I accepted a luxury free trip to New York City. I ignored the glaring red flags that’ve now ruined my life

They say the best things in life are free – but for Levi-April Whalley that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The glamorous jet-setter couldn’t believe her luck when her best friend Sophie Bannister invited her on an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City.

Whalley said she didn’t think twice before accepting the flights and swanky Times Square hotel just a few weeks before Christmas in 2023.

Now, she wonders how she could have been so naive and dumb not to have realized criminal activity was afoot.

She missed the glaring red flags – including the ‘condition’ that the pair had to bring home two suitcases full of ‘watches’ to their native UK. The haul turned out to be nearly 80lbs worth of illegal drugs.

Whalley argues she was lured by the stunning city that was a perfect backdrop for her buzzing social media pictures, but is now full of remorse.

‘I’m trying to put the mistake behind me,’ the 31-year-old tells the Daily Mail. ‘But every morning, I wake up feeling regret.’

Pictured: Whalley in New York’s Central Park — one of the famous places she visited during her mini-break with friend, Sophie Bannister.

Pictured: Levi-April Whalley on her luxury, ill-fated all-expenses-paid trip to New York which turned out to be too good to be true.

Whalley, the daughter of a house wife and an engineer, enjoyed a stable and happy childhood in the north-west England town of Blackburn.

Her parents were fiercely proud when she studied social sciences at Lancaster University before completing her nursing degree at the same college in 2018.

She loved the medical profession, and with nurses scant in the UK, it loved her back. But, after a decade of seemingly non-stop study and work, she decided to take a career break.

‘I had my own savings and wanted to travel the world,’ she says, noting that she was financially sufficient enough to have purchased her own home at 25.

Bannister – a former boarding school student to whom Whalley was introduced by a mutual friend at age 15 – vacationed with her in glamorous parts of Spain and Greece. They spent some time in Dubai where they just ‘chilled.’

They’d been back in the UK for about a month when Bannister proposed the mini break to New York. She said she’d been texting with a woman she knew in Dubai who would help arrange it.

Bannister told Whalley their expenses would be covered in return for them bringing back the suitcases of watches – they assumed the backer was some sort of import business.

Nobody specified the type of watches, and Whalley and Bannister didn’t think to ask.

‘It was a bit of whirlwind, and I was caught up in the excitement,’ Whalley says, noting that the clock was ticking because their flight would be leaving for New York in two days. Bannister, who had been chatting to her contact via WhatsApp, also reassured her that ‘the business’ regularly employed tourists like them.

Their three days in Manhattan lived up to expectations – as Whalley admits, they spent much of the time in full make-up and designer clothes striking Instagram-worthy poses. Their photo backgrounds of choice included Central Park, Times Square and Grand Central Station.

Pictured: Whalley strikes a pose at New York’s Grand Central Station wearing knee-high boots and carrying a designer handbag. 

Pictured: Whalley in the lobby of a luxury hotel. She enjoyed the high life which included visiting Thailand, Greece and Spain prior to her vacation in New York City.

‘I loved seeing the sights of New York,’ Whalley said. ‘I didn’t want to go out there and just party. I wanted to not drink and do a lot of things instead.’

As the duo prepared for their Air France flight to Birmingham, UK, with a brief layover in Paris, they followed WhatsApp instructions – this time from a stranger – to wait outside the front of their hotel for the suitcases to be delivered an hour before they were scheduled to take an Uber to JFK Airport.

The contact arrived in a large Range Rover, Whalley says, and the black cases were swiftly handed over by a man neither of them recognized. Whalley happened to look into the SUV and saw about a dozen identical cases stacked in the back.

Finally, an alarm bell rang in her mind. 

‘I began to think something was wrong,’ she says. They wheeled the cases, which featured combination locks, to their room – the women hadn’t received a code to open the luggage. Whalley shook the bag, hoping to hear the sound of metal watches jangling, but the contents were clearly densely packed because nothing moved around.

Both Bannister and Whalley began to panic. Bannister called the WhatsApp number and a man answered. She said they didn’t want to take the cases back to Birmingham because something seemed awry.

The threats, Whalley says, came thick and fast. 

‘He got really nasty and said we had to go through with it because we had a deal,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘When Sophie told him we wanted to back out, he said he knew where we and our families live.’

While many people in their circumstance would like to think they would dial 911, the women froze. ‘We were scared and in too deep,’ Whalley says. ‘I accused Sophie of getting me into a lot of trouble and we argued among ourselves.’

