American literature has been shaped by remarkable storytellers like Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and John Steinbeck. But behind their groundbreaking books and stories lies.

Equally incredible.

Tales of struggle and triumph. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of Wondry's podcast, American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, we'll explore the lives of six of America's greatest authors and how their personal triumphs and tragedies influenced their writing and transformed modern literature. Follow American History Tellers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondry app. Support for The Big Dig comes from Cure Alzheimer's Fund, which supports foundational scientific research into the causes of Alzheimer's disease because research is the only path to a cure. Learn more at CureALZ. Org. And also from Bunker Hill Community College, now registering for online winter session. A three week session starting January second designed to help students catch up on classes and get ahead. B-h-c-c. Edu/winter. When did you first realize there was something weird going on with the concrete that was going into the big dig?

Mix 404.291. I remember doing the work on it and I didn't like it. It was setting up too quick. I remember talking with the boss, I said, Well, what's going on here? This stuff is just tightening up very quick, setting up quick. He said, It's that new mix we decided to use. I'm thinking, Oh, no, this is not going to go well.

Dan Johnston was a quality control technician for Aggregate Industries, the largest supplier of concrete for the big dig. But I have to say, he's not what I would have pictured. Johnston has long hair down past his shoulder blades. The shelves in his living room are filled with Stephen King, classic sci-fi with the books propped up by statues of dragons and gargoyles. I might expect to find him at a Magic: The Gathering tournament, more than I would a concrete plant.

I ended up in construction first through The Trades painting. I was the worst cop until you ever run into. I was scared the hell out of the nails. I never could hit it twice. I ended up meeting some friends who were in the testing business, testing materials for construction. I had a friend who was working for this company who said, come on down.

This was in 1997, just as the Big Dig was entering its peak construction years.

Essentially, you look at.

All the ingredients. And Johnson's job was to check the concrete.

Stone, sand, water, cement, fly ash.

Put it through a whole battery.

Of tests. Slump test, air entrainment test, temperature, the yield.

In theory, all the concrete going into the ground would pass these tests, and that meant the concrete would last. In theory, could you give me a sense of the quantity of concrete that was going into the big dig?

Yes, I get a pretty good number for you. That truckload that you look at has 11 yards of concrete, essentially a sidewalk that goes the length of a football field, including the end zones. So that's one truckload. We had 100 drivers. So 100 of those going out every hour, almost.

And those trucks are just going back to the plant, back to the job site, back to the plant, back to the job site all day non-stop.

We had guys, they were laughing. They were in the 40-40 club. That's 40 hours regular, 40 hours overtime.

A week.

A week. Every week. So that's a lot.

In total, aggregate industries build the big dig for 135,000 truckloads of concrete.

What I told the feds was that I couldn't swear on to oath that even one truckload was batched as it should have been. Not one. Not one.

From GBH News, this is The Big Dig, a study in American infrastructure. I'm Ian Koss. All along, we knew The Big Dig was expensive. We knew there were some slip-ups, that there were some wasted money, but we could still hope that at least the money was being spent on a job well done, built to last. It wasn't until the tunnels were virtually complete that their flaws became clear, causing disruption, distrust, and in one case, a needless death. At that point, the question of responsibility over the project took on a whole new meaning. This is part eight. I want justice for what happened.

Never mind the light. Today, there was a ribbon at the end of the new I-93 northbound tunnel.

One, two, three, go.

Yeah. After some.

Twelve years- A ribbon cutting is really a magical thing, like alchemy. If it's done right, all the frustration turns to relief. Talk of cost turns to talk of benefits. The entire narrative turns a corner. And we're going to build this project. All you.

Folks out there in the hard hats.

That made today a reality. And in 2003, the Big Dig stood on the threshold of just such a magical moment.

And.

It really was like you flipped the switch and there was one last car that went over and then there was a first car that went down. It's exactly right. Mike Lewis, the Dig's project director, was there that day when the rusted, crumbling, elevated central artery carried its final car. When you.

Do that shift of traffic for the first time in 50 years, there is no traffic on 993 above the city.

I want to recall for a moment, if we still can, the idealism and vision that launched this whole story. Fred Salvucci walking under the elevated artery, eyeing the space between the columns, imagining what the city would be like if it weren't there. That moment feels like a lifetime ago. I'm buried now beneath layers and layers of crusted outrage over this project. It's amazing to think that a vision can survive that much fury. So many handoffs, so many careless drops, and yet still become reality.

It was a cold December morning, crystal clear, bluebird day. I remember walking down the elevated artery in the north end, and it was silent because the traffic was gone. It was this first time that I really got feeling like this is why we did this. It was that silence.

