I'm really confused by this blog. There seems to be a large portion of the story missing. I can't figure out the correlation between the owner losing their franchise and the rest of the story. Why did they want to steal the sets? If they're really a $400M company (whatever that means), why would they do this over (at most) $200k?
I couldn't figure out what is being claimed here. I'm not saying it's not true, I just can't follow the story at all.
EDIT: After reading other sources, it seems that the franchise owed $200k to BAM (unrelated) and also made a deal with the Mansell's directly. And it seems like the parent company is saying the unsold sets have been returned but the money is theirs because the store owed them money, while the Mansells are (correctly) saying consignment means they own the sets, not the franchise. BAM crossed into definitively illegal territory when they continued to sell sets after the Mandells asserted they wanted their property back (as confirmed by a "sting" operation).
A man gave a store merchandise on consignment, signed a contract with the store manager.
The manager lost control of the store to corporate. The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
Corporate says, "this is mine now" and refuses to honor the contract. "It wasn't our name on it, says right here that the previous store manager signed this, and she's no longer with us." They sell the goods and keep all of the revenue, rather than just their 10% share.
It seems like theft, but it's a very common civil contract dispute. The side with possession and deeper pockets is the side with the leverage, sadly!
Corporate is also claiming that they don't allow stores to take on consignment deals, contrary to their franchise agreement explicitly allowing franchise owners to take on consignment deals.
I have absolutely no doubts a court would consider it impossible to transfer goods under consignment to a different entity free of the burden of the consignment contract. So the corporation trying to reach into the franchise to grab these goods without honoring the contract is absolute BS and they should be dragged through the mud over it.
The unfortunate loophole here is that, potentially, by shutting down that franchise in a bankruptcy the corporation may end up being preferred for being made whole on debts relative to the consigner. Bankruptcy is complicated so while I am pretty sure any remaining goods from the consignment would be returned to the original owner the proceeds from sales that were successfully made might end up in the pocket of the corporation.
Personally, I absolutely loathe consignment. It is an incredibly complex agreement with a lot of weird edge cases about deprecation of goods and the duty to seek a good price that get complex quick. If you have goods like this and can find a store that will buy your goods in bulk you should be very careful in considering how much you care about the price difference between that bulk price and the percentage they list for consignment. A single transaction is usually much cleaner and easier for both sides and in this case (trying to pay for medical costs) having the money immediately can be quite attractive.
If you look at the latest stuff from the previous owner where they recorded multiple conversations / pulled security footage... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zedmOopRTm0 1, they were allowed to do consignment deals, 2, when corporate took control, they said they'd take on the consignment liability, 3, BAM outright threatens them with making the legal process too expensive for them.
All of which contradicts the current corporate response
yeah, it’s plain as day they say blatantly they’ll take on the consignment.
the reckless ben youtube videos are pretty clearly laid out with contracts, video evidence, etc..
the crazy part to me is how blatant the executives of bricks and minifigs are in saying go ahead and try to sue us, we’ll drag this out until you’re broke from lawyers fees. we’re a lawyer rich corp and you’re not. they don’t even try to hide it.
bricks and minifigs are just crazy dickens movie tier evil it’s crazy.
Unfortunately this makes every Bricks and Minifigs store a risk to do business with, selling or buying. You're either supporting a criminal enterprise or risking being a victim of one.
"the crazy part to me is how blatant the executives of bricks and minifigs are in saying go ahead and try to sue us, we’ll drag this out "
To my experience this is a common strategy in disputes when the corporate party has people who operate as uncivilized brutes. I think it's part of the McKinseyfication of companies - profits at all cost - and here's the playbook.
My personal experience is from private parking control. Rather than be professional about my reclamation, their first response was "only criminals dispute these and we win all the court cases".
So I think trying to be imposing and villanous to scare the other non-corporate party to back off is a common global corporate playbook in situations in matters where companies enter contractual complex space with individuals.
Very rarely do corporations act like this once there’s any sort of spotlight on them. Especially over such a relatively small number. This is nothing to do with any standard corporate tactics and everything to do with the guys in charge being complete dick heads.
That has always been the goal. There is, has, and always will be a powerful caste system to ensure that they are gods and we are trash. "Stay in your lane" / "Know your place" / etc. have been watchwords for thousands of years.
yeah you cant just unilaterally cancel the contract in which you agreed to hold the goods for sale, and then take possession without any reimbursement.
You either need to pay the sales price of the consigned items, or just give them back.
If you do neither, its the same exact thing as theft. Which is what they did. They took possession of the 200k lego set with no reimbursement. Just plain ol' theft.
> I have absolutely no doubts a court would consider it impossible to transfer goods under consignment to a different entity free of the burden of the consignment contract.
Reminds me of the whole "disney must pay" debacle.
No, they came up with some legal theory in which they’d bought the assets of some company, including the company’s ownership of some art, but not obligations like paying royalties.
That’s like when I got my shower sealed and then it started leaking within the warranty period. The company claimed that they were the new owners and had purchased the business but not the warranty obligations (!) and I’d have to find the original owner and try to make him honour the warranty. Which was complete BS, obviously, but it wasn’t worth taking to court. :/
There actually are legal ways to do that… instead of buying the company, you start a new company, and just buy assets of the old company (e.g. phone numbers, web sites, trademarks, customer lists). Seems shady but apparently it’s pretty common.
The problem with consignment is that the consignor wants the maximum price but the consignee wants a quick sale because 10% of a few bucks more means very little and they have to hold the inventory.
Selling on consignment can be an absolutely great deal for shops, under the right conditions.
If I'm a lego trader and I buy your set for $900 hoping to sell it later for $1000, in the meantime that's $900 I can't invest in anything else. And maybe I guessed the set's value wrong and I end up unloading it for $800, taking a loss.
On the other hand, if I agree to sell that same set on consignment? Zero capital outlay, zero risk of me taking a loss - just some shelf space and admin work.
Unless the store owns its building and has too little inventory to cover the shelves, the cost of not filling the shelves with the right goods is quite serious. In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".
This is definitely not uniform. I worked on inventory management at Target, and stores had quite a lot of shelf space—to the point where we'd hold large amounts of cheap, non-perishable stuff like cat litter because, well, we had the space for it.
Stores also wanted to look full. We actually had parameters in our inventory management logic to increase inventory just for presentation reasons. If inventory is expensive, having some free, quality inventory can be valuable in and of itself even if it moves slowly.
Bricks and Minifigs stores are like 2000 square feet, much different than a Target. Their overhead per square foot is almost certainly far higher than Target.
If you have no shelf space, of course you can refuse the consignment. And this was a really big one, but the shop was initially very happy with it. Advertised widely with it. Brought in more shelves to display it all. From what I understand, it was a very large part of what was for sale in that shop.
My wife owns a retail business where some part of their sales is consignment. Taking anything in with only a 10% consignment fee would be laughable, there’s no way that’s a money making deal when you account for all the overhead of a small retail store. My suspicion is the original store owner made a bad consignment deal to sell the Star Wars stuff with only a 10% commission and the new owner didn’t want to live up to it. Of course, at that point they should have just given it all back, but it turns out they’d rather be evil.
> In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".
However, in this particular case, the legos were initially displayed as a customer attraction, and then kept in storage. Presumably there's still some inventory cost in storage, but the shelves are clear.
>> The collection will be on display in the store's party room from 10am till 6pm on Saturday, November 11th, and 11am till 6pm on Sunday. The collection will be available for sale immediately, so the best time for pictures will be Saturday morning. The collection will not be stored on-site after hours for security reasons, and after Sunday the sets will be available for purchase but stored elsewhere.
It isn't - deprecation of held goods is always a risk and if you're working on consignment then that comes with weird financial liabilities. If there's a flood and you lose your inventory it sucks - if there's a flood and you lose an inventory of consigned values then suddenly you're potentially exposed to paying market value for a number of items in addition to all the site damage you'll need to address. Capacity is one aspect of the costs of holding inventory - but breakage is the much more expensive consideration and consignment just makes it even more expensive.
I believe in this case the consignment contract requires the store to hold insurance on the consigned merchandise, which I assume is intended to address this concern.
a large part of the value of secondhand stuff is in the box and packaging, assuming those nice boxes in the image were from his collection - those are a little more fragile than the Lego pieces themselves.
Edit: wait, the whole collection was sealed and new in box. Yea, just water damage to those boxes would cut the value by at least 10%. Collectors are picky as shit.
They were sealed in box? Yeah you'd be right that damage would be easy and could significantly reduce the value.
I didn't realize people bought Lego to leave in the box. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised because it's a common thing for collectors to do in other hobbies.
Yup, if I worked in a field where consignment was an option I'd refuse to do it - it's a huge headache. So I'd absolutely believe that the corporation has a policy against accepting consignment offers and might have a case to recover damages or something against the original franchisee. But the way they've handled this situation still appears to be atrocious. Lets say you consigned 200k at a 10% commission, 50k sold under the original franchisee and you were paid 30k already. If the franchise transferred and the company wanted out there should be an exit[1] in the contract to pay the additional 15k and then return the goods to the original owner. I think it's important to remember this sort of an option was always on the table.
1. Even if the original consignment contract was poorly drawn up without a clear exit clause I think it'd be reasonable to expect a resolution somewhere close to this in mediation.
I have read that article and a few other sources since the first few ways I heard about this story were heavily biased. I have not yet seen B&M confirm that the contract that was leaked is genuine - it is incredibly unlikely that they would, of course, but it still remains one the facts in this case that I tenatively believe but have some reservations around.
I thought it was interesting to, from the assumption that the corporation actually banned consignments, still work through how it doesn't free them from wrong doing. Even in the best light B&M has acted in bad faith.
Your alternative is that the contract was forged. Something easily falsifiable in court and absolutely devastating to any case brought, not to mention any follow-on charges that may result. Is that what you're putting forward?
They can seize assets that belong to the entity. They can’t seize assets that belong to other people just because it happens to be on their premises, in the same way that they can’t seize and sell the cars that happen to be in a bankrupt store’s parking lot.
"Can't" is a really bad word to use and I am not certain if "they" here are the corporation or the liquidator.
If you're talking about the corporation I think that any sensible neutral party would probably come down on the side that the corporation has no entitlement to those goods.
