not long ago,” said Daniel Shaffer, the executive editor of Hali Magazine, a rug and textiles publication. “There was nothing collectible about them. I don’t know what he bought, but with the kind of things I saw on the website, he would have had to buy a container load to spend a million dollars.”

“I can’t believe it was kosher,” Mr. Nazmiyal said, echoing the opinions of more than half a dozen other Persian carpet experts. “If you want to buy jewelry and you’re going to spend a million dollars, you go to see Fabergé, you go to Cartier and Tiffany. When you go to a local, neighborhood store for rare and expensive rugs, in all probability that dealer is going to contact a dealer in a big metropolitan area to get it on consignment and bring it to you. That drives the price up. There’s more hands involved. People hear about it.”

Mr. Manafort wasn’t even a fixture on the auction scene, a typical stomping ground for those looking for deals on highly collectible pieces.

“He never came,” said Mary Jo Otsea, who ran the rugs department at Sotheby’s, where she worked for more than 30 years. She oversaw the 2013 sale of the most expensive carpet ever, a kaleidoscopic tapestry of leafy vines that was woven in Southeast Iran in the early 17th century and measures 9 feet by 6½ feet.