For once, the naysayers had nothing. The tunnel worked. The city above was quiet. A passing driver shouted out the window, Good job, boys. By the summer of 2004, the elevated structure was gone completely, a fading scar from a decades old wound. The Red Sox were on their way to breaking the decades long curse and winning the World Series. The Democratic National Convention even came to town that summer, and it was held right next to her that rusted, crumbling highway once divided the city. In the.

End, that's what this.

Election is about.

A young senator from Illinois got up on stage and dared us to believe in our government.

Do we participate.

In a politics.

Of cynicism?

Or.

Do we.

Participate.

In a.

Politics of hope? If ever there was a year to break curses and shed cynicism to change tired narratives, this was it. And then… Just.

When we thought it was safe to start saying nice things about the big dig, there comes news that The Big Dig is full of leaks.

In September of 2004, water started gushing through the tunnel walls of the brand new central artery, 300 gallons a minute. Traffic backed up for over five miles, and even several hours after it started, no one could find where the water was coming from. Officials could be seen actually tasting the water to at least figure out if it was salty or not. Later that night, as cars continued to creep past this ominous pool covering a whole lane, the source was finally found.

A massive leak was found in one of the slurry walls in the northbound I-90.

An eight-inch hole in something called a slurry wall. I want to take a little engineering aside here because the slurry wall is actually what made the entire big dig possible. Now, it was also making it questionable. If you've ever dug a hole anywhere, you know it's hard to just go straight down without the dirt on the sides caving in. If the soil is loose or wet, it's even worse, right? Now imagine excavating the path for a tunnel that's the width of a highway up to 100 feet deep and surrounded by skyscrapers. There's just no way to keep it all from caving in unless you can put a solid wall in the ground before you start excavating. Before. Can we talk about the slurry wall method? Slurry wall is fine. You may recall Maureen McAfrey from a couple of episodes ago. She was a project engineer on one of the big downtown tunnel contracts, all of which used slurry walls.

Here's how it works. First, a giant milling machine that digs a rectangular trench.

The first step is to start digging a trench about three feet wide at the edge of where the tunnel will go.

At the same time, we pump slurry.

So is each bucket full of dirt comes out, it's replaced by slurry, a soupy clay mixture. What's the consistency of slurry? Could you give us an everyday comparison?

That's a good one. I'm thinking.

If you.

Took a really heavy cake batter and you threw in about three times as much flour, you could maybe match a little bit what slurry would be like.

It has to be stiff enough to actually hold back the earth as you dig that trench straight down 100 feet. But the slurry never hardens. It stays soft enough that you can pump it back out when you're done.

How deep.

Are we now?

93.

Feet now. We're going about 106. I actually find this process a little eerie because when you look at videos of these things being dug at ground level, it just looks like a little muddy ditch. But if you stepped in that ditch, you would slowly sink down over 12 stories into the ground.

A hundred or 120 feet down, depending on where you were on the site.

Don't worry, that never happened.

Finally, concrete is poured and the slurry is pumped out and reused. And now we're ready to put.

Concrete in. Now that slurry filled trench becomes a concrete wall.

We drop in a rebar cage really carefully, and then a concrete pump truck would be pumping concrete into.

That giant trench.

At the same time that we have a pump sucking out that bent night slurry.

Again, there is a delicate exchange of material: concrete in, slurry out, so that something thick and heavy is filling that trench at all times.

Of course, the concrete is heavier, so it's going to the bottom and you're pushing out slurry coming up the top and just pump, pump, pump, pump concrete until you're all the way to the top and poof magic. That's just one panel on just one project.

The whole big dig had about five miles worth of these slurry walls, more than any other project in North America.

So eight foot increments, and I can imagine it took a considerable amount of time.

Pouring slurry walls is a high stakes game. The walls have to be straight. The reinforcing steel has to be straight. Everything has to be done quickly because the longer that trench is open and filled with cake batter, the more chances there are for complications.

The trickiness is if.

The.

Holes cave in.

Jim Bruno was a project manager on one of the other downtown tunnel contracts. The reason he was worried about cave-ins is that if clumps of dirt get mixed into the slurry, then you end up with clumps of dirt in your concrete wall. I'm trying to imagine if you're like 60 or 75 feet down, you've got the steel already laid in there, and then it caves in. You're taking all that out to fix the cave in?

You make decisions.

If you were to.

Have a cave.

In, while the steel is going down, you're.

Faced with trying to pull.

It back out or go in, and now your concrete is mixed up with dirt, which is unacceptable.