Still, the duo got into an Uber and headed to the airport and put the suitcases in the trunk. They checked in at the Air France booth, but Whalley doesn’t recall being asked by either a clerk or the machine whether they’d packed the luggage themselves.

She describes the flight to Paris and subsequent layover as ‘traumatic’ as they dreaded being busted. ‘It was a busy airport but, whenever we heard a loud noise, we wondered if it was because of us,’ Whalley says.

They landed in Birmingham that afternoon. Bleary from the overnight flight, they waited for the luggage on the carousel. The twin black cases were the last to appear, and for some reason, they were upright rather than laying on their side like the other luggage that came off the plane.

Something was wrong and it was enough to cause them palpitations. Whalley says she wanted to disappear to the bathroom and hide but concluded there was no other option than to pick them up.

They wheeled the cases through the deserted ‘Nothing to Declare,’ channel. Two stern-faced customs officers stopped them in their tracks and beckoned them over to the steel tables. They wanted to know the combination for the locks.

Bannister and Whalley shrugged. They didn’t know. Crying and shaking, they came clean and admitted they hadn’t packed the suitcases themselves.

The officers pried the cases open and discovered a number of vacuum-packed black bags. They cut some open with a carpet knife and cannabis spilled out. There were no watches in sight.

‘It absolutely stunk,’ Whalley says. The smell confirmed that they had unwittingly smuggled in the drug which, police later found, had a street value that was close to $220,000.

The women were arrested, taken to the airport police station and strip searched. They weren’t allowed to call their relatives and phones were confiscated while their respective homes were raided. They spent 24 hours in separate cells – ‘there was just a toilet and mattress on the floor,’ Whalley recalls – and only came out for questioning.

The raids turned up nothing. This proved, Whalley says, they weren’t drug dealers. Nevertheless, she was convinced she would have to spend Christmas behind bars. ‘I was trying to get my head around things and thinking, ‘I’m going to wake up from this nightmare.”

Pictured: Stashes of the large amount of cannabis that the women smuggled inside two suitcases into Birmingham airport in the UK. The drugs — with a street value of $220,000 were seized by customs.

Pictured: Whalley, who was suspended from her nursing position after telling her agency that she’d been arrested in relation to smuggling jobs. 

She was relieved to be released on bail, the conditions of which were centered on each of the women sleeping at their own homes every night for 14 months until they were charged.

In the meantime, Whalley was suspended from the nursing profession. She gave birth to a baby girl, Arabella, six months ago before tragically losing her mother to breast cancer in March.

‘Mum and the rest of my family were incredibly supportive,’ she says. ‘They never treated me like a criminal.’

She and Bannister pleaded guilty to fraudulent evasion of a prohibition in early April 2025. She faced up to 14 years in prison if she’d been found guilty after pleading not guilty in front of a jury.

Instead, Whalley was sentenced to 16 months, suspended for 18 months, with 10 days rehabilitation and 80 hours of unpaid work.

Bannister was handed 20 months, suspended for 18 months, with 30 days rehabilitation activities and 200 hours of unpaid work. 

Before his sentencing, Judge Richard Archer told the women they ‘perhaps had little regard to the seriousness of your offending’ and he very much hoped that they would not ‘involve yourselves in this behavior again.’

Whalley, who is in the process of launching an aesthetics business, says she is contrite. She is the first person to admit that she was foolish and made a monumental mistake.

Pictured: Whalley at her baby shower when she was pregnant with her daughter, Arabella, now six months old.

Pictured: Whalley with her six-month-old daughter. She says she wants to live a quiet life looking after her child — a sharp contrast to the years before she became a mom.

But she maintains there was more than an element of ‘grooming’ by the drug dealers who bribed them to win over their trust. ‘I do see myself as a victim in a way,’ she says.

Her mitigators might argue she was sucked into committing the offense because she was dazzled by all the glamour New York had to offer. Whalley certainly feels our image-obsessed society played a hand in her downfall.

She has since made her Instagram private and rarely posts photos of herself. Meanwhile, Bannister has launched a career as a model on OnlyFans.

In a recent interview, she said Whalley had taken part in a photo shoot — something her friend brushes off.

‘I want to lead a quiet life with my daughter,’ Whalley said, insisting she is only telling her story to raise awareness about the grim consequences of being a drug mule.

‘It’s something I’ll always have to live with,’ she adds, ‘but I hope that some good will come out of it.

‘People may learn my lesson that you have to think long and hard before making certain decisions.’

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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk