ROME — Forensic police swarmed the crypt of a Roman basilica on Monday to exhume the body of a reputed mobster as part of an investigation into one of the Vatican’s most enduring mysteries: the 1983 disappearance of the teenage daughter of one of its employees.

Medical experts took samples from the remains of Enrico De Pedis and also took boxes of old bones from the nearby ossuary, according to a De Pedis family lawyer, as part of the investigation into whether Emanuela Orlandi may have been buried alongside him.

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Pietro Orlandi, brother of the missing Emanuela, arrives at Sant’Apollinare Basilica in Rome on Monday. The Associated Press

Orlandi was 15 when she disappeared in 1983 after leaving her family’s Vatican City apartment to go to a music lesson. Her father was a lay employee of the Holy See.

De Pedis, a member of Rome’s Magliana mob, was killed in 1990. His one-time girlfriend has reportedly told prosecutors De Pedis kidnapped Orlandi, and an anonymous caller in 2005 told a call-in television show that the answer to Orlandi’s disappearance lay in his tomb.

Amid a new push to resolve the case, the Vatican said last month it had no objections to opening the tomb. On Monday, a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the inspection of the De Pedis tomb was “certainly a positive fact” aimed at carrying out “all possible steps so the investigation could be completed.”

The scene Monday outside the Sant’Apollinare basilica was hectic, with television cameras jostling for views inside the chapel and the adjacent courtyard of the Opus Dei-run Pontifical Holy Cross University, where forensic vans came and went.

An overwhelming stench filled the air as medical personnel ducked into a tent where samples of De Pedis’ remains were believed to have been brought.

Lorenzo Radogna, a De Pedis family attorney, told reporters investigators had found some 200 containers with bones near De Pedis’ tomb in the ossuary, and that they would be tested.

Orlandi’s brother, Pietro, who was at the scene, said samples from De Pedis’ body had been taken for further tests and the tomb re-closed.

In 2008, Italian news reports quoted De Pedis’ ex-girlfriend as telling prosecutors Orlandi had been kidnapped by the Magliana gang on the orders of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the late U.S. prelate who headed the Vatican bank and was linked to an Italian banking scandal in the 1980s. Marcinkus asserted his innocence in the scandal and the Vatican at the time of the allegation said the woman’s claims had “extremely doubtful value.”

Speculation has long swirled about De Pedis’ tomb being in a prominent church next to important Catholics — an unusual resting place for a reputed mobster.

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