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.
And he made money hand over fist. “If Oscar were marooned in Alaska,” his fourth wife, Lynn Wyatt, told The Wall Street Journal in 1984, “he’d survive somehow and by the next week he’d probably be doing business.”
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