When the young Coronel was representing estero thugs in the 1950s, his practice was enriched more by the experience and the occasional hot goods (“a bolt of cloth here, some chickens there”) than by hard cash. Today, he is rumored to be paid in dollars by some of his once highly placed clients. Coronel confirms the currency but disputes the source, saying that only foreigners have paid him with dollars.

For Coronel’s law firm, business is booming indeed. It gets 500 cases a year, and publicity, no matter how adverse, has only enhanced Antonio Coronel’s reputation as the best criminal defense advocate in the country today. It is a position not usually understood by the public. “ Criminal defense advocacy does not deal with angels,” he is fond of saying, which fuels the layman’s belief that his clients, especially the famous ones, are for the most part guilty.

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Although 99 percent of Coronel’s criminal cases are for the defense, he gives the impression that it really depends on which side gets to hire him first. For the lawyer, “the real motivation is the challenge.” The beauty of the law, he continues, “is that it is like a coin. The law is the way you look at it from which side.” On the other hand, he clarifies that a lawyer must remain consistent with his ethical vows.

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Corporate lawyering does not attract him as much as the courtroom drama of criminal defense advocacy. It is in this arena where he has broken headlines and set precedents. In the early 1960s, he defended the Manila police against a Nigerian’s charges of extortion; filed a taxpayer’s suit to stop the building of the Marikina Dam; and fought the Marcos injunction to stop the Manila Public School Teachers Association from striking, the first organization to strike against the government.

It was as a prosecutor, however, that he became a household name. In 1962, the gruesome Lucila Lalu “jigsaw puzzle” murder case was the crime story of the decade. The victim was a beautician whose dismembered body had been scattered all over Manila. At the end of the trial, Lalu’s paramour was sentenced to life imprisonment. For Coronel, that was enough. He himself does not believe in the death penalty.

Since then, Coronel has never been very far from the public's consciousness, achieving a new benchmark in his 31-year career with the current spate of “loyalist” clients. But, if it has been a long, hard climb for him from the dusty streets of Sta. Cruz, Ilocos Sur, to his well-appointed office in Quezon City, he does not show it. Of his boyhood burdens, he speaks with a lilt in his voice; of his travails as a legal tyro, he mentions nothing at all. Perhaps, he no longer remembers the hard times, because, for this portly 64-year-old with the infectious giggle, “that was yesterday.”

There is, in Coronel, this determination to always look at the bright side of things. The “road to responsibility” began in 1944. His father a PC captain, had been killed by the Japanese; his distraught mother was still nursing his baby sister; his brother was only eight years old. It was left to the 11-year-old pater familias to supervise their evacuation, while the retreating Japanese went on a rampage.

After the war, Coronel worked as a janitor for two years in a high school run by an uncle. “But at the same time I was president of the student council,” he grins proudly. Later, he worked as a sacristan for a relative-priest. If he found it lonely living in a convent away from his family, he also found the solitude splendid for mixing poetry and a vocation for priesthood. His calling lasted for three months.

He had, however, a gift for debating and oratory, so he drifted into law. More important, for a young man with modest looks and even more modest means: “My being talkative was probably the one factor that allowed me to enter the field of the opposite sex. They liked to hear me talk, I liked to hear myself talk. So we had something in common.”

A valedictorian from elementary to high school, Coronel was a full scholar at the Philippine Law School. He also clerked at a law firm, and by his third year, he was already attending court hearings. In 1955, when he passed the bar exams, he was among the top 15. Sixteen years later, he became Dean of the Philippine Law School and has been holding that position since, except for his retirement between 1978-1981.

Coronel is also a member of the Division for Continuing Legal Education at the University of the Philippines, which holds seminars for lawyers, judges and fiscals. A batch of lecturers are sometimes invited to the provinces, which is why when the Honasan coup was launched, he found himself hiding under a table in Iriga. He and his colleagues were patting themselves on the back for not being in Metro Manila that August 28 when Communist rebels struck near the restaurant where they were eating. Everyone dove for cover. And “that was the first time,” he cracks, “that the bench condescended to be on the same level with the bar!”

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“When I was a young lawyer,” he continues, “I was very idealistic. I was going to be a crusader for the poor, the trampled, the weak and the hungry. But somewhere along the line, you find yourself fighting for other causes.”

As he is wont to say, but without cynicism or apology: “That was yesterday.”