The Up Down Charts

October 25, 2023·50 min·3 clips

Jim Karasiotis described his job as holding a beach ball underwater — denying every cost increase until the ball finally popped to the surface and betrayal was the only feeling left.

From 1993 through 1999, the estimate barely moved. The host treats that flat line as the weird part: the official number rose mostly for inflation, while suspicion kept gathering around it. Karasiotis kept making the same promise. In 1998, he told business leaders the project still cost $7.7 billion plus inflation, and he talked as if that settled it. Dissent did not get much room. When Joe Malone questioned the finances during a governor's race, Karasiotis called a live radio show and pushed him until Malone hung up. Then Jim McGovern got the same treatment. After the sitting congressman commented on the finances, Karasiotis replied with the clipped line, "Jim, stop whining." The host hears more than bluster there. It was a rebuke dressed up as certainty: you are wrong, we are on budget. Reporters could print the claim, but people covering the project were already hearing that the real cost was far above the public line. Tom Palmer had sources. Laura Brown was after the same problem, with enough smoke to doubt the number but not enough on the record to publish. That is when the episode gets tight. The host keeps the ingredients simple: a mystery, a fight, and tension waiting to break. Cost had become the story. It was no longer plain project bookkeeping; the number now carried politics, newsroom pressure, and public trust. Karasiotis sits in the middle of it. The episode sketches him as tragic, maybe even an anti-hero, because he defended the estimate so hard that backing down started to look impossible. The Spartan image lands for that reason. Through Andy Pavin, the show sits with the old line about coming home with your shield or on it, then lets that code explain the corner Karasiotis built for himself.

As heard by us

A civic history about cost, public promises, and the fight over the Big Dig's budget.

The Big Dig treats Boston's best-known construction project as a story about cost, public promises, and the effort to keep the budget narrative under control.

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You want Big Dig drama with a tragic-hero edge and a newsroom-fueled sense of suspense.

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