If he were indeed a coke-snorting, drug-dealing, FBI-fearing mob stoolie, he would have just said so, the Rev. Al Sharpton insisted Saturday.
And the world would have forgiven him, he argued.
“I could have very easily said, ‘I made a lot of mistakes 30 years ago,’ and confess to all the allegations they said, and the public would have forgiven me,” Sharpton said, reacting to an ongoing storm of reports claiming that back in 1983, the feds flipped him against his mobster pals after catching him in a coke sting.
“I could have said, ‘I helped the cops because I was scared.’ And at the end of the day, who would have been mad at me for 30 years ago?” he argued.
“But why lie?” he said in sticking to his denials. “I’m not going to distort what happened.”
Sharpton’s remarks came in response to an exclusive Post interview with Robert Curington, the former VP of Sharpton’s ’80s-era National Youth Movement.
Curington described Sharpton as greedily interested when an FBI agent posing as a South American boxing promoter invited him in on a coke deal during a taped 1983 sting.
The then-portly preacher had to wear a wire to stay out of jail, Curington said — echoing a chorus of other cronies and law-enforcement sources who have come forward in the wake of newly published FBI documents.
Curington, of Durham, NC, also told The Post that back in Sharpton’s track-suit-and-medallion days, the rev. was a personal fan of the white powder.
“You got huge public officials who said they used cocaine in their 20s… I’d have no reason to deny that if it were true.”
“He never sold it. All he would do would put it up his f- -king nose” at clubs, Curington said.
“He was too timid for [dealing], but he certainly did a lot of it.”
Sharpton insisted Saturday he’s a talking head, not a cokehead.
“You got huge public officials who said they used cocaine in their 20s” and carried on unscathed, Sharpton said. “I’d have no reason to deny that if it were true.”
Curington said Sharpton avoided using cocaine out in the open. “He was kinda discreet,” he said, and cheap, too, using only what was given to him.
“A lot of people gave him the coke” to curry favor in the concert-promotion business where both Curington and Sharpton were making names for themselves, he said.
His appetite for food was much bigger, Curington added.
“He was a fat motherf- -ker, not like what he is now. He didn’t even like the finer things — he ate it all,” he said.