ABC13/MARQUITA BOYLE
Former St. Louis heist accomplice Latunya Wright, filmed last week in Houston as she appears to brandish a gun.
One of the central figures behind a notorious $6.6 million St. Louis heist is in trouble again. This time, however, the criminal charges against Latunya Wright don't involve hiding bundles of cash stolen in a carefully planned caper, but allegations she flipped out on a disgruntled customer at the tax preparation business she opened in Houston.
In 2012, Wright was sentenced to 51 months in federal prison on a charge of conspiracy and transporting stolen property from an August 2, 2010, robbery. That day, four gunmen emptied the vault of the Grand Center headquarters of ATM Solutions, stole an armored van and escaped with millions.
According to the FBI, the four robbers had driven the loot directly to Wright's home, and she later helped stash the cash in her attic and moved millions more to a storage locker in north St. Louis County. (Ultimately, only half of the stolen cash was recovered, and much of it appears to have been re-stolen by other parties connected to the original bandits.)
After her stint in federal prison, Wright had seemingly left her St. Louis history in the past. She moved to Texas, where she founded MZBIZ Tax Services. It was in her business on March 25 where she allegedly struck a woman in the head with a gun.
In an interview this week, Marquita Boyle told the Washington Post that she'd arrived at Wright's business that Thursday to complain about her tax filings. While waiting, she observed Wright in a heated argument with two other customers, a married couple who had also come to complain.
According to Boyle, Wright pulled out a gun during the argument. Boyle took out her phone to film, capturing Wright walking around the office with a black handgun in her right hand.
The phone caught Wright's attention. In the video, she appears to grab for it. In that struggle, Wright allegedly hit Boyle with the gun, took the phone, deleted the video (though it was later recovered) and then smashed the phone on the ground.
"I turn around after picking up the phone and she has the gun in her hands,” Boyle told the Post. “At this point she cocks the gun to put a bullet in the chamber but there is already a bullet in the chamber, so the bullet pops out of the side of the gun.”
Wright was arrested at her business shortly after the incident. She is facing a charge of aggravated assault.
In a statement released the next day, Houston police said that an "investigation revealed that [Wright] struck the victim with a firearm that she brandished during the altercation."
On Monday, Wright's attorney insisted his client was innocent, telling ABC13 that she had only pulled the gun to get the other two people to leave her business and to stop harassing her.
The case remains under investigation. For the full St. Louis backstory on Wright, including her involvement with the 2010 heist, its various larger-than-life players and theories as to where the rest of the money went, there's no better account than former RFT staff writer Jeannette Cooperman's epic 2012 retelling for St. Louis Magazine. The title of Cooperman's piece says it all: "Too Much Money."
Follow Danny Wicentowski on Twitter at @D_Towski. E-mail the author at [email protected]
