March 2 - 9, 2000
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
The Big Dig misconception
To read the Herald and the Globe, you'd think that Boston's dailies were engaged in a classic muckraking battle. Ha! It's the Wall Street Journal that's setting the pace.
by Dan Kennedy
One evening last December, at a going-away party at the Rattlesnake Bar, Massachusetts Turnpike Authority chairman Jim Kerasiotes approached Rob Gray, Governor Paul Cellucci's chief political adviser. Kerasiotes and Gray were, to put it mildly, not close. Relations between the two had been strained since 1998, when Gray, with limited success, had demanded repeatedly that Kerasiotes stop attacking then-state treasurer and gubernatorial candidate Joe Malone, who was criticizing Cellucci's -- and, by extension, Kerasiotes's -- management of the Big Dig.
At the Rattlesnake, according to a well-placed source, Kerasiotes said that the Wall Street Journal was working on a profile of him, and that the paper had asked Kerasiotes whether he had any enemies who might agree to be interviewed. Kerasiotes told Gray he had suggested that the Journal contact Gray. Gray reportedly offered Kerasiotes a lighthearted non-response, and the two went their separate ways.
The meaning of the exchange was unclear until February 9, when the Journal's New England edition dropped a bombshell: a lengthy overview of Kerasiotes's record at the Big Dig, opening with the highly entertaining information that Kerasiotes had called Gray a "moron," that he considers Massachusetts Port Authority chief Virginia Buckingham to be a "reptile," and that he likes to boast that Cellucci fears him. The story has turned out to be a defining moment in the ongoing howl over the Big Dig's $1.4 billion budget overrun.
After the Journal's story broke, observers concluded that Kerasiotes had been trying to goad Gray into trashing him, according to the source who reported the exchange at the Rattlesnake. The theory: Kerasiotes knew he had stepped in it when he'd been interviewed by the Journal, and he figured it would look better when the story came out if he and Gray were seen as taking potshots at each other. It didn't work, since both Gray and Buckingham chose to hold their fire when the Journal came calling.
Word emanating from the Kerasiotes camp is that the Journal's February 9 story was a hit-and-run whack job -- an act of revenge by Journal staff reporter Geeta O'Donnell Anand, who, infuriated that news of the Big Dig budget overrun had been leaked to the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald a week earlier, violated an off-the-record agreement with Kerasiotes. In fact, as the Rattlesnake Bar incident suggests, Kerasiotes may have suspected long before February that Anand was going to use his words against him -- which, in turn, is a pretty strong indication that Kerasiotes also knew he'd been speaking on the record.
"The fact is that Kerasiotes is a big, obnoxious asshole with an ego that's out of control," says WLVI-TV (Channel 56) reporter Jon Keller, who's blasted Kerasiotes in commentaries for WBZ Radio (AM 1030). "And that's exactly the kind of person who says things like that and then tries to put it off the record after the fact."
More important, though, was the substance of Anand's story, which had reportedly been in the works since September. For years, Kerasiotes had been described by friend and foe alike as a tough, competent manager -- a bully, to be sure, but a bully on behalf of the taxpayers: the scourge of sleeping cops and rude toll-takers, the tough-talking guy who promised on countless occasions to keep the Big Dig on time and on budget, and who appeared to be as good as his word. In that context, what was most impressive about Anand's story was that she took on not just the man but also the myth, showing, in meticulous detail, that much of Kerasiotes's reputation is based on smoke, mirrors, and accounting tricks. To cite just one example, Kerasiotes has claimed that he cut the MBTA's budget from $785 million in 1994 to $753 million in 1996. Anand reported that the cut was achieved, in large measure, by moving $65 million off the books -- by listing it as a capital investment rather than an operating expense.
"That was a very good story," says a source at Boston Globe, where Anand used to work. "Once you get past Kerasiotes's statements about the `moron' and the `reptile,' she really cut his balls off on substance. She got the true Kerasiotes out there, and did it in a journalistically honorable way."
But perhaps what's most fascinating about all this is the way an out-of-town newspaper has succeeded in driving a story that, up until now, the Globe and the Herald had owned. In fact, sources say it was the Journal's behind-the-scenes reporting that helped flush out the news that the price tag of the Big Dig had risen to $12.2 billion, an increase of $1.4 billion over what had previously been announced. Then, last week, with the local papers scrambling to catch up, the Journal broke another story -- this one by Andrew Caffrey, formerly of WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) -- offering a detailed look at how the cost overrun was discovered, and why Kerasiotes and company kept it to themselves for as long as they did. It's a crucial point, since the Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking to determine whether Big Dig officials were fully forthcoming when they sold bonds to finance the project last December.