If you're talking about the liquidator then the goods were held by the franchise so if it went through bankruptcy those goods would be under consideration by the steward - I think they'd usually find that the original owner should be entitled to the goods since they're relatively non-fungible. The proceeds from sold goods are likely a more complicated answer since money is fungible and divisible. I could accept that there would be scenarios where a steward would think that the corporation should recover a portion of the proceeds.
I think if the consignor has not taken the correct steps then there is a risk the receiver would be able to pay other secured creditors using the consignors assets. For example if there are other creditors with liens on the inventory then you are meant to take steps to notify them of your claims on the consigned goods because otherwise the consigned goods could look like inventory to the secured creditor (https://www.lowenstein.com/news-insights/publications/articl...)
bricks and minifigs is going to lose a hell of a lot more than this 10% in business
regardless of the law, it’s a very stupid move on the company’s part.
if they had half a brain they’d pay double the commission and pretend it aas internal miscommunication. $40k is cheap versus the pr hit they’re taking right now
I’ll make sure if I’m ever listing anything through a store via consignment that I remember to ask if the contract with their their franchiser allows consignment in the event that the franchisees folds. You know, typical stuff.
Corporate is lying a lot, and is pretty clearly guilty of theft at the very least.
The bigger problems I see here are:
1. You can't really sure large corporations like Bricks & Minifigs. They've got deeper pockets and can drag it out until you go bankrupt. There's no good legal recourse for this, meaning larger corporations can basically do whatever they want and ignore the law, as long as they only hurt people smaller than them.
2. The police refuses to treat this as the theft it is. There have been several confrontations with police that give a very strong impression that the police is corrupt and protecting the Bricks & Minifigs and its crimes.
3. Reckless Ben's questionable shenanigans seem to be the only way to fight for justice in unequal situations like this. The offending franchise is now closed. The victim still doesn't have his lego or money back, but thanks to Ben, Bricks & Minifigs is now also feeling the pain. Without that, they would have simply gotten away with it. Chance are they've done stuff like this before.
Also interesting are some of the stunts Ben has pulled:
1. Confronted with the claim that it's a civil matter, he tried turning it into a crime, by holding a raffle for one of the stolen sets that's still legally owned by the victim. The winner of the raffle went to pick it up, and was refused, making it theft from a lottery, which is a crime that the police is supposedly required to investigate (they didn't).
2. Several people buy $10k worth of lego from the victim and claim it from the shop. When they're refused, they go to small claims court, which is now possible because it's only $10k. Bricks & Minifigs ignored it and closed the shop instead. There are default judgements in favour of the people helping the victim, but there doesn't seem to be any way to enforce them.
3. He went out of his way to get the company to sue him, which is apparently better than him suing the company? I'm not sure why. But Bricks & Minifigs didn't bite.
The most effective thing has simply been the PR. The public attention may finally get law enforcement to investigate and punish Bricks & Minifigs. Or at least the broader public will know and avoid Bricks & Minifigs, so at least the company gets punished financially. That won't help the victim, but at least it would be some measure of justice.
#1 is a bluff. It would be really hard to drag it out and judges hate that. You are much more likely to end up paying the costs of the little guy as sanctions than bankrupting them or whatever.
This is also straightforward enough and enough evidence exists that it would be hard to drag it out.
You definitely can sue a large corporation and win or force a settlement. The “we’ll drag this out until you are bankrupt” thing is more bluff than reality. Courts do not react favorably to that. Especially when they have direct evidence of those threats.
A corporation may have a litigation cost advantage, but they’re still
going to spend more than the $180k or whatever that they owed to execute this drag it out forever strategy.
(sprinkle a bunch of IIRC's) You're glossing over the fact that they have continued to sell the items in spite of a cease and desist from the brick owners which makes them totally culpable of selling other people's property, and that they're also being sued for unfair termination because the managers were calling in good faith to let them know they were going to take a job abroad.
The store in question was a franchise so potentially the liability will be limited to just the assets of that franchise. But there's a lot of weird stuff here and it looks like the corporation may have (in a legally questionable manner) removed assets from the store to the corporation during proceedings to shield them.
A representative of the corporation, while taking over the store, expressly states that the corporation is taking over the consignment agreement, on camera and with several witnesses.
They absolutely are and a good lawyer, I'm sure, could audit the accounts and find some misdeeds - the issue is that the auditing and even getting access to those records in court is extremely expensive. To my knowledge there isn't a way to trigger that kind of a discovery in small claims so you need to go through the pricey legal system.
The money in question here is the proceeds from selling a collection valued at 200k - the recovery (unless you start to get into punitive territory) is likely to be rather meager... and it's a large risk so there may be few bites on firms willing to take it on purely commission.
In the UK you can make an order of information to compel directors of a company that is in debt to answer questions about company assets, accounts and records under oath. This can be done in County Court and my understanding it is inexpensive. I'm not sure how useful this is for carrying out an audit because I think its meant to be used for seeing if the debtor has the ability to pay. I think generally incorrect trading during an insolvency is meant to be discovered by the receivers during the insolvency process. Also, I'm not sure if there is an equivalent to an order of information in the US system.
Somewhere in one of the long videos, they mentioned that there were unique stickers on each of his items that he was selling on consignment. They had to have known which items were his.
The original franchisee claims to have lost their life savings in that move. I have no idea how exactly that happened. Their story really sounds like something from Russia back when western investors had their company simply taken from them by someone well-connected.
It sounds like the original franchisee doesn’t want to admit that they were losing a lot of money already. Only someone really desperate would take on a $200K lego collection and only collect a 10% consignment fee. It would also explain the corporate “takeover” if they were already behind on paying their franchise fees or whatever they might have owed to corporate.
That being said, it’s not illegal to be a bad business person, and none of that excuses the subsequent behavior by BAM corporate or the new franchise owner.
* They had sold about half of the consigned inventory
* The old franchise owner said they had a job offer outside the country
* Said franchise owner was current on a restructured fee schedule that, they allege, was the direct result of corporate bungling the transfer of accounts from the franchise owner previous to them
From what I understand, the original franchisee wanted to sell the store because they wanted to leave the US (for "political reasons"; I suspect they don't want to live in Trumpland anymore, but that's pure speculation). The way it appears, the moment they announced that desire to sell, B&M corporate showed up to take control of the shop. And the consignment.
Yes? Take the side of the person getting railroaded by a giant corporation, a bunch of corrupt cops, and a legal system that is built to protect the big, and milk the poor.
Whats the other side in this? Feel bad for the 400 million corp with their army of lawyers? Feel bad for the store owners who scammed the person and acted like a total dick? Honestly, whats your take on this?
The difference between you and the person you replied to is that, despite neither of you knowing what the other side is, the other person was curious to learn it instead of assuming they know everything and attacking.
> The police, for their part, kept calling it a "civil matter" and declining to investigate. Every single time.
On the other hand...
> In a subsequent conversation after the store closure and lawsuit loss, when Ben indicated the logical next step was to pursue Johnson personally, Josh's response, according to documented accounts, included the threat: "If you try to pursue me legally, YOU stole the LEGOs."
> Shortly after that conversation, someone called in a police report claiming Reckless Ben was transporting heroin.
This is a strange choice by Johnson, since it instantly transforms the civil dispute into a criminal offense.
Yeah, but you don't know the whole story. There was a young motorcyclists who ran from the police and killed in a crashed. His family has a go-fund me still just to collect money.
You should post the link to that. Police chases costing people’s lives is an awful thing, anybody that’s ever seen a cop driving 130mph because they think they’re Knight Rider might want to donate.
I used to sometimes do consignment with artistic products I made, and 80% of the time I ended up being jerked around by the store. Even stores that kept good records and paid for a while would, after a few years, end up with inventory left that they never returned or paid for. Sometimes the stores would close and disappear with the inventory. Other times they’d avoid me. Sometimes they’d insist they paid for everything already, and have done such a poor job of documenting what payments were for that it was difficult to tell. Some people just straight up ran their stores like Ponzi schemes - paying off old consignment with sales from new vendors. As an individual artist, I became very wary of consignment as it’s essentially an unsecured loan. Even worse was that some people who faded away and kept inventory were friends and good business partners, and it’s not like I would sue them for $400.
Forgive me if I'm trying to figure out what's going on here. I just read the linked blog and some of the links within, but I don't have time to watch all these long YouTube videos
> The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
The store says the full inventory was not discoverable at the store. They said the person gave a written statement in the past saying the collection was "moved off site for security reasons" so I don't think this is really as cut and dry as the YouTuber and blogger people are trying to make it look.
> Corporate says, "this is mine now"
Their statement says they located what inventory they could and offered it back.
I think there's a lot more to this story. I wouldn't really trust the YouTube influencers for the whole story.
The store (as managed by the second group) lost the suit, if they were negligent they still owe the consigner. What's missing is the relationship between the second group and the corporate parent. Seems there's some reason the liability from the lawsuit doesn't transfer to the corporation.
> The store (as managed by the second group) lost the suit, if they were negligent they still owe the consigner. What's missing is the relationship between the second group and the corporate parent.
This does seem like a very key point that keeps getting ignored for the sake of a simpler story.
Everyone keeps talking about this lawsuit loss, but what lawsuit? Against whom? The article doesn't even explain, but it's starting to look like the lawsuit was against the former owners, contrary to the ragebait "Bricks and Minifigs stole..." title
I haven't watched this particular video, but I've read her 46 page suit. That's not the case that was lost. The case(s) that were lost are small claims actions made by the YouTuber and 9 of his friends, essentially. They got default judgments from the court on 10 claims each worth $10k. The previous owner's suit was just filed in March of this year, I believe.
Now as for the previous question of who was at the pointy end of those default judgments, I haven't been able to find that answer. I assume they should have named the local franchise as an entity and it's owners individually. Closing the store to avoid paying is arguably a fraudulent transfer of assets, but that would need to be taken to court in an enforcement action.
Oh yeah sorry, I misunderstood the suit the comment was referring to.
It is my understanding that BAM took direct ownership of the local store and therefore the small claims case was also directed against them, but at the moment I can't find where I've heard that so I'm not 100% sure.