Do you remember any especially tough calls where it's like, boy, we should probably go down and dig that out, but that's going to be, wow, a big step back.

There were a few tough calls, but again, at the end of the day, everything worked out.

Good evening. Day two of those State House Transportation Committee hearings on The Big Dig, as House and Senate members seek to find out how serious those leaks in the I-93 tunnel are and who should pay for the repairs. City and the Hot Sea.

Today- In the fall of 2004, just weeks after that eight-inch hole opened up in one of the downtown slurry walls, a man named Jeffrey Cohen moved up to Boston.

I was reading newspaper articles about a leak in the tunnel.

Where he was starting a new job as assistant.

Us attorney. When I got into the office, I basically, the first day I was there said, Hey, why aren't we doing a big dig case?

There had been investigations of the big dig before, but not by the US attorney's office. These federal prosecutors carried a different heft. There were charges they could bring that no state prosecutor could. In particular, they could work with something called the Falls Claims Act.

It's a very powerful federal statute.

Which basically allows someone like Jeffrey Cohen to prosecute anyone who knowingly bills the government for shoddy or fraudulent work. There's a whole section at the Department of Justice that specializes in this one case.

And that's happened to be where I came from.

Now, here he was just down the street from the biggest public works project the federal government had ever funded, and it's full of leaks. Seemed like there had to be a false claim in there somewhere. In order to make that case, Cohen was paired up with another federal prosecutor.

My name is Fred Wieshack. I was an assistant US attorney.

But where Cohen specialized in these false claims, Wieshack had a background in organized crime, big time organized crime.

I mean, you got to realize, Whitey Bolger was a-.

In fact, Wieshack had spent the past 15 years building a case against the infamous Boston mobster, Whitey Bolger, and his Winter Hill gang.

We had corrupt FBI agents who were trying to derail the case.

For a time, Whyshack had state troopers outside his house for protection. Were you ready for a fresh case?

I'm always ready.

I imagine Cohen and Wieshack like a buddy cop duo, the small, bookish claims attorney pouring over documents and the stalky, square-jawed, mafia prosecutor ready to go do battle in the courtroom. And in many ways, they were the perfect pair for the case. I mean, what is corporate fraud but organized crime with a lot more paperwork? And that's exactly where they started, with the paperwork.

These documents were put in boxes, kept in a warehouse that looks like it's miles long. Literally, we had agents going through these boxes for months to find relevant documents.

As Cohen and why started working through these documents, they found evidence of imperfections, concrete pores that were not up to spec, stuff in the slurry that should not have been there, all documented by Bechel, Parsons, and the other contractors.

Beyond just a mistake here and there, there was a lot of things out of specification.

Tonight in Greater Boston, more bumps in the road as big, big questions keep coming.

You have to remember, these slurry walls have been poured years ago at this point. They were one of the first steps in building the tunnel. Now it's 2004, and we're just finding out there were issues.

All along. The 1999 document clearly reads, slurry does not meet specs.

Cue the outrage. Whoever is responsible for these.

Failures will be.

Held accountable.

In this case, that likely means BechTail Persons, which had managerial oversight of the project.

As the leaks investigation built momentum and drew more attention, the investigators got a new source of information, whistleblowers inside the project, including several from the concrete supplier we heard about at the top, aggregate industries. The tip came in the form of a code, 10-9. Take a look into the 10-9 concrete. Again, assistant US Attorney, Jeffrey Cohen.

I can explain that if you want me to, but it's- Please, yeah. -it's complicated. It may be counterint, but sometimes concrete trucks leave with some concrete still on their truck. If you order 10 yards of concrete for your swimming pool, they might only pour six. But you have to buy it in a truckload. Right. So there's four left over. That four that's left over was the key to the whole case.

Because old concrete is a problem.

Concrete is a chemical reaction. You add water to cement and aggregate, and it makes concrete. And that chemical reaction happens in about 90 minutes. So concrete that's over 90 minutes starts going bad.

Which is why concrete suppliers are supposed to throw away that old leftover concrete mix. But Dan Johnston, the Quality Control Technician at Aggregate, remembers when new instructions came down from leadership.

We're not going to do that anymore.

Each yard of leftover concrete was worth about $80. That adds up. So at some point in the mid-1990s, aggregate industries came up with a.

New system. So someone would call up to the plant and say, Okay, look, I'm 10-9, we didn't have excess mix. So the guy would stick his face in the back of the truck and just guess how much was in there. Looks like three yards. Then dispatch would say, Okay, go to Dorchester and top it off.

Just top off the old mix with some new mix and send it back to the job site. And you could just listen along to this whole process.

Oh, yeah, because we have the CB radios, anyone tuned into that frequency would know.

