Metro

Rangel threat to ‘ally’

Move over Dale Carnegie: Rep. Charles Rangel’s campaign has a new recipe for winning friends and influencing people — threatening them.

Following a Rangel endorsement rally yesterday in East Harlem, the embattled congressman’s campaign team made an unlikely confession to The Post: They’d strong-armed state Sen. Bill Perkins for an endorsement.

Perkins, a Manhattan Democrat, initially planned to back Rangel’s stiffest challenger, state Sen. Adriano Espaillat, in the June 26 congressional primary, Rangel’s camp admitted.

“I have friends all over the place, and I heard from someone he was going to support Espaillat,” recalled Rangel’s East Harlem campaign manager Edwin Marcial.

The rumors seemed true last weekend, when Perkins failed to show for a pro-Rangel Harlem Democratic confab.

“When I asked [Perkins], he said, ‘That’s true,’ ” Marcial continued. “I said, ‘If you don’t support Charlie, I’m going to run against you,’ ” Marcial told The Post.

Perkins is running unopposed for another term in the Senate seat he’s held since 2006.

Yesterday he offered up lukewarm words, a week late, for Rangel, who was censured in 2010 for 11 ethics violations, including keeping a rent-stabilized apartment as a campaign office and failing to pay taxes on a posh Dominican villa.

“The people are not blind to what has been happening with the congressman, but nevertheless they feel that he measures up to the needs that they have,” Perkins told The Post. “The congressman knows he has my full support.”

But Perkins did not respond to requests for comment on the revelation that Rangel leaned on him.

Rangel, 81, seeking a 22nd term in Congress, is seen as vulnerable after his district was redrawn to include parts of the heavily Hispanic South Bronx and northern Manhattan. He learned this week he would not be getting Bill Clinton’s endorsement and already lost support from former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion and ex- Bronx beep Fernando Ferrer, who both back Espaillat.

Politicos said the bullying tactics reveal how desperate Rangel is to remain in office.

“It shows how concerned they are and how determined they are to win,” said Dick Dadey, head of the watchdog group Citizens Union.

A defiant Rangel told a crowd of about 100 assembled yesterday on 116th Street that it was a Republican cabal that put him under the microscope.

“As soon as I became chairman of the Ways and Means committee, Republicans all over the country said they were going to bring me down,” he said.