According to the former store owner's lawsuit, and what comports with what I've seen in the original video, the store was seized by corporate and then sold quickly to the owners of the Eugene, OR BAM store.
They lost default judgements because they did not appear. Either they thought it was fake or they thought they'd lose, but they were served and did not appear.
Or they thought that the losses were acceptable to avoid having to make sworn statements about the series of events that are still at issue in the previous owner's case and some events that may very well still be charged by Oregon prosecutors.
I believe they would need to dissolve the business entity. These default judgments against them should count as debt that needs to be paid before the business is closed unless they declare bankruptcy in court and not like Michael Scott.
Quantum physics guarantees us anything is a possibility. The question is, is it a likely one at all? And the overwhelmingly likely reasons are obvious to anyone with half a brain, given all the surrounding context here.
A default judgement is still a loss. Why would not they not fight back small claims cases, which would be trivially easy for someone with their resources, if they could win?
I am not stating that I think B&M would win. B&M's original intent was to force Ed and Ben into a pyrrhic victory via dragging out one lawsuit, even if they lost that one suit.
Without being able to run up Ed/Ben's legal costs, trying to defend these suits at all is just a further loss for B&M for no benefit.
I don't think it was the deciding factor, but Ben also sent a fake Guinness award to the store around the same time they were being served. It is within the realm of possibility that they thought Ben was bluffing with the lawsuits and tried to call his bluff just to find out it was all real after they failed to appear.
Nah, the whole Guinness thing was obviously just a bit for the video. Clearly the franchise would not fall for that, when you can easily check that you were summoned to small claims (and they also probably get some form of direct communication from the court I would guess).
Legal costs for a small claims suit is tiny, and would be easily doable for them if they could win it. Again, there is a reason they lost those cases.
They can't even serve papers because they're being relentlessly harassed by Police who have immediately banned them from serving them. In part 2, cops even verify the court case and he has a process server-- but they just refuse to. One of many different cops eventually took the papers to serve them, and ended up coming back saying "he didn't want them."
Additionally, the original business in Kaizer shutdown as soon as the default judgements went through.
I don't know what point you're trying to make. But also please watch the video, they submitted multiple separate claims via different aggrieved parties, this totaled $100k, despite the low individual small claims maxima.
Reckless Ben's video I would rank as one of the top 3 best YouTube videos I have ever seen.
I had never seen this guy before but this video was wild. It's a mix of reporting and trolling and questionable legal tactics.
The evidence in the video seems pretty hard to dispute. Of course there is 2 sides to everything but I strongly believe bam is the bad guy here.
If the consignment contract was not legal then BAM never owned the goods and would not have had the right to sell them.
EDIT: as other commenters point out, BAM actually did lose the lawsuit over this and now the issue is the consigner is trying to collect the judgment. In that case it would normally be irrelevant that the store was a franchise location, because BAM would have become the successor to all liabilities upon taking over the store (in the U.S., at least). With deep pockets BAM could drag out the collections process long enough to try an extract a settlement from the consigner; the risk with doing so though is that interest accrues on the settlement at statutory rates that are normally higher than market rates and they face the possibility of court sanctions for any attempts at delay that have no reasonable legal basis.
> The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
This appears to be in dispute.
As per bricks and minifigs:
>It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
>A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition.
It appears they are alleging that the prior operator had sold a larger portion of the consigned goods than they had claimed to the family.
I read about this previously and had the same reaction - something seems missing, it’s too crazy, this has gotta be just one side of the story. Normal reaction in this media landscape. But this seems to be one of the rare cases that, yes, it really is a case of an edge case of law allowing theft.
From what I can see: Franchisee entered into a consignment agreement to sell the lego. They were not allowed to do that, so corporate took over the franchise.
BUT rather than unwind the agreement and return the lego, they just kept it. Argued for it to be dealt with legally. It was, they lost, so they closed down the store rather than return the lego.
Incorrect as the article points out with an image of the contract:
> However, it was brought to my attention by site user @luddevig that Chrystal Law, the Bricks & Minifigs Salem-Keizer store's original owner, was able to pull the franchise agreement between her and and the B&M Corperation, that clearly states that consignment is allowed.
They hired a PR firm that was looking at the base case and those averages. As Nassim Taleb points out, we live in Extremestan. No idea what the value was of the Bricks and Minifigs, but I'd be shocked if it hasn't dropped by 2 or 4 million dollars. Their biggest moat was their reputation.
According to the former franchise owner this is a lie from corporate and they were indeed allowed to sign consignment agreements. They showed a contract that says as much as evidence.
We really need an eccentric billionaire going around trolling all sorts of petty legal trolling. Ben is actively making the world a better place with this, and every person with a networth worth a damn is barely a toenail the man he is.
I didn't know Ben dealt with cults until he revealed he started the "Scientology Sucks" religion, but as soon as the cops started baiting him into agreeing they had cause for arrest, I instantly guessed he had completely accidentally walked right into another cult corruption video. If I had a penny for the amounts of times I saw this exact type of cult discovery happen, I'd have 4, which is a pattern -> ALL cults are corrupt.
> Bricks & Minifigs CEO Ammon McNeff is a graduate of Brigham Young University. Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best are, by public record and documented account, members of the LDS community. When Reckless Ben's team, following the pattern of obstruction by local law enforcement, looked into the individual officers involved in these incidents, they found that multiple officers were also BYU alumni.
I thought “it has to be some kind of corruption here”. And yup it’s the mormon mafia apparently
Honestly that pattern of actions by law enforcement was the most disturbing thing. There was a moment where they knew this person was present at a private property to serve a warrant in a legitimate lawsuit. Clearly the right and moral action for the police at that moment was to help serve the papers AND then escort the litigant from the property. They chose to behave more like mobsters than defenders of the public trust, like they were taking over responsibility from the courts
This is the main reason I read comment threads on law enforcement stuff on HN. There's a bunch of people trying to square their opinion of policing ("protect and serve") with the reality of policing ("protect and serve the wealth").
My understanding is that 50% of people in the state of Utah are mormon. I'm not saying there wasn't corruption, but it could very well be pure chance with those odds.
If cops are pulling over another person from Utah probably not a big deal but when dealing with an outsider from out of state the situation is different.
Hate to break it to you but the Mormon belt extends well up into Idaho (probably all the way to Montana on the East side) and down into Arizona, and diffuses out quite far from there. Probably need to go through Montana or skirt the Mexican border areas to avoid it, but border areas these days come with their own issues self created by our government...
I lived in Idaho Falls (well within the majority Mormon area that extends farther North at least to Rexburg) and never had an issue, but I definitely knew I was not part of the club.
Yeah, as a non-Mormon, I agree. I think the Mormon connection is a paranoid distraction. The behavior of the police can be explained by the same kind of corrupt-small-town-police-defending-locals-from-outsiders behavior that happens across the country.
> The behavior of the police can be explained by the same kind of corrupt-small-town-police-defending-locals-from-outsiders behavior that happens across the country.
Mormons aren't implicated, but I fail to see how this can explain the behavior of the Oregon police.
The best part about this is that the CEO insists that the agreement with the previous store owner is null (thus relieving him of the burden of paying 200k), and yet he also insists on keeping the Lego collection set and selling it. It's comical.
From what I understand ownership of the Lego sets never left the Mansells. The consignment agreement states as much.
Even if we take what corporate says at face value (there was no agreement, or the agreement is null, or it's an agreement that the previous owners agreed to) that still just means that the store possesses property that they do not legally own. Whether or not they legally came to possess the sets seems irrelevant here.
I'm not a lawyer but I don't see how the Mansells ever stopped owning the lego sets.
I watched a video from a lawyer who was explaining some of the legal aspects of this debacle, and this one stuck out. Basically, if the Mansells had filed a form with the Oregon Secretary of State, they would have a much simpler claim. That form basically just says "X company is holding Y merchandise that is mine for consignment". Because they (likely) didn't do that, the process for determining their ownership may be more complicated in certain events, and closure of the store might be on that list. Reasons the new owners and BAM corporate are screwed:
1) they made statements during the seizure of the store that they are aware of the consignment and that will transfer to them
2) they were made aware of the consignment in writing by Mansell in a letter terminating the agreement and demanding return of the merchandise after a missed payment in Nov 2025
3) they sold a set from Mansell's collection after 1 & 2 to one of Mansell's confederates
4) they knowingly removed stickers placed on the collection by the previous store owner to identify it as part of the collection
Even if the consignment was undone, they don't get to just keep the collection. The agreement can almost certainly be terminated, but the collection would then be returned to Mansell.
I believe that's the one thing BAM refuses to acknowledge, they have no legal possesion of the lego sets, that's the beginning and end of it. They are trying their damnest to hide that fact behind a consignment/contract/franchise/corporate/arrests/heroin/lawsuit curtain of smoke.
> I'm not a lawyer but I don't see how the Mansells ever stopped owning the lego sets.
The store declares bankruptcy, and corporate is a prioritized creditor. From a certain view, based on the consignment contract means they wanted money, and I could see an argument that they're really owed $200k rather than the physical legos. Ie they're effectively just another creditor, and probably not a prioritized one.
"Ownership" gets very odd when you hand goods over to someone with the expectation that you'll never see those goods again, but will get money. It gets even weirder when that someone ceases to be a legal entity, and the goods are now in possession of someone you never had an agreement with. The store obviously has an obligation to hand over either money or the goods, but it's not clear that obligation is transient to anyone that ends up with the goods.
I don't know how effective the wording of the original consignment agreement would end up if tested in a suit. It reads "Consigned merchandise shall remain the property of Mansell until sold".
On the other hand, without the agreement, how can one prove the expectation that the goods were handed over with, at all? Without establishing that expectation wouldn't the ownership of the goods just stay with the original owner at all times?
It would make sense that there are some ways you can abandon property you own in a way that someone else can swoop up and take ownership it without having to give it back, but do any of those potentially apply here?
> The store obviously has an obligation to hand over either money or the goods, but it's not clear that obligation is transient to anyone that ends up with the goods.
It is extremely clear. You are just detailing the buffer being used to pretend otherwise.
