The crack business, it turns out, is a modern, brutalized version of a 19th-century sweatshop. Despite the popular notion that crack sellers all drive Mercedes-Benzes, wear gold jewelry and get rich quick, most of the people in the business work round the clock, six to seven days a week, for low real wages in an atmosphere of physical threat and control.

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Their pay is often docked if they arrive late; they may be shot or maimed if they are even perceived as trying to cheat their employers, and many fall into such debt to their bosses that they have to go into hiding. A few have scratched their way up to the second tier of the broad-based pyramid of the crack distribution system, but even they admit that their lives are dismal.

On the streets or vacant lots, or in the doorways or buildings where crack is sold, people speak of a financial picture far removed from the one they had hoped for and even further from what the world at large believes to be true. Social scientists, ethnographers and others who have studied the workings of the crack trade describe lives built around a kind of shimmering lure, built on myth and self-deception and on a reality that all too often ends in prison, violent injury or death.

Stephen Koester, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver who is studying the lives of drug dealers, said, ''I go into their homes in the housing projects and they have nothing there. In East Harlem, a crack seller who is caught by his distributor trying to steal a little crack for himself has his kneecaps shot out. In the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the retribution is a severe beating; one drug distributor there kept his workers in line by showing them a large jar of teeth that he said were extracted from the mouths of employees who tried to cheat him.

Carl Taylor, director of criminal justice and public safety at Jackson Community College in Jackson, Mich. And for those working under them, said Dr. Terry Williams, a sociologist at the City University of New York who lives and works in Harlem, ''It's a horrible existence.

Even though the business is brutal, new recruits keep appearing. One reason is the persistent myths about opportunities in the drug business. People on the streets who have bought and sold drugs and know the truth tell each other that there is money to be made, that their own continuing poverty is just bad luck. They put on airs, fake courage. But deep down they are afraid of what they are doing.

Huddled in a gray ski jacket on a recent blustery night in Brooklyn, Peter B. Like other current or former crack sellers, he spoke on condition that his identity not be revealed.

He said he had just completed a nine-month prison term for selling drugs, which he said he used to buy from a distributor and resell on the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section. He said that before he went to prison he saved almost no money because he had to spend whatever he earned on projecting the right image: At first he attributed his inability to accumulate wealth to ''bad luck.

When questioned further, however, Peter conceded that he did not know of a single person who has really made any money selling drugs. And his real assessment of his own three drug-selling years, starting in ? I tried, because I saw that the money was there. But the money ain't there for everybody. Ansley Hamid, an anthropologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said most people who sell crack or help sell it do not really make much money.

He also said they lose out financially in other ways: They don't have health insurance. They don't have additional training. They always say they will get rich, but they don't get rich. They just get farther and farther away from a job. Most sellers exaggerate their incomes, though many on the street do look and act as if they were getting rich.

But often it's not theirs. Dealers exchange cars to put up a front. Yet the false impressions have an effect. The swagger and even the small real incomes the street workers do earn are convincing in a poverty-stricken neighborhood, and give them at least temporary status and power among many residents.

The Wages of Crack For Many, Less Than the Minimum. In the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the dealers, or wholesalers - the owners of crack concessions -run their businesses 24 hours a day, seven days a week, hiring runners who transport the crack and cash proceeds. The runners, in turn, hire street sellers and dock their pay if they are late for their long shifts or leave early. The sellers who want lookouts must hire them and pay them themselves.

In the rain there on a recent Friday morning, Lorraine F. They told of the violence of turf battles and how rigidly the territorial and organizational lines are enforced. Lorraine said two young men who were new to the area recently came into Williamsburg and stood on a corner of First Street selling crack.

But she said another man who saw his business threatened walked up and shot one of them in the testicles. The wounded man is still alive, she said. But others say the average figures over the long term are much lower. In East Harlem, said Dr.

