Police have arrested the so-called “Panty Bandit” who they say broke into nearly a dozen lingerie stores since January, stealing over $10,000 of lingerie.
35-year-old Carlos Olivares was arrested on Thursday after police saw him trying to pry open a door of a store in the San Fernando Valley, reports ABC 7.
“We had dubbed this man the Panty Bandit,” said Det. Merrill Dunn in a statement released by the LAPD. “His penchant for breaking into lingerie shops told us this was a matter of organized retail crime, which means he’s reselling the merchandise to fences or shipping it out of the country.”
“It just is a maddening thing,” Beth Higgins of Intimate Image told the television station. “You work so hard all your life for all this money and for someone just to come in and disrespect and take off with it – it’s very maddening,” she said.
Higgins had her store, which specializes in helping cancer patients who have had a mastectomy find a custom bra, broken into twice by Olivares.
Olivares was booked for commercial burglary.