It's not even paying 200k. It's returning the sets that haven't been sold. They hadn't paid for the sets, they just hold them in stock until they're sold
"We acquired them from the previous franchisee when we purchased the store. Here's the contract we signed to acquire the store and contents, here's the payment we made"
We're far past the point where the company bigwigs should have fixed this. It's not like they don't know.
> The bigger story is an elderly man needing to sell his toys to pay for cancer treatment.
Idk. Straight up corporate theft of $200k, backed up by the cops, is a more visceral story than 'yet another person merked by our predatory healthcare system'.
> We could give all people free cancer treatment, but defense contractors need money.
Yes, and that's important - but there are unique aspects to this story which shouldn't be overshadowed by the higher priority problem for the nation. The immediate problem for this elderly cancer patient isn't going to be solved by Americans suddenly realising that they have people power - but getting his Legos back might save his life.
I think it's more visceral, but a smaller story. 'yet another person merked by our predatory healthcare system' is a headline that will be relevant again, with new participants, tomorrow, or next week.
Sure. Any one person's story will be smaller than the whole picture - is that your whole point? What are you proposing - that we ignore stories like this until we fix healthcare?
Because if that's not what you're saying, why bring it up as if one cancer patient's life and property rights aren't important (even beyond tomorrow and next week)?
> 'yet another person merked by our predatory healthcare system' is a headline that will be relevant again, with new participants, tomorrow, or next week.
And so will corporate theft, and bureaucratic Kafkaesque nightmares, and police corruption, etc. There's no lack of overlapping evil to look at here.
Individual stories are still important and relevant, and ignoring them to look at the bigger picture is like ignoring water to look at the ocean.
> is that your whole point? What are you proposing - that we ignore stories like this until we fix healthcare?
IMO that's a pretty antagonistic read of my comment. GP said 'bigger story', you said 'visceral story'. In no way do I read myself or the GP dismissing the B&M story - quite the opposite, as GP says, noting "millions of dollars in PR damage" doesn't sound like ignoring something.
The second half of my comment was criticizing the news cycle, and its preference for unique headlines.
Apologies for reading your comment in an antagonistic way, but, I couldn't find a better way to read it. If you're saying that it was just about adding context, okay, but I think there's a way to do that with out painting this a "smaller story" that will be forgotten about "tomorrow or next week".
A guy is dying from cancer and unable to get treated because a $400m company stole his unique $200k life-long Lego collection ... That is a smaller story than America's murderous healthcare system - but until the guy's situation is corrected, no amount of media coverage is too little.
America's media failures also are a critical piece of the picture, but as written your comment reads as if painting this as a forgettable little story about Star Wars lego:
>This headline about star wars lego? Less so.
... I'm glad to hear that wasn't how you meant it.
If you search for "Bricks and minifigs", every result apart from their main website is about this controversy. One of the values of a franchise is the branding; at least for the forseeable future, this will be a negative value. For a company that serves a small niche community, this seems like suicide.
It seems they closed the store rather than give back the lego. That seems like a win of sorts, because I'm sure it hurts B&M to some degree, but it's not getting the stolen lego back.
I've now also seen part 2, in which the amount of police harassment that B&M seems to be able to bring to bear is absolutely disgusting.
This post and TFA have a common issue: no one seems to have a clear, compellingly evidenced account of basic questions about the collection and its history under consignment:
1. What exactly was in the collection?
2. What happened to the collection after it was consigned: which sets were sold, which were stolen or lost, which were moved to off-site storage, etc.?
3. How much money did the original franchise owner owe the consigner for the sets sold?
The peripheral claims about e.g. police malfeasance are disturbing, but without this basic evidence about the substance of the matter, I don't know if it's a great idea for an online mob to take sides.
You're right that we don't have the facts. That said, the way that Bricks and Minifigs handled this has been horrible. The CEO should have said on camera that he's willing to work with the lego owner to return the property and to work with police to charge the former franchise owner with theft.
I just don’t understand why a company with $95m in sales would steal $200k. That’s a fraction of a percent of sales for the year.
There’s now a boycott against them that will easily cost them more than that.
If the case is as this blog says, it cannot be hard to find a lawyer to do this one pro bono. Breach of contract is one of the few things in America where you can sue for your legal fees. If you take over a business you assume it’s contracts even though your name wasn’t on them. You gain anything the business owns but a consignment shop doesn’t own the inventory.
BAM is going to lose millions and for what? Is this article just wrong on substantial facts? Simple greed wouldn’t explain this as it will almost certainly lead to far less money, even in a short period, than returning it.
I have a family member who works in estate planning. From all the stories he's told me, a lot of wealthy people compulsively screw over people / refuse to follow the contract they agreed to / etc, simply because they can and know that it is too expensive for most people to file a lawsuit.
I agree with you. It makes no rational sense for the corporation to act this way. I can see how they end up losing a court case but can't explain why they don't pay up.
It sounds like the first franchise collapsed owing money. I expect the company had created strong incentives for employees to claw that back. Someone has followed those incentives against the interest of the corporation. This happens all the time although in this case they break the law.
Eventually there's a lawsuit and a lot more people get involved including people without any incentive to do illegal things. However those involved originally present some varnished version of the truth (to avoid getting fired!) the company trusts this version of events. They decide to fight the case in court.
Then they lose the case. Those who decided to fight it realise they made a bad choice and they now look bad too. It's at this point that the weirdest thing happens. Why do they choose to close the store instead of paying up? My guess is that it became personal for someone.
> It sounds like the first franchise collapsed owing money.
It did not, the franchisees simply wanted out because they were offered better paid work overseas.
They told corporate they wanted to sell the franchise back to them, as they say they wanted to recoup their investment in the franchise before they left the USA.
Corporate arrived the same day and started saying the franchise owes them $200,000, didn't inventory the franchise, terminated their franchise that day, seized the franchise that same day.
It’s a farcical notion that people are uniformly rational actors, as well as the notion that rational is adjacent to just.
It’s an unfortunate fact that many people in positions of wealth and power default to “F-you my lawyers will drown you and I will win” in every single case, regardless of merit.
Many times, that is the singular strategy that has put them in that position of wealth and power. Many times, they apply this strategy to every situation where they already possess an asset or service for which they have not paid, and that asset or service is valued higher than an ongoing good faith relationship with the person or entity that they owe for the asset or service that they received.
It’s a wholly predatory strategy but it can be a very rational calculus, and it can propel you to the very pinnacle of wealth and power. Its continuously surprising to plebs because it goes against the fantasy of the fundamental justice of society that they have been inculcated with, a convenient lie that keeps powerless people in their lane and justifies the use of police powers to protect the criminal activity of the owner class.
I say this as a member of the owner class. I try not to be one of those people, but it’s easy to see justice as an unnecessary and frivolous expense. I’d estimate that a significant fraction of my peers are in this category, and nearly everyone else occasionally dabbles, often without even being aware of it as their lawyers push in that direction.
Ultimately, it’s a side effect of obscene inequality. I don’t know how to fix it, much less how to make the world somehow intrinsically just. IMHO there is no justice except the justice we go out of our way to create. Justice is not the natural state of the world.
I agree people and especially corporations act this way. Indeed many people believe that it's a corporation's fiduciary duty to lawyer up if that's expected to be cheaper than paying up.
Here, they are looking at small amounts of money, but they close a store, which presumably involves writing down an asset and forgoing future revenue. This only gives them a small chance of avoiding payment and risks the reputation of the entire firm.
The earlier decisions all fit the narrative of coldly rational, but I find the final decision to close the store doesn't fit. It's almost impossible to imagine how it ends well for the corporation.
My take is that this all comes down to the stores being franchises.
Yes, franchisor hold a lot of power, and in the big picture the franchisees are small owners and a move like this ($200k of merch they haven't paid a dime for) can affect the PnL quite a lot on the local level. It seems like the average Bricks and Minifigs franchise store has annual revenue of just $600k. At that's revenue. Another search shows that their margins are around 10%-20%
If these franchise owners managed to pull of this, and sell the collection for $200k on top of the expected annual revenue, that would put their store margin for that year around 45%-55%!
I'm guessing Bricks and Minifigs, the corporation, just assumed this would fly quietly under the radar, and let their franchisees.
I think it just comes down to greed. A couple of franchisees figured they could make a killing, and become one of the most profitable franchise stores with no effort.
Because this isn't the first collection they've stolen from someone, presumably.
It's a lot easier to become a really successful company if you can keep your inventory costs down. Perhaps by investing in local law enforcement instead, to make sure no one looks too close at said inventory?
Donald Trump is famous for not paying even really cheap contractor bills, because he knew he could get away with it.
This is the answer. They thought they could get away with it. And from what I understand, they nearly did, because the original victim couldn't afford the risk of a lengthy and expensive lawsuit.
How is this company, BAM Franchising Inc, valued at $400M?
They aren’t publicly traded so it’s hard to find out.
It seems like there’s almost no employees and they collect a franchising fee and 6% royalty on the 200+ franchises that BAM claims makes $570k average annual revenue [0].
.06 x 570k x 200 = 6,840,00
So not sure how a $400M valuation comes from $7M/year in revenue.
And this is revenue, who knows what the profit is.
And if you want a (less entertaining but very interesting) legal analysis of the various legal tricks Ben used in this video Lawful Masses with Leonard French has just released this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ktgvoH4Mc
Some of the people in this thread making very definitive claims about consignments contracts without considering this specific jurisdictions should watch it... the victims here could have had an almost open and shut case if they did a bit more paperwork (and paid $20), as there is an exception for consignments over $1000 that gave some undue leverage to that corporation.
If you like Part 2 (it shows the most egregious police misconduct I've seen in the USA in a while) then please consider Ben's Patreon where he will post Part 3 next week. The Part 2 is technically "paywalled" but the link has leaked. I think everyone needs to see Part 2 as it really blows the story fully open.
Holy mother of God this seems like one of those landmark cases by the looks of what's going on. So much rot in there...
Bro also fled to Mexico, they could even make a movie out of this.
> Then Bricks & Minifigs Corporate took control of the Salem location from the original franchise owner
> They were found liable in court. They closed the store rather than pay.
This doesn't make any sense. If the corporation took control of the franchise, the corporation now owns it and its obligations. They can close the store if they want, but that doesn't do anything about their obligation to pay.