Johnston would hear that same exchange constantly.

I'm 10.9, three. I'm 10.9, maybe 11, maybe the whole truckload.

And.

It would always be the same. Go to this plant, top it off. Go to that plant, top it off. Jump a line, get a new ticket.

So they have to create an actually fake delivery ticket.

Again, assistant US attorney, Jeffrey Cohen.

That says, This is 10 yards of concrete that was just made and handed to the big dig inspectors.

Which took real effort, by the way, because that ticket dispensing machine is not just a printer. It's like part of the concrete dispensing machine.

Little do they know that four of it was for your pool at a totally different specification, and now it's three hours old. Right.

There was one last trick that the concrete truck drivers would have to pull in order to pass off the old mix. You may remember one of those many tests that Dan Johnston was supposed to do was something called the.

Slump test. Slump test is basically the inverted bucket that every child plays with at the beach, and you pull it up, and depending on how much it settles from the top, that's a slump.

Now, this old concrete mix that I've been sitting in the truck for a while might not pass the slump test because it's too rigid. It doesn't slump enough. You got to loosen it up.

The way you make old concrete look new is you keep adding water to it.

They were told, pull over and check your load before you get to the job. They'd pull over, check the slump, and then they'd throw a switch at the back, throwing 60 to 90 gallons of water into his load.

The Inspector at the job site could then do their own slump test and the concrete would pass.

But it would never pass the test of time. Never.

Dan Johnston obviously knew about this fraud as it was taking place, even if he never personally falsified any documents or broke any laws. For Johnston, the breaking point came when one of his superiors asked him to dispose of a pile of documents.

Get rid of it. Dump it. This was all documentation, a huge box.

Johnston said, Sure, I'll take care of it.

It was in the back of my pickup truck, a hundred pounds worth. I had to go to Dorchester for something. I pulled up in the plant and I remember a bunch of the drivers eyeballing that huge box of paperwork and, What are you going to do with that?

He told them the truth, but the drivers seemed suspicious.

Why don't you just put it in the dumpster there? I'm looking at them. I'm looking at the box. It's like, Yeah, I got to take care of something else as well. Just get rid of it all at once. Instead, I took it home.

Ultimately, Dan Johnston became one of several whistleblowers from within the company that came forward and helped the federal prosecutors, Wyshack and Cohen build their case.

We were able to get search warrants.

In the summer of 2005, state troopers raided the aggregate offices in three separate locations.

We seized all their batch records.

Amazingly, the company had documented its own fraud.

I was certainly surprised when I saw the driver's logs.

And.

They had the code 10-9 on them. Because once you have that code, you can actually count the hours and minutes until it gets poured on the big dig and which contract on the big dig.

All the way down to which panel of which slurry wall the old concrete went into.

And we can then look, does that slurry wall have a leak?

And did they line up?

They did.

I want to be very clear here. There is no conclusive evidence I have found that backs up what Cohen is arguing, that the 10.9 concrete caused the tunnel leaks. There were many public officials at the time who specifically rejected that claim. I mean, there were hundreds of thousands of loads of concrete being poured into this project from multiple suppliers. The attorneys could only prove that a small fraction of those were compromised in some way. So it's hard to know what their effect was. But in a sense, it doesn't really matter because between the tunnel leaks and the aggregate scandal, it was becoming clear that somehow a ball had been dropped here. And who is responsible for that?

Well, I think that's a $64,000 question.

There were the contractors subcontractors, the suppliers, all the people out doing the work.

And then there was Bechtel, Parsons, Brinkerhoff that was watching the work.

So Cohen and Wyshack began building a case against Bechel Parsons itself, the 800-pound guerrilla of the entire project, led by one of the most legendary construction firms in American history. And if there was any doubt about the strength of that.

Case- To none in Greater Boston. Tons of concrete fall from a ceiling in one of Boston's.

Big, big tunnels. That doubt evaporated in a single tragic moment.

There were concerns about the safety and leadership of the big, big project. It's cool, cloudy, and rainy as Mass Turnpike chairman Matt Amarello and I start out for a driving tour of the big dig.

In January of 2006, exit 20 B to Albany Street opened to traffic.

All right, we're on our way.

It was the final piece of the big dig to be completed, the last of the many ribbon cuttings.

You want to get.

Into the... I'm driving.

After a year and a half of work and periodic closures, the tunnel leaks were now under control and traffic was flowing once again.

I want to see if I can do it without.

Your help. All right. So, I mean, 2006 in some ways is right when the project is formally.

Wrapping up. I mean, it was beyond that, Ian. There was almost a celebratory feeling.

