SAN DIEGO — U.S. drug agents working out of a phony La Jolla corporation they set up to launder profits for a Colombian cocaine cartel have ended a three-year sting, arresting 153 suspects worldwide and seizing $44 million, officials said Monday.

The mammoth investigation exposed a new and alarming partnership between Colombian drug lords and the Italian Mafia, said Julius C. Beretta, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office here. Details of the operation were announced Monday at news conferences in the United States and in Rome.

DEA agents worked with narcotics police in Italy, Colombia, Spain, Canada and Britain to snare seven high-ranking money managers for the Cali cocaine cartel outside Colombia, authorities said. An eighth avoided arrest when he failed to keep a date in Caracas, Venezuela, where authorities were waiting, a DEA official in Washington said.

The arrested money managers included Rodrigo Carlos Polania, a former inspector of Colombia's national bank who is suspected of being a "plant" for the cartel in the anti-narcotics financial task force in Bogota, officials said. He was arrested Friday in San Diego.

Glenda Escandon Sanchez, an official at Banco Atlantico in Tijuana, was also arrested Friday in San Diego. Escandon was alleged to have converted cash proceeds from the sale of cocaine to checks issued by Mexican banks.

DEA and U.S. Customs agents began the investigation in September, 1989, when they established a fake company, The Americas Ventures Associates, in La Jolla. Undercover agents posed as money-laundering "facilitators" and used informants to identify several major drug money brokers in Colombia, officials said.

The Colombian brokers then acted as middlemen between the Cali cartel kingpins and the undercover launderers. Before agents began making arrests last week, they had laundered about $53 million for the drug lords since the investigation began, Beretta said.

The investigation, dubbed "Operation Green Ice," was conceived by Thomas J. Clifford, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA's San Diego field office. Clifford planned earlier DEA money-laundering investigations in Florida, Beretta said.

On Monday, DEA officials said the sting was successful beyond all expectations.

"We have seized $44 million and have in fact disrupted the cartels," Beretta said.

The drug traffickers made so much money from drug sales that Beretta labeled their attempts to launder the proceeds "pervasive."