What's missing from this story? Because as presented, it makes no sense.
It is my understanding that they sued the franchise, which then closed, and not the parent corporate entity.
While they won against the franchise due to the default judgement, they didn't win against corporate.
The store that is now closed is the franchise they sued.
I've personally never heard of consignment deals where the consignment store becomes the owners of the goods. Not once.
Back in college I used to make money flipping stuff on Ebay, and did that extensively. I did consignment for others, as well as sending stuff to others to sell.
This sounds illegal, and like a case of the store / new franchise owners trying to bully the consignors into submission.
Mormonism is the original cult that survived the first generation. It has all the hallmarks of a cult, singular charismatic leader, polygamy, child abuse, apocalyptic prophecy etc.
Child abuse is not an official sanctioned thing in Mormonism. And they have officially ended the practice of polygamy (yes there was some coercion on the part of the US govt)
The other three were pretty much traits of every major traditional religion at its founding.
> Some of the mormons haven't even stopped polygamy today.
Using the term 'Mormon' to refer to the the entire family tree including splinter sects is just a recipe for confusion. Adherents to splinter sects, excluding RLDS, number in the tens of thousands compared to millions of CoJCoLDS. The problems with CoJCoLDS are damning on their own without needing to conflate facts with fringe groups.
In the 1800s, when children had mining and factory jobs and didn't go to school past age 12. Trying to position that as Mormonism condones child abuse is bonkers, imo
So because children were forced to work dangerous jobs it's okay for adult religious leaders to have sex with them? I'm not sure I follow that.
You should research polygamy in the mainline (Brighamite) sect if you haven't already. One of the last marriages to the the mormon prophet Lorenzo Snow was to a 15 year old. Snow was 57 at the time. This was not normal despite any assertion about children working.
Are children more abused by Mormons? I find it highly unlikely just considering on average they are wealthier than other religious groups and poverty and child abuse are highly correlated
It's more like a combination of factors that make child abuse more prevalent: lack of access to the outside world ("we are in the world but not of the world"), a strict patriarchal hierarchy in the home that puts children at the bottom, endorsement by the church of physical punishments, etc.
Similarly, even if I fail to see the link between my previous comment and your question. Israel is a settler-colonial project whose ultimate goal is the creation of a Jewish ethno-state where Palestine once stood. Logically, it requires the displacement/murder of the current Palestinian population. POSIWID
If it is, it's certainly not because it had a charismatic leader who condoned polygamy. That is basically every major monotheistic religion in the world.
It can be a religion in its beliefs and a cult in its practices and that's exactly what's going on -- especially since it's Utah that we're talking about...
I have very close Mormon and ex-Mormon friends and have dealt with lots of Scientologists via community involvement in music and science fiction...there is no difference.
A married couple that are friends of mine had minor questions of faith and their entire large extended families with immediate no-contact. It was bitter, brutal and painful even as a bystander seeing it happen in real time. Their young children were cut off as well and their families hounded them and made their lives miserable via institutions (police calls, anonymous complaints to their schools & jobs, etc.). The behavior was beyond the pale and this couple are literally the nicest, most loving and reasonable people that I have ever met.
They switched to a different Christian denomination and raised their kids that way and couldn't be happier about their decision. In hindsight. The family wounds 20 years later are still very visible and real.
The BAM case is certainly instructive, it's not one or two bad mormon apples but a whole rotting orchard. From the owners and their employees to the police.
It's good that you're friends made it out of the cult.
If this the same Ben in YouTube then omg was he annoying. I couldn't even get throught the first quarter of the video.
The dude shows up at a store. They ask him to leave multiple times. They call on the police on him. Then he says "the police are in on it" because they trespassed him. Like wow shocking that the police won't get involved in a civil matter. Then they manipulate a store employee that had nothing to do with this? That's where I stopped watching.
This is a basic contract case. If the original owner's son had no intention of suing the other party then why did he draft up a contract in the first place? Just get a fucking lawyer.
The best part is when the officer takes the process server's subpoena, says he'll serve it, then walks back and says the defendant isn't accepting it while refusing to allow her to serve the subpoena.
The search of his person over a call to police is a clear violation of his rights, a phone to call to police is not PC or RAS. The fact they held him for three hours will to be to his benefit in court. Arresting him for starting a gofundme, a clear violation of his first amendment rights, I mean they're just digging that hole. Then they raid him, dislocate his arm, and now he has a warrant out for physical threats?
This story is not blowing up because because of Legos or stealing from old people. It's blowing up because we're watching a corporation and a police department abuse their power and we're all grossed out by it.
Part 2's corruption and civil rights violations makes Part 1 look irrelevant. A lot of the coverage on this is still about the $200k and the lego sets.
Fun part to mention is the officer that takes the subpoena to the would-be defendant is the part of the 3rd set of cops that were sent to Ben's non-moving car that is on public property. The cop's bodycam discussion with the would-be defendant is also fully redacted, for some reason.
After telling Ben that the defendant doesn't accept the subpoena (can you even refuse being served like that?), the 3rd set of cops leave and a 4th set of cops shows up, make a phone call to verify that it's a real lawsuit they are trying to serve, question him further, and then after all that Ben is still arrested.
Ben also shows how the body cams are being redacted in ways that they should not be. Due to sloppy redacting, he gives an example where the content of the redacted audio is one cop telling the other that Ben is basically annoying but the thing he's doing that they got called over for is not illegal.
> After telling Ben that the defendant doesn't accept the subpoena (can you even refuse being served like that?)
They can't, and I'm surprised the officer wasn't aware of that. Confirm the person's ID, hand them the papers or sit them somewhere and tell them, they have been served. Process-wise, all that matters is confirmation to the court that the person is aware of and was given possession of the documents. If they don't like it and set them on fire, that's not the court or the server's problem.
I think there's also generally a process for someone avoiding being served. Ie if you can prove they're trying to avoid being served, that is per se evidence that they are aware they are being served and can be considered as served. Iirc, it's not preferred because it's way, way cleaner for the court to have a signed document but they can and will do it.
Legalities aside, this is why you'd normal hire someone to do this. The cops don't want to be involved, and especially so for YouTube drama. Hire someone completely unrelated who can show up, be completely emotionally detached and do the "I'm just trying to do my job, man" schtick. They're also much better for contested servings. If one party says the other got papers and the other denies it, there's a "he said, she said". If you hire a professional who doesn't care about the outcome of the case then it carries a lot more credibility.
I didn't mention it in the comment you replied to, but during this whole event including the 4 instances of police, Ben is in a car with a process server he hired to serve the papers. Ben himself stayed on public property the whole time.
The cops even tell Ben to get a process server, and he points out to the cops that yes, he has brought the exact person they described, she's right there in the car with him.
I can't speak for Utah, but I sued a valet for crashing my car in small claims. I was given the option for an additional fee to have the subpoena served by the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department. I think you're better off getting police involved if you can when it comes to serving people. In the case of the video I'm pretty sure he hired a certified process server and the police shut it down.
Regardless if it's a civil manner or not the police clearly had no intention on even working towards a solution. They didn't attempt to find out if it was a civil or criminal matter, because he refused to listen.
Find him annoying sure, but it was made very clear why they even had to call in a youtuber to be annoying and get attention. Clearly legally they would bury the original owner with legal fees. If you have a solution that doesn't involve fighting big corperations, that very clearly do have connections with morally questionable cops then go ahead because it is made very clear why "just get a fucking lawyer" doesn't work
I'd say the police did have a clear intention to works towards a solution, a solution that helped BAM and his leaders, not honoring the law or helping the victims. They are obviously colluding, part2 video leaves very small room for imagination.
I do agree that Ben has done a good thing exposing to the public the situation.
Watch part two and you will understand the claims of "the police are in on it". I agree it sounded like a joke in part 1, but after you see the rest of the story it makes sense.
The police are literally in on it. It's very likely they've violated Ben's civil rights, roughly at the behest of the new franchise owners (who they know personally through the LDS church). I hate to say 'details in part 2' but there are further details in part 2. IIUC it'll be available on youtube in a few weeks.
It's explained multiple times in the video that Mansell has considered suing, but the most likely outcome of that is he pays a lawyer upwards of $60k to get <<100k in awarded compensation, then struggles to collect. The new franchise owners threatened exactly this. It's a classic and well known (and exploited) problem with our legal system.
https://youtu.be/14ktgvoH4Mc?t=1029 talks about the distinction between civil and criminal here (and the whole video is good, worth a watch). There's not exactly an either-or distinction like it's commonly presented. The police can+probably should have investigated the initial refusal to return the legos as criminal theft.
First they tried and realized they couldnt afford one. Then they came up with a way to settle this in small claims, won, and the franchisor decided to close the store. The legal process did not work here
This guy tried to resolve a legal dispute without a lawyer. Any competent business lawyer should have been able to straighten this out within days. He even tried to do process service himself, which nobody does. You pay a process server $100 or so for that.
The video has Ed Mansell stating that all the lawyers he spoke to informed him that it would not be financially viable for him to pursue a suit.
Additionally, there is audio of one of the would-be defendants saying that they intend to drag things out as long as possible, basically taunting both Ed and Ben to sue him as they all understand that it is not a viable solution to the problem for Ed.
Part 2 starts with 10 separate $10,000 default judgements won against the store, but they are unable to recover any of the funds.
Ben brings a process server with him to serve new lawsuits against the owners as individuals, and 4 separate times on the same day in the same spot, cops are sent to him. The cops even take the papers from the process server, try to serve the defendant, and then give it back to the process server saying it was refused . After that they don't allow the process server to serve the papers, and then the cops show up the 4th time and Ben is eventually arrested.
You should watch the two videos if you haven't because it's full of jewels. The kind of conversations and plays recorded point to a pattern. This is not their first time doing something shady, they think they can get away with it, and they greatly underestimated Ben determination and resources.
"are you stupid?", "you stole them", "i swear to god i'll return them if you send me first a false apology/confession" are some of the things these BAM people said to him. Again, the video is really fun to see, you get secret cameras on these guys, police bodycams with redactions undone, plenty of legal stunts, and a healthy amount of human misery documented.
I'm not doubting the claims at all. I simply don't understand why a massive company would shoot themselves in the foot over something relatively small.