Mike Lewis, again, the Big Digs final project director.

We did it. After all of that, after all of the challenges, we did it. We hop on the pike, and within minutes, we're back at W. Gbh, 21 miles and no traffic later.

So what do you think?

People are going to finally see that the pain was worth it. And I can no longer say that on July 11th. July 10th, 2006, went home, and at 11:00, a little after 11:00, I was in bed. I got a call from our emergency management. It was a somber voice. They said, There has been an accident in the tunnel. I knew that everything had changed. I said, I'll be right in.

A series of concrete panels weighing some 26 tons had suddenly lost their grip on the ceiling of the tunnel, swinging down like a giant trap door, just as a 1991 Buick passed underneath. In that Buick was a recently married couple, Angel and Melena del Valle. Could you tell me what Melena was like? Do you have any memories that you still think about?

Of course.

I spoke with the pastor from their church, Lisa de Paz.

My memories about Melena is that always she was with a smile in her face. I remember once when I was driving, we saw a little duck, a chick. And she was like, Oh, my God. She's lost. She's lost. And I said, Well, maybe her mom is close by. No, stop. She made me stop and I start following the little dog just to be sure that she would be okay with her mom. That was her personality given to others.

Melena had come to Boston from Costa Rica. She was undocumented at the time, and her plan was to work and send money back to her kids. It was supposed to be temporary. But then she met Angel, who worked behind the meat counter at a Latin American grocery store. Angel was also new to the city and also had family to support back home in Puerto Rico. The two fell in love. They got married in 2005 at Lisa's Church. At that point, the plan changed. Melena wanted to become a citizen to make a home here and eventually bring her kids here.

So she started working and saving money to bring the youngest son to here to have a better life for them. And it was cut off suddenly.

Wow. And that's when the.

Accident happened. Exactly. Yeah.

On the night of July 10th, Melena and Angel were driving to the airport to pick up family. The car was just a few yards from leaving the tunnel. If they had maybe one more second, they would have been out in the clear.

I got to the tunnel and the state police had it closed off and I saw the panel. From that view, I don't even think I could see that there was a car under there.

Angel, on the driver's side, walked away with only minor injuries because the panels were swinging from the right-hand side of the tunnel. Melena, in the passenger seat, was killed. Good morning. This is a very sad day in.

The.

Commonwealth, and I want to express- Governor MIT-Romney announced the news the next day. What happened last.

Night, of course, is unacceptable. On a very.

Different matter, let me turn to the issue of the management of the Turnpike Authority.

Very quickly, the ceiling collapse turned political, with the governor and the Turnpike Authority sparring over who was responsible. It is time for.

Change at that authority.

Who had control of the project? Who decided if the road was safe to reopen? In many ways, it was a repeat of the Turnpike revolt from the last episode. Same old dynamics with new characters. I'm going to leave that piece to the side. I want to focus instead on what this moment meant for the investigation into Bechel-Parsons-Bringerhoff. If you've been keeping track, Bechel-Parsons has been facing accusations from one corner or another for the last three episodes. There was the Fort Point channel with its pudding-like soil that no one adequately tested. Then there were My Host and Levi going after Bechel for a refund, blaming them for the out-of-control costs. But none of those accusations ever seemed to stick, or at least they didn't produce a substantive outcome. The company was still there, silent, untouchable. It took the life of Melena del Vahe to finally change that dynamic.

It had been hard to focus before.

Martha Cokley became the state's attorney general the year of the ceiling collapse. What does that tell us about public life and accountability that it takes a tragic death in order to actually clarify and focus attention and scrutiny on something like this?

I think it's the nature of human beings to wait until something really bad happens.

The ceiling collapse is especially tragic because it was so preventable, beginning with the panels themselves.

Those panels, they were about eight feet by 40 feet.

By four inch.

Thick concrete. So it was pretty heavy.

Jim Bruno was one of the contractors who installed those panels, which were essentially like the drop ceiling that you'd see in an office building, a ceiling hanging from the actual ceiling, creating a space for air to circulate.

We.

Actually, at the beginning of the project said, Hey, these are real heavy. Can we use light?

Something light, a.

Piece of metal or something?

But the.

Owner.

Said.

If you go to something much.

Lighter like that, it's a redesign, which is time.

And.

It's just too much of a change.

The panels were way heavier than they needed to be.

So we put these things up.

When you say the owner, who's making that call?

Spectal Parsons.

But even still, those heavy panels could have been installed safely. Each one was hung by metal rods that were bolted into the tunnel's actual roof and held in place with epoxy.

They were epoxyed into the concrete ceiling from above.