It's not that the Globe and the Herald have been doing a bad job. Transportation reporters Tom Palmer, of the Globe, and Laura Brown, of the Herald, are diligent, conscientious journalists who have covered the Big Dig aggressively and in mind-numbing detail over the years. Since February 2, when the budget-overrun story first broke, both papers have been engaged in a steel-cage death match, assigning teams of reporters to get to the bottom of the project's woes.
But there are times when it takes an outsider to step back and look at the big picture -- to question basic premises in a way that beat reporters at hometown papers rarely do. Thus, the media story of the Big Dig is the story of the New England edition of the Wall Street Journal. A four-page supplement that's published on Wednesdays, the New England edition has won respect since its debut in October 1997, but not much attention. That may be about to change.
"For those insiders who did not know that the Wall Street Journal had a New England edition, they do now," says Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, who's also a talk-show host on WRKO Radio (AM 680).
The notion that the Big Dig might be over budget is not exactly new. Way back in 1994, the Globe published a three-part series by Charlie Sennott and Tom Palmer reporting that the cost of the project -- then estimated at $7.7 billion -- might very well be spiraling out of control. "Some federal and state officials directly involved in the project are privately conceding that the final cost will be more than $10 billion by the scheduled completion date of 2004," Sennott and Palmer reported. "Some state legislators -- less intimate with the project but more blunt in their assessments -- believe the price tag will reach $12 billion." In 1998, Joe Malone, attempting to wrest the Republican nomination for governor from then-acting governor Paul Cellucci, called the Big Dig "a big disgrace," and predicted that the price tag would reach $12.5 billion. Last April, Laura Brown wrote a Herald piece reporting that the builders of the very tunnel where Kerasiotes chose to give his "State of the Project" address had filed for another $100 million on what was supposed to be a $400 million job.
For whatever reason, though, signs that $10.8 billion would not be Jim Kerasiotes's final answer simply failed to resonate with the public.
Then, last fall, rumors began circulating that the Big Dig had run into a cost crunch and might soon be forced to revise its estimates upward. According to a number of sources, none of whom would speak on the record or even agree to be quoted on a not-for-attribution basis, two reporters began researching stories into the cost overrun: Tom Palmer and Geeta Anand. As it would turn out, both were overtaken by events -- but it was Anand who was better able to put what she'd learned into a larger context, enabling her to come back strongly after having been beaten at first.
Anand, 33, grew up in India and emigrated to the United States to attend Dartmouth College, from which she graduated in 1989. Following a short stint at a string of weeklies on Cape Cod, she took a job at the Rutland Herald, in Vermont, and then was hired by the Globe in 1994. In 1998, she wrote one of most significant stories of that year's state election campaign -- a report that then-state senator Lois Pines, running for attorney general, had made angry telephone calls to her opponent's contributors, threatening them with retribution in the event that she won. Pines denied making any threats, but her campaign never recovered, and she was beaten easily in the Democratic primary that fall by Tom Reilly, the Middlesex district attorney who, two months later, strolled to victory against token Republican opposition. Anand also got a new job that fall, moving across town to the Wall Street Journal.
They hate us out there. Western swing
In Western Massachusetts -- that vast territory once described by the late Cleveland Amory as anything west of Dedham -- anger over the Big Dig cost overruns is raging.
After Big Dig chief Jim Kerasiotes was forced to disclose that the cost of the project has risen by $1.4 billion, to $12.2 billion, the editorial pages of both Boston dailies urged caution. The Globe opined on February 3 that "the most important point is that the project is a boon to the city, the state, and all of New England. It has been managed, by nearly all accounts, with remarkable skill and steadiness through three administrations, much of the time with Kerasiotes in charge." The Herald has been less credulous, but the paper has nevertheless defined completing the task as priority number one. "There is no turning back," a February 17 editorial stated, "but there is a need to find the political will to move ahead with some assurance that all the facts are on the table."
Them's fightin' words at the Springfield Union-News and Sunday Republican, which have been carrying out an anti-Big Dig crusade since news of the cost overrun first broke. "Run for the hills, Western Massachusetts, run for the hills," began a Union-News editorial on February 7. "Our state legislators have successfully argued in the past that Western Massachusetts should not have to pay for a project that primarily serves drivers in eastern Massachusetts. [Note, by the way, the capital W in `Western' and the lowercase e in `eastern.'] It will take all of their considerable persuasive skills to do so again. . . . [T]he Big Dig has been a runaway train, and we can't help but feel we've been taken along for the ride."
Then, on February 20, a Sunday Republican editorial hailed the decision of federal investigators to take a close look at the Big Dig's books, making the irrelevant but obligatory parochial observation that "the Hoosac Tunnel, a far greater engineering marvel in its time than the Big Dig is today, cost just $11 million to build by the time it was completed in 1875." The editorial continues, "The closer scrutiny is certainly welcome out here in Western Massachusetts, which has watched the Big Dig siphon money from long-delayed highway and bridge projects. . . . Western Massachusetts residents need a tunnel under Boston Harbor like they need a hole in the head. But here we are again, forced to pay for something used almost exclusively by eastern Massachusetts drivers."