After consuming a lot of media around this, reading the former store owners' lawsuit filing, and discussing with a couple lawyers in my life, I think the business is in severe trouble. The decisions they make are that of a teetering company clawing to stay afloat. For example, the former owners' lawsuit says that BAM franchising let it's business registration lapse. Between that and the many many actions that indicate they don't have any lawyers in the loop at any step, I conclude that they must not be able to pay one.
Also, and I know it isn't incredibly rare, but it stuck out to me, the store was owned by corporate before it was sold to the then-manager (who is now suing corporate) for $65k, despite saying that it costs upward of $200k to start a franchise. I couldn't make the numbers make sense, personally. Why would they sell a corporate store for 1/3 of the value?
It's small if you do it once. If that becomes a pattern and you know you get away with it most of the time, it can boost revenues. Would that be a pattern, stealing $200K to a single family probably is too ambitious. If that's business as usual, I hope people will now share their stories.
Because unfortunately, as any Harry Dubois of the world soon screams off the roof naked and drunk, you can't become a massive company in the first place without theft.
I encourage you to relieve yourself of your naivete. Your default stance needs to be that every company on the planet would feed you feet-first and screaming into a woodchipper if they thought they could make a dollar from it.
Your comment is so depressing because of how graphic it is, and what makes it so upsetting is that I can't disagree. You and I have lost faith in the world. Oh, to go back to when I was young and I thought theft and abuse were rare...
Why would a billion-dollar company pay their employees so little that they need assistance to live? Or need to urinate in a bottle to keep their delivery times up? Greed and a belief that the rules don't apply to them.
The apt comparison would be wage theft. It's one thing to advertise a job at a particular hourly rate, entirely another to breach the contract and lose public trust for a paltry gain. If you're going to commit what people will interpret as theft at least make sure it's worth your while.
I suppose if you advertise a job for $20/hr and a bunch of people show up and apply for the job, you're probably not going to start advertising the job for $40/hr instead.
And whether $20/hr is a "living wage" depends entirely on your circumstances. If you're a solo adult you can probably swing it. If you have 3 kids you will probably be on food stamps. Should Amazon pay people with kids more? Or only hire single people with no dependents?
I agree the deal from when minim wage was established is broken. A wage you can't raise a family on is not a living wage, as it results in a dead/old age society, not a living society.
As such, this part of the new deal should be reverted as well "We are relaxing some of the safeguards of the anti-trust laws. The public must be protected against the abuses that led to their enactment, and to this end, we are putting in place of old principles of unchecked competition some new Government controls. They must, above all, be impartial and just. Their purpose is to free business, not to shackle it" since business has not held up their side of the new deal.
> What's a family? Should it be 2-3 kids max, and then you're on your own?
As far as the specific concept of a living wage, yes.
> A solo adult who doesn't want kids is going to have far lower expenses and "living wage" than a single mother with 6 kids.
The solo adult can enjoy the extra money. And if they start a family later they'll have extra savings to build on. The baseline should be bringing everyone up to the level that they could afford a family, whether they have one or not. We have more than enough productivity and wealth to make this happen.
For someone with 6 kids, they need help from other sources. That goes beyond living wage territory.
Yikes, you can't find a single sentence in there that doesn't basically say "we're clueless, so we assume that the most convenient thing for us is true". Reads to me like: "We have no idea where the collection is! So we assume it's not our problem!"
I think you're right. I can't think of any reason an entire organization would act this way unless it had been repeatedly successful for them in the past.
Its a different kind of rational though. There is a world leader who gets away with all kinds of obvious theft and bribery and grift and fraud and self-serving out in the open, but to reasonable people, he doesn't seem rational at all, despite getting away with everything.
> The seizure. November 14th, 2024. The [original franchise owners Crystal Law Gorman and her husband Benjamin Gorman] approach B&M about selling the store. They have an overseas job offer, they want to recoup their investment before they leave.
> The same day --- same day -- corporate dispatches a representative to the Kaiser store. By B&M's account, the Gormans owed approximately $200,000 in unpaid royalties. The transition negotiations broke down and B&M terminated the franchise agreement under what McNeff described as a clause permitting offset of store assets similar to an asset seizure in a bankruptcy proceeding. By the Gormans' own account, they had approached corporate about selling, not closing. And B&M's response was a same-day forced removal? No notice, no inventory, and a single box of personal belongings?
> That same evening, Law Gorman says she informed the B&M representative on site who was on speaker phone with the corporate director of operations, Key McAllister, that there was an active consignment in the store, that Mancel had not been fully paid, and that the property remaining in the store was not the store's to sell. According to Law Gorman, McAllister responded that the new operator would be "taking over the consignment as well."
> This is a critical factual claim. McNeff has refused to address it on the record, citing pending litigation. McAllister has not responded to media requests at all. The Gormans say the store's security camera footage captured this exchange and that it has been provided to Kaiser police.
This reads like B&M corporate are hardball-playing morons, and they choose intimidation as their first action. They clearly didn't know or care about what a fuckup they just made in effectively seizing consigned goods while taking over the franchise, even though they were told about it. And they've relied on the stacked-deck of civil proceedings costs to get away with stealing a guy's property, while they taunt the guy and lie about their actions. And the police, instead of prosecuting them for what looks like a criminal offence, are helping them get rid of the annoying guy publicising B&M's malfeasance.
A $200k loss isn't much in the context of the whole company but it may be a very large amount for an individual franchise, and they want to set an example.
Think of it like a restaurant chain pursuing legal action against an internal theft ring at a single location.
(I am not taking the BAM side here, just providing a rationale for their actions).
Someone at a lower level probably a regional director, noticed that a franchise owed them a debt, took inventory from the store as payment of the debt, and when all this blew up and he realized he needs to give the inventory back, he doubled down bc otherwise he'd need to record a $200k loss on that franchise
Keep in mind you are getting one side of the story. The company seems to be claiming that the franchisee sold the sets and (perhaps) did not pay the consignor for the sales. And that the consignor moved his sets out of the store.
> That said, after ownership of the Salem store changed, we thoroughly documented and assessed current inventory. A few days later, we became aware of the previous arrangement, and compared our inventory assessment to the limited documentation provided by the consignor. It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
> A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition. The consignor also provided a written statement to a podcast that his collection was moved offsite for security reasons. Additional attempts to restore what we could with what was in our possession, was also declined, in writing.
I read through all of this too. It just seems that 1. why would the consignor decline? 2. if he did decline, especially "in writing", then why not post proof?
As you suggest, maybe the reason is more complicated, e.g. some was sold, consignor not happy to have what's left returned and no compensation for what was sold, so refused to just have the smaller amount of stuff returned. If so that could have been much more clearly expressed in this letter. And again they could just post the correspondance.
Difficult to imagine why it would be declined. Did they perhaps insist on unreasonable conditions for doing so, such as fully indemnifying them in the matter? (Just wild speculation on my part since for whatever reason neither party seems interested in providing a full, clear, objective telling of events.)
Yes, what you're missing on is that it's an intentional stalling strategy. It's obvious the debt goes to either the corporate, or to whoever owns the affiliate store. None of that is the problem. None of that is meant to be what's stated. Closing the store was done to hide the responsibility and the responsibili-tee.
The video has people doing that type of shit down to the leve of the employee
They can't nullify the debt by shutting the store down, but can they shut it down to create further headaches and delays for the person trying to collect the debt?
Does HN have a large crossover with Lego collectors? I’m struggling to understand why this is towards the top of the front page. Someone has their legos stolen via some consignment dispute. Why is that so interesting?
This looks like a corporation stealing from an old man. It’s clear-cut wrong, even if the YouTuber is annoying. I wouldn’t put it in the same bucket as a common murderer with similar favorable as Stephen Miller.
The Legos were being sold to fund the college education of the old man's young descendants IIRC. So, like the killing, the alleged issue is a corporation stealing from a young man, actually.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation in the comments, I would assume because the linked article doesn't cover many of the developments.
The youtuber Reckless Ben has recently covered the story and spearheaded a campaign of "provocative journalism" against the store[0]. Regardless of whether you support the way in which he goes about things, his video explains the story in much greater detail, and enormously expands on the malpractice of Bricks and Minifigs and the local police department.
Here are some bulletpoints in case you do not care to watch Part 1 + Part 2:
- Bricks and Minifigs explicitly threatened both the previous owners of the store and the original owner of the collection with lengthy legal battles
- The owner of the collection tried going the legal route but was quoted prices that he couldn't afford, so youtube was his last resort
- Bricks and Minifigs CEO publicly admitted of having the collection, being aware of the issue, and not wanting to give it back, while at the same time trying to run PR campaigns denying the allegations.
- BAM leadership went out of its way to create legal trouble for Reckless Ben, involving the police and fabricating false evidence about him
- The local police went out of its way to legally stop Ben, arrest him without probable cause, try to plant Heroin on his car, and even *ended up swatting his house*, dislocating his shoulder.
- All of this while the police department illegally scrubbed any incriminating evidence from the bodycam recordings they were obligated to provide.
This is an *insane* story that doesn't get enough credit. It not only exposes the inefficacy of (parts of) the American justice system, but also the enormous level of corruption and abuse of power of the American police (and tangentially the Mormon community)
I really recommend watching both videos. I promise you it's even more insane than it sounds like.
All the other stuff dwarfs the theft of $200K. I'm hoping this leads to financial damages that are a large multiple of that number, and multiple jail sentences.
Of course, that probably won't happen. I can imagine reform-oriented candidates running on putting an end to this sort of crap, and winning a local election or two. Speaking of which, I wonder if anything's come of the Afroman case in Ohio.
I dont see how B&M can even continue after this. The lego community is small. Why would a single person ever shop at one of their stores ever again? Maybe you can get some families trying to buy stuff for kids, but the vast majority of money here is adults that are very plugged into the lego scene and surely know about this.
putting aside that this deal went sour, which is very frustrating, i am curious how much they actually spent to buy all that lego, and how much they gained, if anything, over just directly saving the money.
Wow. I do not want to knock collectors but I will never understand them. That particular set worth 10k looks kind of crappy to me. I understand the star wars crossover appeal but still. And I have three kids and have bought countless sets. Every bday and xmas times 3.