Basically, super strong glue. And it worked.

You go put up 10 of these hangers, you load.

Test a couple. Yeah, they're holding. They're great.

They meet the load. Checkmark, hang it.

Go on. So we thought we were good.

The fatal flaw was in the epoxy itself.

The epoxy had creep to it.

Over time, it deformed and fractured, losing its grip on that metal rod holding up the ceiling.

And.

I went and creeped out.

Good evening, inspectors and investigators say they have identified more trouble spots in the big dig I-90 connector tunnel...

And that the road- After the ceiling collapse, the tunnel was closed for months while the public waited anxiously for.

Answers, detours, afraid nerves, and longer commutes.

I have a family member who commuted through the Big Dig tunnel downtown. She told me that was the first time she started looking around and noticing where all the emergency exit doors were. It was that moment. It's like peeling an onion. There's just more and more and more inside. And as the investigations produced results, they put the blame on a lot of different people. They're expected to include the usual suspects. The designers, the contractors, the suppliers, including the manufacturer of that epoxy holding up the with the bolt fastening system were reported. But also on the Turnpike Authority, which could have inspected the ceiling earlier and more often.

A lot of blame has come down.

On BechTel- And, of course, on BechTel-Parsons.

Bechtel-parsons. Bechtel leads to.

Know that there's.

Going to.

Be a.

Totally independent review of this.

I do want to be clear. The ceiling collapse was not all on BechTel Parsons. But for the assistant US attorneys, Jeffrey and Fred Weyshack, who were already building a case around the tunnel leaks and concrete fraud, it fit the pattern, a pattern they've been seeing for years. Hundreds of leaks in the big dig tunnel system. In each case, there were warning signs.

The 1999 document clearly reads-.

There were opportunities to correct the problem. Yes, there was a report which indicated a special need- And yet the problems continued.

It became clear to the joint venture, Bechel, Parsons, Brinckeroff that we had them in our sights, that there was potentially going to be a criminal case against them.

The reckoning had finally come. Bechtel's day in court. There was just one problem.

We didn't have one witness from Bechdel, Parsons, Brinkerhoff, who would actually say, We knowingly processed false claims to the United States.

Just like their case against the concrete supplier, the BechTel Parsons-Brenkerhoff case would hinge on false claims, proving the company had billed for work that was not done as promised. Again, Fred Wieshack.

But it's very difficult to hold any individuals at BPP criminally liable.

So that phalanx just never broke. There was never a single person who flipped.

Yeah, not inside BPP.

Did that surprise you? I mean, you had broken through the Winter Hill Gang, of course. Did this feel like a criminal organization on a whole other level of sophistication or something?

I think that's the difference between prosecuting white-collar criminals and prosecuting violent criminals. A lot of white-collar criminals, I mean, they go through this whole psychological rationalization process in their heart of hearts. I don't know what they believe, but at least outwardly, they won't admit wrongdoing.

Part of the problem was that there were just so many Bechel staff who had managed various parts of this project at various times.

Bechel would rotate people in and out like you were in the army.

There were constantly new engineers, new managers.

You got a six-month tour of duty in Boston.

To the point that it was hard to look at any one individual and say, You knew about this problem and you willfully ignored it.

It's like grabbing sand because you can interview 100 people and they would all just point to somebody else as who is responsible for that particular flaw.

So with no witnesses and no actual suspects, Wyshack and Cohen had just one option left: go after the company as a whole.

If their piecemeal knowledge put together would have proven that they knew fraud was being committed, the corporation becomes liable.

No one would go to jail, but convicting the company of conspiracy and false claims could carry a multimillion dollar penalty. Perhaps even more troubling for Bechdel, these charges carried the possibility of debarment, meaning they would not be able to bid on any contracts with the federal government. For context, this is the company that built the new US embassy in Baghdad after we invaded Iraq. The company that the Department of Energy hires to handle nuclear waste, De barment would be a huge blow to their business.

That brought people to the table.

After years of resisting the state's efforts to claw money back, now, Bechdel wanted to settle civilly, even if it cost them. And in 2007, the bargaining table quickly took shape.

They hired Williams and Connolly.

Bechdel brought in a high power DC firm to represent them.

And the lawyer who actually led that team from Williams and Connolly was Bill Clinton's personal lawyer.

Wow. That's some firepower. Yeah. This lawyer not only represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment, he later represented Hillary Clinton when she was pursued during her presidential run for using a private email server.

He would always show me his White House cufflinks.

Also at the table was the new attorney general for the state, Martha Cokley, who was under real political pressure to hold Bechel accountable.

