Wealth & Money Quote by John Gotti

Gotti’s “always be nice” is the velvet glove on a fist: etiquette as strategy, charm as a way to keep the machinery of power from grinding you up. The line reads like self-help until the hierarchy lands. Bankers first, pension fund managers second, media third - not because they’re morally admirable, but because they’re structurally useful. It’s a criminal’s map of American leverage, delivered in the language of politeness to make coercion sound like common sense.

The intent is transactional. “Nice” doesn’t mean kind; it means nonthreatening, cooperative, worth doing business with. Bankers represent liquidity and laundering, the ability to move money, extend credit, and legitimize cash. Pension fund managers aren’t a random pick; they sit atop vast, slow-moving pools of capital and contractors, a reminder that real power often hides in boring institutions. If you can influence where retirement money goes, you can influence developers, unions, vendors, and politicians who depend on those investments.

Then the media, last but still essential: not to be obeyed, but to be managed. Gotti understood celebrity before “brand management” was a cliché. Coverage can intimidate rivals, sway jurors, and soften the public into thinking of violence as spectacle. The subtext is chillingly modern: you don’t beat the system by standing outside it; you parasitize its gatekeepers.

Context matters, too. This is late-20th-century New York, where organized crime, finance, labor, and tabloid culture weren’t separate worlds so much as adjacent rooms with a lot of shared acquaintances. The quote works because it’s blunt about a truth polite society prefers to deny: power is rarely just about force. It’s about access, optics, and the people who can make your money - or your story - disappear.