Could he take them to small claims court one Lego set at a time, get a judgment against the business then go in with the sheriff and start taking stuff to cover the judgement?
This is one of the stunts tried on the video. The original owner sold the sets to the crew members, and they presented 10 small claims. They won all of them because BAM did not went to court, the next day they closed the store permanently. This story is crazy.
I dont understand how that works: The entire $400M business decided to close over $200K judgment? Or just the single store? If just the store, why did they sue the store and not the underlying business?
In my (possibly flawed) understanding, it's a franchise so they were able to dissolve the LLC that owned this particular store. The franchise is what has physical possession of the lego and signed the consignment contract.
No. Small claims are for claims which are small. This belongs in civil court all at once and you don't get to go in with the sheriff (if you win) unless they are ordered to pay you and refuse to.
There are explicit rules against claim splitting and you risk either the judge combining all of your filings into one case and moving it to a different court or dismissing all of the claims after the first one. There are very good reasons why a person can't keep suing you over and over for the same event.
Watch the video. They worked around this by selling lego sets to 10 different people (as it was still owned by the lego owner), then the 10 different people all opened separate $10k suits, which they all won.
Then corporate shut down the location to avoid paying the suits they lost.
One surprising thing I learned over time from news articles is that "won a judgment for $x from person y" actually doesn't mean very much in the US. The first thing that came to mind is a parachutist site in Lodi, but this one is another one.
I suppose it is indeed as Andrew Jackson said: John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!
If someone is poor and doesn't have the money, sure you can't enforce it.
If it's a corporation, it's pretty straightforward. If they refuse to pay, you get a writ from the court that authorizes seizure of assets.
Usually that means you go their bank and the value of the judgment will be garnished by their bank and given to you.
Occasionally and theatrically, a sheriff will take you to their headquarters to seize property like computers and printers that you can sell at auction until the value is satisfied.
It only becomes difficult if the corporation is bankrupt, which is similar to a poor person who doesn't have the money. Then it becomes a question of prioritization, e.g. do you get paid before or after lenders, and will there be any money left.
Have you actually gone through this process? Like sure, obtaining a writ is technically part of the same case, but it's pretty much starting all over again. And you'll still be paying filing fees, dealing with court clerks, and waiting weeks or months.
Finding a corporation's bank is a whole separate issue, where you have to go back to court for a post-judgement discovery to force them to tell you. And even if they do - or you already knew - you have to get the writ served to the bank, and just hope they didn't move funds beforehand - or else you're back to start.
As GP said, it IS a huge PITA to get judgments paid, and it's particularly menacing in Small Claims. Unless the other side act on some virtue (which, they were already bad-faithed enough to have a lawsuit against them AND lose), your judgment is just an IOU, and actually forcing collection is often way more money — or time in money — than most state's Small Claims limits.
No, but my point is that it does work. It's a lot better to be delayed by months and have to pay more but still get your money, rather than by delayed by years and not get it at all.
This is a franchised retailer with over 300 locations, and this is a value of $200,000+ plus so this is way bigger than small claims.
Like I'd definitely agree with you if we were talking about a $5K claim against a single location in small claims. But this seems to be a $200,000+ claim against a corporation in regular court, as far as I can tell.
I mean yeah, but only my final paragraph is about small claims. The accountability and enforcement mechanisms to collect your money from a ruling don't change between a $200K and a $2K lawsuit, it's the same PITA either way - just a few more zeroes on paper.
It stuns me when I read about people investing in Lego in order to make money later, and in this case it was to pay for someone's college. That info is from the fundraising page that's trying to pay for the lawyers.
The CEO's brother (the COO) appeared on a live stream tonight and showed the Temporary Restraining Order they obtained against everyone -- Ben, Chrystal, etc. which requires them to remove all their media on all platforms etc.
The basis for the TRO was that they offered "sufficient evidence" that Ben, Chrystal etc were a "criminal conspiracy" subject to RICO.
Those who hire a crisis management team rarely win in the court of public opinion. BAM just continues to dig a hole when they could instead facilitate fixing the situation regardless of if they think they are a party to this or not.
One of the saddest things about modern capitalism is that people stealing from businesses is criminalized and heavily punished but businesses stealing from people (eg. wage theft, illegal contracts, medicare/PPP fraud, and outright stealing like this case) is treated as a civil violation and almost impossible to prosecute.
The only cases of white collar crime I've seen get prosecuted is securities fraud and that's rich people stealing from other rich people.
Federal and most state civil courts are pay-to-win, too. They have absolutely nothing to do with justice. The only time "the little guy" wins anything is when the lawyers stand to make a windfall in contingency fees.
(...See, e.g., authors vs. Anthropic. The most prolific author might make somewhere in the low six figures, the average author is gonna make ~$10k, and the lawyers representing the class asked for $300M!)
The legal system is captured by legal professionals. The average American is bound by a system that they can't engage directly with. The middlemen who most people must hire to navigate through it generally will not help unless there's a substantial payday in it for them. And in civil matters, defendants have no right to representation.
(Also, the judge is colleagues with counsel, opposing or otherwise; none of them think much of you, which a trip to /r/LawyerTalk will confirm.)
All of this is a choice. Essentially the same choice that we have to have medical insurers instead of a single-payer system; a broken housing market controlled by large corporate interests, instead of one where prices are moderated by a stock of residences built by the government and sold at-cost or lower, as in Singapore or pre-Thatcher Great Britain; broken and spread-thin policing instead of the kind of sophisticated social support system that you would expect the richest country on the planet to be able to afford (and avoids sending the same armed ex-jock to domestic disturbances, mental health crises, car accidents, public school security, etc.). My suspicion is that the fight against change in any of these cases is so fierce because breaking one cartel threatens the others.
You correctly identify the problem as an over-complicated legal bureaucracy in your first paragraph, and propose more government as the solution in your third?
The solution here should be to simplify the legal system so legal adjudication is more accessible to non-lawyers, not add more layers of government bureaucracy on top of the existing ones.
The bureaucracy is not the body of law or the judiciary, which were the only government-related targets of my criticism. I agree that the legal system needs to be more accessible to non-lawyers. At the heart of that grievance is the professionalization (read: privatization) of the legal field, which turned a tool for finding justice, despite disputes into a career pursued for prestige and wealth. The problem is that the law and the people who adjudicate it have been captured by private enterprise. The bureaucracy is, like... the court clerks. Who I don't have a problem with, they're quite helpful.
In fact, they'd be integral to this "simplification of the legal system", since what that's essentially asking for is not to make adjudication more accessible, but to move disputes out of adjudication into a procedural venue (where the rules are simple, everyone knows them, and you either follow them and win, or don't and get the hammer).
Across all of the examples - legal recourse, healthcare, housing - what you're looking at is the end of the ambiguity of paradigms driven by private companies with opaque policies and conflicts of interest, and the arrival of an institutional monolith which can be changed by voting in elections. They don't even have to have a monopoly, they just have to be there as an option. I suppose policing is the exception, and while the vision there is unbundling instead of bundling, you're still looking at wresting control for social services out of the hands of the professionals who have captured it.
If you ask me, the solution to this matter in particular should be: (1) That all sides to civil litigation use court-appointed attorneys who are assigned at random and are sworn to not waste the court's time with delaying tactics, (2) That all persons should be granted the right to representation in civil court, an (3) That default judgments should not exist in the absence of the above; all matters should be adjudicated fairly.
In my opinion that would do little to solve the core problem, which is that adjuration is extremely expensive. It would just pass that high cost on to taxpayers and probably simultaneously 10x the demand because you just made it "free".
"The only cases of white collar crime I've seen get prosecuted is securities fraud and that's rich people stealing from other rich people."
There are thousands of YouTube videos of people being arrested or being in court on charges of embezzling from their employers, committing fraud, presenting bogus checks at banks, etc.
Hacking is white collar crime. So is mortgage fraud. So is tax evasion and bribery. There are tons of prosecutions of these crimes every year.
It's extremely rare for a rich / famous person to get prosecuted for securities fraud.
For instance, Martha Stewart (the only example that comes to mind) was convicted of lying and obstruction of justice, not for any actual crime that was being investigated.
It's not like she was the mastermind of the 2008 securities fraud meltdown, but she was the only person to go to jail for it.
There is an active criminal investigation into this from the Keizer police. Your implication that this is only being treated as a civil matter is false.
The public events depicted in part 1 also happened before the publishing date. Particularly the banner stunt that got local media attention is what I suspect prompted the criminal investigation.
> The only cases of white collar crime I've seen get prosecuted is securities fraud and that's rich people stealing from other rich people.
I was trying to popularize the phrase "the only thing which is illegal in America is defrauding investors" but I have no social media presence. Feel free to take it.
Regardless I agree with you on capitalism, but my take on securities fraud is less cynical. In late stage capitalism it makes _perfect sense_ that the only crime is to steal from investors - that's capitalism protecting itself.
This is comic book villain shit. The story isn't told well anywhere that is covering it, YouTubers aren't always exactly great journalists or incentivized to tell a coherent and concise story. But, it's obvious the Bricks and Minifigs folks are lying about damned near everything at every turn and not engaging in good faith.
So, the facts are hard to follow, but I know for a fact the old guy who lost his collection to a shitty corporation is not the bad guy in the story.
He kind of is. The right thing to do here is go straight to court. All this drama, grandstanding, conspiracist thinking, and stunts are bullshit. Sue. Get the judgment. Collect.
It's wild to me how willing people are to torch their company's reputation. If you've seen some of the videos and comments around this it really seems like the corporate owners, and possibly the new franchisee, are arguably, for lack of a better descriptio0n, egotistical bullies, the "yeah? sue me then" types. They've probably gone their entire life just being a-holes and not being held accountable. And now they're digging their heels in.
The facts and the law here are quite simple. Man consigns LEGO collection to the store. He has a contract. The new store owner still has that liability. The existence of a contract is in dispute. The franchisee's and corporate owner's positions seems to be that the contract is with the previous owner not the owner's store.
Well, if that's true, the LEGO collection still belongs to that previous owner and the new owner has simply stolen it. So their legal argument is ridiculous.
Allegedly that previous owner was basically kicked out of the store and denied the opportunity to take inventory so that owner probably has a case against corporate and the new owners as well.