Padilla of De Paul University spent months with a gang whose members control the selling of cocaine. For most people, said John Hagedorn, an anthropologist who works for the city of Milwaukee, drug selling is, indeed, ''just another minimum-wage job. Clearly, distributors in the upper echelons of the crack world do get rich; Robert Stutman, a special agent in charge with the Drug Enforcement Administration in New York, said the amount they make is enormous, but he said law-enforcement officials cannot say exactly how much.

Some of the more successful street workers do make more more than the minimum wage. But even they fail to accumulate the wealth they dreamed of. One reason is often their own drug addictions. Many either use the drugs they are supposed to be selling or buy drugs with the money they earn.

And their chances of moving up in the drug hierarchy to where the money is made are slim.

For one thing, careers are short. Residents and street-level workers in Brooklyn estimate that most of the workers there have three to six months, at most, before they are arrested and imprisoned. A Violent Living The Ultimate Risk: It was the threat of jail or death that led Y. During dinner at a restaurant near the housing project where he lives, Mr. Smith said he was ''scared straight. Smith said he entered the drug business at a fairly high level, from which he controlled a lucrative neighborhood business because of his status as a teen-age gang leader.

He had good connections to start selling powdered cocaine, the preferred form in Milwaukee, where people cook up their own smokable cocaine pellets. Smith said he carried a gun everywhere he went.

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His business was always open. If the men wanted to use Mr. Smith's house to sell their own cocaine, he insisted that they sell his cocaine first, and he paid them nothing. Use of his house was payment. Was he exploiting them?

Smith said he and his friends in the trade felt it was mandatory that they spend money ostentatiously. They ate at restaurants, bought clothes, jewelry and expensive champagne, and took trips to Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis. Eventually, he said, the tensions of that way of life made him give it up. One by one his friends were jailed or killed. More and more people are getting shot. More and more people are in jail.

Smith had quit school after 10th grade, and jobs for uneducated, unskilled workers were hard to find. The car wash was the best he could do; he said he feels embarrassed when people who recognize him see him working there. How low can you get? But he said he cannot return to selling cocaine.

Just that day, The Milwaukee Journal had a front-page story about a friend of his who had been found in a ditch, shot in the head. I just grew out of it, man, I just grew up. There comes a point where you know it ain't going to last.

Others said they stopped selling drugs for much the same reasons. Kenya James, an year-old from Harlem, said he watched ''a lot of people get caught and a lot of people get killed. With prostitution, she said: I go for three days. I get a loitering charge dismissed, thrown out. They get a heavy charge. Tiny was in jail. I think Pebbles is in jail. Pebbles, she added, has also been beaten up for trying to cheat the crack distributor she worked for.

The threat of violence, of dismemberment or death, hangs over her and most everyone in the crack business, as heavily as the threat of imprisonment. Still, it is not always easy to get out of the drug world, particularly for teen-age gang members.

The ritual consists of walking through a long line of members who punch and kick them. This ritual frightens many into staying on in the cocaine business. When Sellers Are Addicts 'I Was My Own Best Customer'. Many addicts who sell drugs to support their own addictions find themselves slipping backward instead of getting rich. A former crack addict, who used to sell the drug in Harlem to support his habit, confessed: I was my own best customer.

Richard Curtis, also an anthropologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, recently taped an interview with a man who calls himself Red and who is a crack addict and street seller in Flatbush.

He said it was so easy to make money on the street.

But the myth of easy money persists. And Red wakes up every day, falling further and further behind while dreaming of making it big. Room for Debate asks whether shorefront homeowners should have to open their land to all comers. Log In Register Now Help Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular. The Myth of Wealth -- A Special Report: Despite Its Promise of Riches, The Crack Trade Seldom Pays By GINA KOLATA Published: The Wages of Crack For Many, Less Than the Minimum In the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the dealers, or wholesalers - the owners of crack concessions -run their businesses 24 hours a day, seven days a week, hiring runners who transport the crack and cash proceeds.

Being Killed It was the threat of jail or death that led Y. James said he ''knew selling crack was wrong.

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When Sellers Are Addicts 'I Was My Own Best Customer' Many addicts who sell drugs to support their own addictions find themselves slipping backward instead of getting rich. Why take chances like that? Sweep to a Win Over the Heat.