I knew exactly what forces they're in, Marshall. But in the end, we had the law on our side.

And of course, there was the buddy cop duo of Jeffrey Cohen, the false claims specialist, and Fred Wyshack, the mafia prosecutor.

And I think that helped us because everybody in the room knew that Fred would just like to walk out of here and just go sort this out in the courtroom. And that helps.

You've got the guy who put away Whitey Bolger, itching for a trial.

Right. That sharpens the point for at least them. It was a big case. It was going to be months long, but we were ready to go.

The question now was, how much was Bechel willing to pay to avoid that trial? And would it be enough? I want to pause here to say that my co-producer and I made several attempts to interview Bechel leadership and their representatives, including that lawyer with the White House Cufflinks. None of them agreed to talk on the record. At one point, I had a lengthy phone conversation with the company's global head of communications, and she asked me directly, Will this series be negative? I tried to answer honestly that my goal was not to write the great exposé of Bechdel corp, which has been done several times. My goal was to understand how this one project unfolded and learn some lessons from that. But all that came of it in the end was an extremely bland written statement about how the Big Dig was an engineering triumph. It's really easy and tempting to make Bechdel the big, bad villain of this whole story. But when I try to follow that feeling to an actual theory of the case, it doesn't really lead anywhere. I don't believe that Riley Bechdel, great grandson of the founder, was sitting in his corner office plotting a grand fraud that left us in Boston with a leaky, dangerous tunnel.

The truth is probably much more mundane. People were put in positions they weren't qualified for. People took on new jobs and didn't know what their predecessors knew. People felt pressured to keep the project moving at all costs. They were biased. They were stubborn, careless, loyal to their colleagues, overly optimistic. I mean, I don't want to explain away all the project's failings as simple human nature, but the point is, it doesn't take bad intentions for things to turn out badly. In fact, many people have argued to me that nobody wanted this project to succeed more than Bechel. They are not some fly-by-night operation that can just rip off the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and then melt away with their spoils. This is a storied company that values its reputation. Unfortunately for me and for us, I suppose, Bechdel also knows that its reputation is bigger than one podcast, bigger than one mega project even. They know that the storm will blow over. And when it does, that the contracts will keep coming.

We built a criminal case.

Ultimately, Wyshack and Cohen, the US attorneys, they were just another storm for this company. It, too, would blow over.

Essentially, the sense we were getting from Washington, from Maine Justice was that the barment of Bechel was a non-starter.

In DC, Bechel was too big to fail, essentially. Too important to debar. To clarify one more time, no one ever told you you cannot indict BechTel. It was just a decision you made based on the circumstances.

I would say that that's probably accurate. We would send our memos to Washington, and if you don't get the green light, it's a red light.

I see.

It's a backwards way of saying though.

Right. And that meant to you, it's time to settle.

Right.

The very idea of a settlement with Bechel-Parsons was bound to be controversial. After everything that had happened, how could you just boil that down to a number and move on? It feels dirty, or at the very least, unsatisfying. Shortly after the ceiling collapse, Angel delvaye, the surviving driver, made a public statement. Through a translator with a visible bruise still on his forehead, he said, quote, Many people may be thinking about money, but at this point, I don't care about it at all. That was my wife, and that's all I care about. I want justice for what happened. It's hard to know what that justice should look like when the harm is concentrated in a single person. But the responsibility is spread across hundreds, maybe thousands of people. The tunnel ceiling was reinstalled safely. The head of the Turnpike Authority did resign. The Delvaya family received a good amount of money through a series of settlements. Then, Bechel offered the state their pound of flesh.

Good afternoon, everybody. Attorney General Martha Cokley. I just want to introduce who's here with me today.

The deal was announced on January 23rd, 2008.

With all.

The many state and federal investigators crowded up on stage together like it was their high school graduation or something. The actual meat of the settlement was announced by Cohen and Wyshack's boss, the US attorney for the region. Today, among other admissions, Bechel, Parsons, Brekhoff acknowledges.

Their role in the.

Breach of.

The slurry wall as.

Well as their- That day, Bechel, Parsons formally acknowledged their failures of oversight, including the faulty slurry walls, the collapsed ceiling panels, and the use of bad concrete. They grossly fail to meet.

Their.

Obligation and responsibilities.

But the real news that day was the number. A total of over $458 million will be.

Covered by the United States and the Commonwealth.

Of Massachusetts. Almost half a billion dollars, most of it from Bechel itself, which will be put in a special trust fund for maintaining and fixing the Big Dig facilities. According to the US Attorney's office, that amount was several times Bechel's total profit on the Big Dig, meaning they were now losing money on the job. If there were future catastrophic events like the ceiling collapse, the company could still be liable for those.

