Oscar S Wyatt Jr

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 in October 2025 in Houston. He was 101. 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. 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.” In 2007, he was indicted on federal charges of paying millions in bribes to Saddam Hussein from 2001 to 2003, when the oil-for-food program was discontinued. A year after Hussein was executed in Baghdad for the murders of his own people, 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. 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. 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. In 2015, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, received a gift of $10-million from Oscar Wyatt, founder of the Coastal Corporation, an oil company in Houston, and his wife, Lynn, for its capital campaign. 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 Army Air Forces bomber pilot in the Pacific in World War II.