Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt Jr. was sentenced to one year and one day in prison today after pleading guilty last month to conspiracy to violate the rules of the U.N. oil-for-food program.

Wyatt, 83, had agreed to be sentenced to between 18 and 24 months in prison and forfeit $11 million when he pleaded guilty in October to the federal conspiracy charge.

U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, citing Wyatt’s age, military service during World War II, and the many letters written to the court on his behalf, handed down a more lenient sentence, but noted: “There’s little doubt in my mind that he broke the law.”

Wyatt cried as he addressed the judge, apologizing to his family and friends and saying, “I would never do anything to hurt my country.”

Before pleading guilty on the 12th day of his trial, Wyatt had insisted he never paid an illegal surcharge to the Iraqi government to win oil contracts.

Prosecutors contended he paid millions of dollars to Iraqi officials to get an unfair share of contracts connected to the oil-for-food program, which ran between 1996 and 2003.

The program permitted the Iraqi government to sell oil primarily to buy food and medicine for suffering Iraqis.

It was meant to help Iraqis cope with U.N. sanctions, but authorities said the program was corrupted when Iraqi officials began demanding illegal surcharges in return for contracts to buy Iraqi oil.

During the trial, the government introduced evidence that Wyatt used an energy company he founded, Coastal Corp., to buy crude oil from Iraq in the decades leading up to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

After the invasion, Wyatt maintained a close relationship with Saddam Hussein to guarantee his continued access to Iraqi oil, prosecutors said.

In court papers filed prior to sentencing, prosecutors argued against leniency for Wyatt, criticizing his “breathtakingly immoral” actions. The government claimed that Wyatt was in a unique position to dissuade Iraq from corrupting the scheme.

It played a tape for the jury of a 1990 conversation in which Wyatt is heard telling Saddam that he had visited Iraq as many as 40 times in the previous 15 years and that he was “largely responsible” for a lot of the transactions in which Iraqis sold one-third of their oil exports to America.

Wyatt’s lawyers described their client as an American hero.

They said he tried to play a peaceful role in resolving conflict between the two countries, even helping to fly Americans out of Iraq when Hussein was threatening to keep them there in the event of an American invasion.