Exhibit A – October 7, 2008

Daniel J. Bennett still remembers the day he was late for a basketball game with Gerard T. Leone Jr., when the two were students at Harvard University.

Bennett, who admittedly took his time over lunch, returned to the dorm room he shared with Leone to find the future Middlesex County district attorney pacing.

“He was saying, ‘I just wasted a half-hour. I haven’t wasted that much time all year,’” recalls Bennett, today a prosecutor in Leone’s office.

Twenty-five years after that belated game of pickup, Leone, 45, hasn’t changed much. Disciplined and determined, the lessons he learned on the playing fields as the son of a Franklin High School football coach have given him an edge in coming up through the state and federal ranks.

“I’m never the smartest guy in the room, and never the most talented guy in the room, but if there’s ever been a measure of success, I think I can attribute it to getting up early, going to bed late and not wasting a whole lot of time in between,” says Leone.

The married father of two beams as he describes his role as the elected law enforcement leader of one of the largest counties in the country, which has him managing a staff of 250, including 115 lawyers. “I’m the head coach,” he says.

Leone – who played football, baseball and basketball and also boxed – understands that the stakes are higher here than on the playing field or in the ring. Earlier this year, his office was front and center in three high-profile murder cases that played out in Middlesex Superior Court. In the weeks leading up to the trials, he would quip: “We’re going 3-0 this month.”

And his office did.

Leone’s team scored murder-one convictions against Neil Entwistle, James Brescia and James Keown in just eight days.

On June 24, a jury convicted Brescia of hiring a triggerman to kill his estranged wife’s high school sweetheart after the two rekindled a relationship. Prosecutors portrayed Brescia, 46, of Waltham, as a jealous husband who thought he could reunite with his wife if Edward Schiller, a 39-year-old from Framingham, was dead.

One day later, jurors convicted Entwistle, 29, of murdering his wife and 9-month-old daughter at the couple’s rented Hopkinton home in January 2006. In a case that attracted international attention, prosecutors convinced the jury that the Brit had become financially overwhelmed and sexually dissatisfied with his marriage.

And on July 2, a third jury pronounced Keown guilty of slowly poisoning his wife with anti-freeze so that he could collect a $250,000 life insurance policy.

“It’s hard to think of the job as winning and losing, but the fact of the matter is when you’ve exercised good judgment and discretion and brought a case, yeah, it is about prevailing, because it is about standing up and speaking up for someone else,” Leone says.

He refutes pop-psychology assertions that convictions provide closure for families, saying guilty verdicts offer only a small measure of comfort.

“There is no closure,” he says. “That’s just the beginning for these people. [A guilty verdict] is helpful to victims and survivors and their families … to try to recover, but … in a homicide case, there’s no closure.”

Schiller’s brother Carl, who attended every pre-trial conference and the entire three-week trial with his parents, says it was clear from day one that Leone understood what his family was going through.

“He said, ‘We haven’t forgotten about Eddie and we’re going to keep fighting for Eddie Schiller,’” says Carl, who plans to sit through the alleged triggerman’s next trial.

The truth comes out

Those who know Leone say his sincerity and dedication are the real deal.

After graduating from Franklin High with a B average, Leone attended Phillips Andover Academy on a scholarship to help him gain entrance to Harvard University. He then went to Suffolk University Law School at night while working days at the Suffolk County DA’s Office. That position was followed by stints in the Middlesex County DA’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Adrienne C. Lynch, a co-prosecutor in the Brescia case, was Leone’s supervisor when he joined the Middlesex County office under DA Thomas F. Reilly in 1993. Leone was second-seat to her lead in his first homicide case – an 87-year-old Malden woman who was strangled to death.

As the murder trial neared, Lynch learned that Leone had longstanding plans to go to California with a group of friends for a Notre Dame/USC football game, an annual event that he had already paid for. Had Leone gone, he would have missed only the first day of jury selection – not the end of the world for a second-chair.

But, says Lynch, “it wasn’t even an option for him.”

Not until Leone was assigned the Louise Woodward case in 1997 with now-Attorney General Martha Coakley did he become more of a household name in the commonwealth.

Woodward was a 19-year-old British au pair charged with shaking to death one of the children in her care, 8-month-old Matthew Eappen. A jury convicted her of second-degree murder, but Judge Hiller B. Zobel lessened the charge to involuntary manslaughter and sentenced Woodward to the 279 days in jail she had already served.

“There was tremendous criticism throughout the entire case, and [Leone] never blinked,” says Reilly, his boss at the time. “He stayed true to his plan and executed it perfectly.”

When the jury rendered its verdict, Reilly and Leone shared a quiet moment.

“We met in my office and we hugged and we cried,” remembers Reilly. “Finally, the truth had come out.”

Harvey A. Silverglate, who was a member of Woodward’s defense team, says he respects Leone’s consistency and integrity even though he didn’t see eye to eye with him in the nanny case.

“Gerry was, I guess, so horrified by the death of the child and by his conclusion at the beginning that Louise was guilty, I think he was insufficiently flexible to see as the evidence opened up that she was innocent,” says Silverglate. “I strongly disagreed with Gerry about the Woodward case …but when he would tell you something, you could believe that he believed it. His integrity, in my view, is unquestioned. I say that as someone who has a lot of criticism about prosecutors and judges.”

But Lynch is quick to point out that while Leone sympathizes with the victims he encounters on the job, he is also realistic about the role his office plays.

“You shouldn’t misunderstand the fact that he is an incredibly empathetic person … with him being blind to the reality and ethical obligations,” Lynch says. “He’ll say we have an obligation to either have a case we can prove, or we can’t prosecute it.”