Farther west, in Pittsfield, where the hills are higher and the air is thinner, the editorial page of the Berkshire Eagle is espousing similar anger. "Administration officials' see-no-evil, hear-no-evil act can't disguise the reality that the gaping maw of Boston's Big Dig project is swallowing up Berkshire road projects, to the huge detriment of a region that has been digging itself out of the economic doldrums," began a February 10 piece, which continued: "The [Turnpike] Authority is proposing some toll increases inside the Route 128 belt that amount to chump change in relation to the Big Dig's cost overrun. Your government in action." The Eagle, though, doesn't seem entirely opposed to the idea of its readers' helping to bail out the Big Dig as long as the region gets the state highway assistance it's been promised: on February 7, the paper urged Governor Paul Cellucci to "use the latest Big Dig blowup as political cover to abandon his preposterous tax cut measures. They will only make a bad situation worse."
Of course, where you stand depends on where you sit. Readers of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette sit at the affluent crossroads of Central Massachusetts. Many commute to Boston each day. Many more benefit directly or indirectly from Boston's roaring economy. Thus, the T&G editorial page, though concerned about local highway projects, has been considerably less withering in its criticism of the Big Dig. On February 13, for instance, the Sunday Telegram came to this two-edged conclusion: "Mr. Kerasiotes may have undermined his credibility in the current dust-up, but the plain fact is the Big Dig and its appalling costs are here to stay. At this point, he appears to be the person best qualified to see it through." And in a February 17 editorial, the T&G approvingly cited evidence that there is "no evidence of criminal wrongdoing" at the Big Dig -- while noting that local improvements to Route 146 and Route 2 appear to be progressing on schedule.
-- DKResearch assistance was provided by Mary Beth Polley.
Anand's first and most extensive interview with Kerasiotes reportedly took place last October, during a three-and-a-half-hour session at Legal Sea Foods, across from the state transportation building. It was during that interview that Kerasiotes made his incendiary remarks about Rob Gray, Virginia Buckingham, and Paul Cellucci -- remarks Kerasiotes has not denied.
As fall gave way to winter, rumors of the cost overrun grew stronger, raising the possibility that the story would break before Anand's piece on Kerasiotes's management record was finished.
Anand prepared a story that would run on February 2: a piece attributed mainly to credit-rating agencies reporting that the Big Dig was between $1 billion and $1.5 billion over budget. According to the sources, Palmer was putting the finishing touches on a similar story to run in the February 2 Globe. But Big Dig officials -- pushed, it appears, by state treasurer Shannon O'Brien -- met with Cellucci-administration officials on February 1 to disclose the $1.4 billion overrun. The news quickly leaked to the Globe and the Herald. As a result, the local dailies that Wednesday had the exact figure, with both Kerasiotes and his project director, Patrick Moynihan, speaking for the record. The Journal, which had been cut out of the action, went with Anand's less specific story, along with a notation that both Kerasiotes and Moynihan had "declined to comment."
The following week, Anand didn't just get mad -- she got even. And here is where accounts differ over whether Anand, furious at having been left out of the leak loop, took material that was off the record and put it on the record. Not surprisingly, those involved take strong, specific, and ultimately irreconcilable positions. Big Dig chief-of-staff Jeremy Crockford, the only other person who was present during Anand's October interview with Kerasiotes, says, "There is no doubt in my mind that that was off the record. He was playing around, and he was saying terrible things about a lot of people. But it was not meant as a 100 percent serious commentary."
The Journal's New England edition editor, Caleb Solomon, citing Journal policy, would only issue a prepared statement: "Clearly it was on the record. The Wall Street Journal does not take things that are off the record and put them on the record. This was a story that took months of work. It was carefully reported, carefully written, and carefully edited. I think the story speaks for itself." The Journal did not allow Anand -- now on maternity leave after giving birth to her second daughter -- to comment.
Which leaves those who weren't present to wonder what really happened. One perspective is offered by Tom Palmer, who says, "If you deal with Jim Kerasiotes, you know he says things like that and stronger, but never, ever on the record." Palmer is an honorable guy, and no doubt he's telling the truth about how Kerasiotes has always dealt with him. (In fact, though some critics think Palmer has been exceedingly kind in his coverage of Kerasiotes, word out of the Kerasiotes camp is that Palmer is viewed as an overly inquisitive pain in the ass.) Others, though, say Kerasiotes is well known -- as Channel 56's Jon Keller suggests -- for intimidating reporters into not using on-the-record quotes that he fears will prove embarrassing.
