Oscar S. Wyatt Jr., the Texas oil tycoon who courted presidents and dictators, dabbled in foreign intrigue and went to prison for paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government under the cover of a United Nations oil-for-food program, died on Wednesday in Houston. He was 101.
His death was confirmed by his sons Trey and Steven Wyatt.
One of the last of the storied wildcatters, Mr. Wyatt was a sagacious, rough-hewn entrepreneur who took out an $800 loan in 1955 and founded a pipeline company that became the Coastal Corporation. Over the next four decades, he built it into a national energy conglomerate, a Fortune 500 competitor of Enron and El Paso Gas, and his conduit for oil imported from the Middle East.
Mr. Wyatt made billions selling energy to the Americas. His hydra-headed empire supplied heating oil to the Northeast, petroleum and natural gas to the Southwest, and marine diesel in the Caribbean. It owned vast pipeline networks, fleets of oil tankers and trucks, and 962 Coastal gasoline stations in 33 states. In the 1990s, Coastal had as many as 20,000 employees and revenues that exceeded $12 billion.
With friends in Washington, private jets, a 9,000-acre ranch, a villa in the south of France and legions of detectives, lawyers and public relations retainers, Mr. Wyatt personified Texas. He rode horses, hunted game, packed a pistol and threw lavish parties for Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Johnny Carson, John Travolta, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote.
But Mr. Wyatt also reneged on contracts, left municipalities short of power, raided corporate rivals, battled lawsuits and hostile takeovers, paid fines and civil misconduct penalties, and left a trail of enemies. Many Texans likened him to J.R. Ewing, the amoral oil baron in the television series “Dallas.” Texas Monthly magazine once called him “meaner than a junkyard dog.”
Mr. Wyatt offered no excuses. “As a corporate manager,” he told The New York Times in 1985, “you have to have one objective — to be profitable or popular. I’ve chosen to be profitable.”
He scoured the globe for oil; became a fixture at Vienna meetings of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC; and began importing Chinese crude soon after Washington established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979. In the 1980s, he traded with Libya, even as its mercurial leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, defied the Reagan administration.
Acquaintances said Mr. Wyatt boasted of his contacts and conflicts with Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and with governors, members of Congress and other officials. He contributed to the campaigns of both Democrats and Republicans and nurtured ties with foreign leaders.
His chief friend in the Middle East was Saddam Hussein, whom he met in 1972 after Iraq’s oil industry was nationalized. As Mr. Hussein consolidated his power, Coastal Corporation reaped rewards in the 1970s and ’80s, becoming one of the United States’ largest importers of Iraqi oil.
In 1990, after Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, Mr. Wyatt urged the first President Bush — just as he urged his presidential son two decades later — not to invade Iraq. When Iraq took 21 American oil workers hostage in a futile attempt to stave off a war, Mr. Wyatt, over Washington’s objections, went to Baghdad, negotiated with Mr. Hussein and secured their release. He came home a hero and wept with their families.
After Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the United Nations, hoping to demilitarize Iraq, imposed sanctions that halted oil exports, the country’s main source of foreign exchange. With ordinary Iraqis affected by the sanctions, the U.N. lifted its ban on Iraqi oil exports in 1995, but only to secure food, medicine and humanitarian aid. Letting Mr. Hussein pick the oil buyers, however, opened the door to fraud. In December 1996, a Wyatt tanker was the first to sail out of Mina al-Bakr, Iraq’s main export terminal, under the oil-for-food program.
In 2007, he was indicted on federal charges of paying millions in bribes to Mr. Hussein from 2001 to 2003, when the oil-for-food program was discontinued. A year after Mr. Hussein was executed in Baghdad for the murders of his own people, Mr. Wyatt was tried in New York.
Facing decades in prison, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud. He admitted paying $200,000 in kickbacks to the Hussein government in 2001. Four other charges, including trading with the enemy, were dropped. Sentenced to a year and a day, half the maximum under federal guidelines, he served 10 months and was released in 2008.
“I didn’t want to waste any more time at 83 years old fooling with this operation,” Mr. Wyatt said. “The quicker I got it over with, the better.”
Oscar Sherman Wyatt Jr. was born in Beaumont, Texas, on July 11, 1924, to Oscar Sr. and Eva (Coday) Wyatt. Abandoned by his father and raised by his mother in Navasota, Texas, he worked on a farm and in a gasoline station, earned a pilot’s license at 16 and flew a crop duster. He was an Air Force bomber pilot in the Pacific in World War II.
After the war, he was nearly killed in a hurricane while working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He worked his way through Texas A&M University, earning a mechanical engineering degree in 1949. In 1950, he roamed oil fields, selling drill bits. Seeing an opportunity, he bought unwanted natural gas being flared at wellheads and sold it to a pipeline operator.
In 1955, Mr. Wyatt founded the Coastal States Gas Producing Company — later renamed Coastal Corporation. As an engineer, pipeline operator, driller and refiner, he was involved in all phases of its operations, and could calculate contract details in his head or order operational changes based on telltale smokestack emissions.
Mr. Wyatt was married four times, lastly in 1963 to Lynn Sakowitz, who survives him and with whom he had his sons Oscar III, known as Trey, and Bradford. In addition to them, he is survived by a daughter, Christina Kremers-Wyatt; two adopted sons, Steven and Douglas, his wife’s children by a previous marriage; and two grandchildren.
Mr. Wyatt had costly business stumbles. In the 1970s, unable to fulfill gas contracts to San Antonio, Austin and other cities, Coastal was sued, assessed civil penalties and ordered to refund more than $1.2 billion to customers. In 1980, he pleaded guilty to federal oil-pricing violations and paid $9 million in refunds to the Treasury and $1 million in penalties.
In 2001, Coastal merged with El Paso Corporation in a $24 billion deal. By then, Mr. Wyatt had retired as chief executive and chairman and was under investigation for bribery. He served as a consultant on energy exploration after his imprisonment, and in 2013 reaped a $500 million windfall for his stake in the $2.2 billion sale of an energy company to Abu Dhabi interests.
Throughout his career, Mr. Wyatt remained an admired if formidable rival to energy magnates in Texas and beyond.
“He is incredibly tenacious,” Kenneth L. Lay told The Times in 1985, when he was chairman of the Houston Natural Gas Corporation, years before he fell from grace as the founder of scandal-plagued Enron. “Once Wyatt decides he wants to accomplish something, he continues to pursue it until he gets what he wants or runs into a brick wall.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.