I know the question will come up and it's been under discussion. We consider the issue of debarment.

However, Bechel would not be debarred. Its leaders would not be dragged into court and forced to testify under oath. It would not bear the stain of being indicted, possibly even convicted. For a company that brings in billions of dollars a year and likes to keep a low profile, this settlement made a lot of sense.

Ultimately, they paid. But unfortunately, it never went to trial.

There were critics of the deal, including Mary Conneton, a member of the Turnpike Authority Board. Because the public.

Could have learned so much.

She pointed out that a trial was really our last best chance to truly understand what was going on inside that black box of Bechel. To put it all out in the open, who knew what, when. But when you have a settlement, that all goes away. How do you value the loss of a woman, the loss of public trust? How do you value that?

And is.

458 millionme in the right number? I don't think so. Again, Jeffrey Cohen. There were some.

People who thought it was a giant number and understood. And then there were some who said we should be bringing criminal charges. And it was one of those situations where I agreed with both people.

We've worked to resolve this, however, we have been ever mindful that Melena Delvahe lost her life in the tunnel on July 10th of 2006. We believe that today's global agreement is the best possible resolution. I do not say perfect, but it is the best possible resolution at this time for the Commonwealth, for the federal government, and for others involved. I'm going to turn the microphone over now to Ted Dorothy, who is to my right, who has been integrally involved.

Did you hold a service for Melena at your church?

Yeah, many people were involved, even I believe the governor was there. And what I remember is seeing people grieving, even for someone who they didn't know. Grievingbecause it was something that could be prevented. Grieving because it was something that could be prevented, grieving because it was something that shouldn't be happened. Do you.

Remember what scripture you read at the service?

We read a Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd.

I know it, but could you.

Tell me? Okay, of course, I can do that. El senior is mi pastor. Nadad me faltara. El lugare de laLisa.

De Paz still prays for Melena's family and children. She still prays that Melena's dreams for them will be fulfilled. She told me she also prays for everyone who is involved in building the tunnel that took her friend's life. She knows those people made mistakes, but she's no longer interested in finger-pointing. In a way, she says, They are all victims of this tragedy as well, and they deserve mercy.

.

Do you have a clear memory of a cleaning out your desk moment? Last day, school's out?

Yeah.

Again, Mike Lewis, the Big Digs final project director.

The last day, my colleagues did a breakfast.

Just a few weeks before that settlement was announced, the big dig quietly ended. The joint venture of Bechel and Parsons Brinkerhoff formally dissolved.

It was really nice because people came from the contractors, from the engineers, from the project staff, from the city. It was an appropriately quiet send-off. It was a recognition that.

We had.

Done this together.

At that point, the books were closed?

Yeah, it was now an operating facility, and the project was complete.

What did you have for breakfast?

I remember bagels.

Thirty-five years after the idea was first conceived, 20 years after it got federal funding, and 16 years after construction began, The Big Dig was over. And there were bagels.

You.

Might expect from this episode, really from the past few episodes, that The Big Dig would go down as Austin's great failed experiment in urban beautification. Maybe all the tunnels have just been shuttered and filled in at this point. Too leaky to use, too flawed to fix, the traffic is as clogged as ever, that people continue to woo the day that Fred Salvuchi ever dreamed of tearing open our city streets and tinkering with what was down below. But no, in a way, the strangest twist of the story is what happens after it's over. In our final episode, the story of the big dig takes a turn for the better. That's a.

Good size tree. It's amazing.

How much these trees have grown. I mean, that can't be more than 20.

Years old. No, it's amazing.

That's next time.

All ago, I suffer all ago. We've been useless words and paper loss. All day, I stayed away from the moors on the Angel's Way. All day, I watched the window down, the sound of the life before you leave. All day, I stayed away, reading words that you might have said.

The show is produced by Isabelle Hibbert and myself, Ian Kass. It's edited by Lacey Roberts. The editorial supervisor is Stephanie Leiden, with support this episode from Elena Eberwine. May Lay is the project manager and the executive producer is Devon Maverick-Robins. I want to thank a few of the people we spoke to whose voices you don't hear, but who helped shape my understanding of this story. Anthony Flint, Paul Ware, and Tom Tramarco. And since this is our last real historical episode, I want to give a special thanks to Peter Higgins and the team at the GBH Archives who helped us access the incredible audio you've heard throughout the series. You can see it for yourself at gbhnews. Org. The artwork is by Matt Welch. Our closing song is ETA by Damon and Naomi. The Big Dig is a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX.

Gbh. From PRX.