On February 11, two days after Anand's story broke, two Globe columnists came to her defense. David Nyhan vouched for Anand's "reputation for careful fact-checking." Joan Vennochi addressed the matter at hand more directly, writing of Kerasiotes, "Because of . . . his willingness to trade information, the press often lets him set his own rules as to what is on or off the record, after the fact. I think that is a mistake, one that I have made on occasion, along with others."
Another Globe source who's covered Kerasiotes says Kerasiotes tends to operate under the assumption that everything he says is off the record, yet he doesn't always make that clear until after he's shot his mouth off. All Anand did, this source believes, was to call him on it. And Kerasiotes learned he couldn't cut the same deal with the Journal that he has with local reporters, who, after all, have to weigh the need for future access against the transitory pleasure of writing one story laced with incendiary quotes.
On February 16, the Herald led with what appeared to be one of the first major revelations since the beginning of the feeding frenzy. Under the banner headline DIG DEEPER, Washington bureau chief Andrew Miga reported that "federal auditors uncovered more than $180 million in additional overruns on the South Boston Transitway, sources confirmed last night."It was, in fact, an old story. Tom Palmer reported that and other overruns in a front-page Globe piece last August 24. Laura Brown also reported it that day in a Herald story. The budget woes came to light when Nancy "Hasty" Evans quit her post as the MBTA's director of planning and angrily charged that spending at the agency was out of control. Evans's charges caused a brief stir, but nothing more.
Andrew Gully, the Herald's managing editor for news, says he hadn't even realized that the $180 million overrun on the transitway, a portion of the Silver Line, was an old story. In any case, he says, the story's newsworthy now because the federal government has taken note of it. Had he been alerted to the earlier stories, he adds, "we would have tweaked the lead."
Which just goes to show that timing is everything. The Big Dig is a hot story now. Hotter than it was in the early and mid '90s, when both dailies, the Phoenix, and Boston magazine were digging for evidence of mismanagement. (The Phoenix published a deeply critical cover story on Kerasiotes by Tim Sandler, now with NBC's Dateline, on January 26, 1996, headlined BILL WELD'S PRINCE OF DARKNESS. Sandler had also written award-winning pieces several years earlier on Big Dig contract overruns.) Hotter than it was a couple of years ago, when 60 Minutes came to town, hoping to figure out why the Big Dig was so expensive, and ended up concluding that, well, stuff costs a lot, you know? Hotter than it was when dozens and dozens of Laura Brown and Tom Palmer stories were published detailing the Big Dig's small triumphs and defeats.
Both papers have now geared up for a major assault. At the Globe, Palmer and political columnist Brian Mooney have been temporarily assigned to the Spotlight Team. (Palmer's popular "Starts & Stops" column, which appears on Mondays, will be written by John Ellement until Palmer's Spotlight assignment ends.) The maiden effort: a Mooney piece on February 24 reporting that project director Patrick Moynihan had failed to disclose $500 million in cost overruns to bond underwriters as early as last fall. At the Herald, Jack Meyers weighed in with a strong piece on February 24 that reviewed the background of two chunks of the Big Dig whose costs had soared out of control -- not exactly new or startling information, but well packaged at a moment when people are finally paying attention. The next day, the Herald published a terrific front-pager by Laura Brown on drivers who evade tolls -- a crucial source of Big Dig funding -- by zooming through the Mass Pike's "Fast Lanes."
According to Stephen Adams of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, the assault has been a long time coming. Adams has been warning of out-of-control costs at the Big Dig for years, first while at the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, and later as an assistant treasurer under Joe Malone. "A story is behind the scenes for years, and then, when it's safe, everyone piles on," he says, criticizing the Globe and the Herald -- and especially their editorial pages -- for being cheerleaders for a project they should have been scrutinizing carefully. "The papers really seem to be more like boosters for the project than objective analysts," Adams says. "The Wall Street Journal isn't a player in Boston, so they don't look to be kingmakers."
Adams's analysis is off just a bit. Though the editorial pages have indeed been supportive of the Big Dig, the news pages have for years scrutinized the project in great detail, if not with much in the way of context. What was missing was a catalyst -- a concatenation of events that would grab the public's interest and focus the media's attention. The Journal supplied both the Gidget Churchill of this story (Kerasiotes's "reptile" and "moron" comments got nearly as much attention as the exposed breasts aboard the good ship Nauticus last summer) and the substantive underpinning, calling into question as it did Kerasiotes's reputation as Super K, the prick who had supposedly kept the lid on costs.
Sometimes it takes a pair of fresh eyes to notice that the emperor has no clothes. Boston is one of the few two-daily towns left, and in this case even that wasn't enough. It's a lesson in the virtues of competition -- and a cautionary tale about what can happen in a universe with fewer and fewer media voices.
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
