Panty Raider Gets Her Come Uppance

Laura Crimaldi writes with charming righteousness in the Boston Herald about an Andover woman who cheated welfare and stole panties from Victoria’s Secret.

“A brazen lingerie hustler who lived luxuriously for years in an Andover gated community while bilking $117,500 in welfare from taxpayers is still tooling around in a sleek $40,000 Mercedes SUV despite pleading guilty this week to defrauding the government.

“It just ticks me off because we work and we’re still struggling,” said Joyce Sheehan, whose neighbor, Jennifer Stevanovich, 32, escaped jail time Tuesday after admitting to swindling state and federal authorities out of $117,555.11 in housing vouchers, health care, food stamps and cash aid.

Stevanovich has taken a hard fall, going from a comfortable Andover apartment complex with a pool, tennis courts and clubhouse to living with her mother in a Lawrence duplex where the white paint is chipping, the gate is rusting and the screen door is busted.

Stevanovich, a hairdresser at Super Cuts in Burlington, was nabbed for welfare fraud after Andover police snagged her performing a panty raid on a Victoria’s Secret shop that cost the business some $14,000 in slinky lingerie. She secreted the scants from the shops by using a sack lined with foil that foiled the metal detectors.

Investigators for State Auditor Joe DeNucci found Stevanovich was paying just $113 monthy rent in 2004 while her bank account ballooned to $76,468 that year from cash made selling the stolen lingerie and goods pilfered from other swanks shops on eBay.