A glamorous drug mule turned Only Fans star issued a stark warning to two young women facing similar charges overseas.
The content creator, Levi-April Whalley, a former nurse from the UK, was caught trying to smuggle some 77 pounds of marijuana into the country when she returned from a trip to New York City in 2023.
She told officials at Birmingham International Airport she had gone on a three-day shopping spree in the Big Apple when they were stopped.
Whalley also claimed the 70 heat-sealed bags inside her luggage were just watches, according to Lancs Live.
But soon, border officials discovered $217,000 worth of cannabis inside the bags.
She was ultimately handed an 18-month suspended sentence at Preston Crown Court in northwest England last month.
In the meantime, Whalley said she is closely following the cases of fellow Brits Bella May Culley, 18, and Charlotte May Lee, 21, who are both suspected of being drug mules.
Now she’s offered the suspects some advice.
‘If I had the chance to speak to Bella and Charlotte, I would tell them to tell the truth and be honest,’ she told The Mirror.
Whalley added that she understands ‘exactly what they are going through,’ but can only ‘imagine how worried they are.’
Culley, a nursing student from northeast England, was arrested in the former Soviet country of Georgia earlier this month when she allegedly tried to smuggle 30 pounds of cannabis into the Black Sea nation.
She was traveling around the Philippines and Thailand before she boarded the flight to Georgia from Bangkok, and has claimed in court that she is pregnant.
Culley has also confided in legal sources that she was in love with a mystery man who now forms a central part of the investigation.
Lee, a former flight attendant from south London, meanwhile, was apprehended in Sri Lanka after police discovered she was ferrying more than 100 pounds of ‘Kush’ – a synthetic strain of cannabis that contains remnants of human bones.
Both women have denied the charges against them, but if she were to be convicted Culley could spend the rest of her life in prison and Lee could spend more than two decades behind bars.
In them, Whalley apparently sees herself – claiming the two suspects are ‘victims’ who were in ‘vulnerable’ situations like she was when she agreed to become a drug mule to ‘escape.’
‘I was not in a good place and could say I was somewhat vulnerable at the time,’ she claimed. ‘These are two young girls – and I believe that’s probably the same situation for them.’
Her comments come as authorities across the world are working to determine whether local gangs in Thailand may be targeting naïve travelers.
Jemal Janashia, a former police general in Georgia and one of the country’s top drug crime experts, told the DailyMail.com that local investigators will be keen to explore ‘the possibility of a link’ between Culley and Lee’s cases – and, hauntingly, ‘that Thai gangs may be attempting to recruit vulnerable British travelers’.
Janashia, who used to head Georgia’s national bureau for combating drug trafficking, suggested that a police crackdown on postal drug deliveries in Thailand may have pushed ‘the cartel’ to seek alternative smuggling routes.
‘Georgia does look like an attractive middle transit point,’ he suggested, close to Europe and visa free for European travelers.
Noting that Culley was 18, foreign to Thailand and pregnant, and suggesting she may have been used as a pawn in a complex trafficking operation, he said that ‘whoever chose her, they knew what they were doing’.
He told the Mirror that he would advise Culley to cooperate with the investigation and ‘indicate who were the youths that she was in touch with in Thailand’ – and a fixer in Georgia, if there was one.
In the meantime, Whalley says she now feels lucky that she was arrested in the UK – noting that her situation could have been much worse if she were detained abroad.
‘I believe if I was caught abroad, it would have been a completely different outcome for myself,’ she said.
‘I believe I would have been in the same situation as them,’ she claimed.
Still, she claimed her life over the past 16 months has been ‘torture’ as she lost her job and was prevented from traveling as she gave birth to her daughter.
She also gave birth to her daughter.
Whalley now hopes her and the two girls’ stories will prevent other women from deciding to take the risk to smuggle drugs internationally.
‘Just because I had a suspended sentence should not set a precedent for others to do it,’ she told the Mirror, adding that Culley and Lee’s situation ‘shows that people don’t always get the outcome we had and should now make people aware of the actual dangers of bringing someone’s suitcase back.
‘I hope, going forward, people see the severity of this offense.’
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