A strong student, Wyatt was accepted to attend Texas A&M University but, in the midst of World War II, he left after a year of school in 1942 to enlist in the United States Army Air Forces as a pilot.
[5] A 2007 Texas Monthly magazine article called Wyatt the real "J. R. Ewing" of the Oil Business and described Oscar and his fourth[8] wife Lynn Sakowitz, a fixture of Houston social, fashion together as the beauty and the beast.
Wyatt entered the refining industry in the early 1960s, and he began to attend Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meetings in Vienna, Austria.
El Paso needed the cash to repay the mounting debt it had acquired from following the same business model as Ken Lay's Enron.
[12] At his sentencing hearing, Wyatt's attorney, Gerald Shargel, pointed to a commission report led by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker that concluded that about half of the 4,500 companies in the Oil-for-Food Program paid a total of $1.8 billion in kickbacks and illicit surcharges to Saddam's regime.
Wyatt's defense also floated the issue of "vindictive prosecution"—that is, the Bush administration singling out its old nemesis in both the oil patch and politics for punishment while leaving other possible violators of the sanctions alone.
Prosecutors, in turn, amassed a daunting paper trail and rewarded a few former Iraqi petrocrats with help in obtaining U.S. green cards—as long as they agreed to testify against sanction breakers like Wyatt.
[9] In October 2007 Wyatt pleaded guilty to conspiring to, under the Oil-for-Food Program, make illegal payments to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
[13] After stepping down from Coastal, Wyatt continued to consult with other petroleum related interests to help them improve their processes and procedures, and maximize their pipeline and refinery operations, resulting in better returns for common shareholders.