There is no world in which this ends well for the company of the new store owner. And it's wild to me that they're sticking to their guns here. Beyond the legal issues, the reputational damage is massive. These stores are for LEGO collectors and they're screaming bloody murder. Plus ordinary people who hear about this story have an innate sense of fairness so immediately side with the people who've had their $200k LEGO collection effectively stolen.
Plus this now has so much publicity that there are any number of lawyers who will take on this case just for the publicity.
It's also funny that the Utah police who got involved when people went to corporate are basically just acting like corporate's security arm.
>The facts and the law here are quite simple. Man consigns LEGO collection to the store. He has a contract. The new store owner still has that liability.
That would only be true if a new owner purchased the business. In bankruptcy consigned goods become property of the consignee's bankruptcy estate and cannot be returned to the original owners. The original owners have a cause of action against the estate, but they are not guaranteed the return of the consigned goods or full recompense for the value of the goods. It largely depends on how corporate took over the franchise.
Generally, if the consignee under such a consignment arrangement files for bankruptcy relief, the consigned goods are property of the consignee's bankruptcy estate. Accordingly, 11 U.S.C. §362(a)(3) prohibits the consignor from picking up the consigned goods after the filing of the bankruptcy. Additionally, if the consignor picks up the goods, (1) the consignor may be subject to a turnover action under 11 U.S.C §§542 or 543 for their return and/or (2) within 90 days prior to the bankruptcy filing, the consignor may be subject to a preference action under 11 U.S.C. §547(b) for their return.
Bricks and Minifigs is a very popular birthday party destination for my kids peers. I will make sure to share this story with anyone considering to go there and allow them to form their own conclusions.
i ignored this for the last week. but after enough people who’s opinions i trust wouldn’t shut up about it, i caved and watched today. this is fucking bonkers. part 2 (and i don’t say this often) is f’ing crazy.
i was like, “a story about legos? cmon.” and then part 1 was a 7/10 and hooked me enough to subscribe to his patreon to see the next part early and wtf, the stuff going on in utah is crazy. i cannot recommend this enough. i’m confident this is going to blow much wider, and once it breaks these utah cops containment, more than a few people will be going to prison.
Damn, I didn't realize this was a huge chain. I've hundreds of dollars at a local store and need to rethink that (easy enough to just go to the actual Lego store instead). This is crazy behavior, shameful.
So infuriating. Seems there is a gofundme link deep in there. I hope this gets him and his family back what he deserves + lawyer fees so he can get justice.
Someone needs to do a movie about this. If anyone from Disney or Lego is here, this is a phenomenal way to get some free advertising + do good in the world.
If this was 200k of anything else I don't think I'd care as much. I'm not sure why childish objects are worthy of more vitriol than anything else, but I definitely feel that way.
What do you think would be helping things? Passively sitting in the house waiting for the CEOs to change their minds? Writing polite letters to the local newspaper? Like, whats your theory here?
We would never be talking about it if it wasn't for Ben. Yeah, he's weird, but he's the one that finally got a light shone onto this insanity. The fact he has literally fled to Mexico to avoid any more police harassment is wild.
I actually am from this town and I have watched this play out over the last five years. I moved away from Oregon because of these exact kind of problems. My daughter's e-bike was stolen and we had a tracker in it and we attempted to get the police to help us recover it from a homeless encampment where it has been tracked to. We have ever possible way to prove ownership of the bike from beginning to end multiple times over.
The Keizer Police laughed at us and acted like it was absurd that we would try to get our property back or that they would help us in any capacity whatsoever.
I have a video of a KPD officer telling me that he's not going to arrest a junkie because only some spit landed on my daughter because the junkie was spitting on my daughter.
It sucks because Keizer used to be a really nice town and it's where people went to retire. It's where I went to retire as well and that's not how it works anymore.
Oregon is a failed trash fire now. I moved to rural Montana and don't regret a second of it.
I’ve watched both videos by RecklessBen (Part 2 is on his patreon, and apparently will be made public when he has Part 3 ready)…
The videos are damning of the behavior by Brick and Minifigs, the two owners who took over the store in Kaiser, and both the Kaiser (Oregon) police for and American Force (Utah) police.
Brick and Minifigs both corporate and the owners who stole the legos, have consistently and thoroughly lied as well as threatened Ben numerous times. He has recordings of it. It’s all in his videos. He even got the franchise agreement which states consignment is allowed. He got a default judgement in small claims court that caused the original location to permanently shutter its doors. He’s now trying to sue them in civil court, but he can’t even serve the papers.
Ben has tried every legal channel, and been hit with at least trespass at every point. His AirBnB was raided, he was searched for three hours for heroin possession allegations, the police continuously and non-stop targeted him. They’ve issued warrants, and they have been redacted so Ben doesn’t even know what he’s gotta defend against.
I’d really encourage folks to go watch the part 1 since it’s freely available on YouTube, but part 2 is where the Utah police seem to full throttle shit all over his civil rights to protect a Bricks and Minifigs, and the franchise owners, who stole $200k of legos from an 83 year old man.
If this all seems crazy, it’s because it absolutely is crazy. Ben does an absolutely incredible job, attempting to document everything and goes to huge lengths to do things the right way.
Edit: Fix autocorrect mistake and minor readability tweaks.
For the alternate side, Bricks and Minifigs claims much of Mansell's inventory had been sold, or relocated by Mansell himself. The liability for any discrepancy in sales and his compensation is the responsibility of the franchisee with whom he sign the contract.
> It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
> A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition. The consignor also provided a written statement to a podcast that his collection was moved offsite for security reasons. Additional attempts to restore what we could with what was in our possession, was also declined, in writing.
> BAM denies allegations that we “stole” this consignor’s collection, let alone a collection worth what has been claimed online. However, we remain willing to provide any appropriate assistance in recovering any and all portions of this collection or funds generated off of its sale to the original consignor and their family, through appropriate means.
> Serious claims require serious evidence. We have repeatedly asked for the original documents and undoctored recordings that support these accusations. Selective social media posts and misleading investigative-style videos are not a substitute for the complete records and legal agreements that govern the rights of all involved parties.
> If a legitimate claim exists, there are established legal and dispute-resolution processes to handle it fairly. Attempting to force a business outcome through public pressure, especially on unrelated stores and employees, is not a productive or fair path forward.
I don't have first-hand corroboration of the facts, though I am surprised that the article favorable to Mansell did not simply publish the consignment agreement with the franchise owner.
The strange part continues to be that the 2023 franchising agreement that explicitly permits consignment. While BAM is also claiming that the 2023 owners manual prohibited franchise owners from consignment agreements.
I would guess that BAM simply had poorly audited, conflicting documentation. It's one part they haven't addressed (albeit not central to their claims).
Do you care to disclose your relation to the leadership of Bricks and Minifigs? Did you go to the same university as those involved from the company? Are you affiliated with any of the same organizations?
No affiliation, other than being a fan of building bricks in general, and making a couple small purchases from one of their franchises (not in Portland, OR).
Why didn't you say they were mormons from the beginning? That all makes sense now. Truth, lies, and morality doesn't mean the same in that case. Read Under The Banner of Heaven by Krakauer.
This is abhorrent and unfortunately not surprising. This corporate culture of fascism is deep, including the culture of YCombinator. The police were founded to protect corporate interests and nothing else.
> Ed Mansell spent years building what many believe to be the largest personal LEGO Star Wars collection in history, over $200,000 worth of sets
Note that it says "$200k worth of SETS". The collection, in the possession of any single individual or entity, is worth many times that. That's why it took years to build the collection, and why it is what many believe to be the most extensive. Others might be trying to acquire a complete set like this, but rarity dictates that other collectors will be reluctant to sell.
If I were to speculate I wonder if BAM already sold the collection to some billionaire for millions and doesn't want to admit it.
Since it is done under guise of a corporation, there will be zero actual consequences for the individuals involved in the theft. Nor will there be any consequences for the officers involved in violating rights.
There really needs to be consequences for blatantly manipulating courts to waste money and delay judgement.
Ruined seems like very strong phrasing when nothing important has been ruined.
They sell new Lego sets in stores every day. They might seem expensive for a few bags of plastic bits and some instructions, but then: They've never been cheap.
A kid can still grow up playing with Lego today, just as they've always been able to.
I still remember building my first new Lego widget. Set 918. It was just a small basic spaceship and no real accessories but a little Lego space dude. I'd already scattered the pieces around and stuck them together in strange ways when I noticed that there was an instruction book so I could assemble it the "right" way. That may have been the first instruction book I'd ever followed; I remember the sense of wonderment as I learned the value of it. That model didn't last long before I tore it apart and went back to sticking the pieces together in strange ways. :)
Anyway, it seems like it would have been about $6.50 back then, or about $31 in today's money.
That's not so different from today's prices -- in fact, it looks things may have actually gotten a bit less expensive since then for a given amount of complexity.
That's not ruination; it's the opposite of it. The kids are fine. Lego is fine.
---
I do see that someone on eBay that someone hopes to get over $2,000 for a new, sealed copy of set 918. That's a about sixteen more fuckton more than $31.
And I can't justify spending that kind of money on some Lego.
But I don't have to spend that kind of money. If I have a Lego itch that I want to scratch, then I'm a grown-ass adult. I can just go to the store or some online seller or whatever, and buy a new set that I like, and put it together.
I don't need to spend $2k to pretend relive a part of my childhood. I already experienced it once, and I remember that part very fondly.
Ruined as in - Lego sets are glorified EZ-mode puzzles and not creative toys anymore. Too many limited sets means it's trending toward "collector items" and not kids toys.
I see both kinds of sets for sale. I do not see ruination. Both kinds present an empire of creativity when they're disassembled and mixed up together in a box, as tends to happen with Lego. It's fine.
Or, alternatively, it may be possible for a person to be such a profoundly grown-up adult to be unable to see it that way. If that's the case, then I guess you're right: These adults are incapable of being creative with Lego, and therefore adults have ruined Lego. For themselves.
But if that's the case, then it was ruined for the old coots from the very beginning. :P
It's interesting to me that Lego can't be easily made at home in 2026. That whatever they do with plastic, dye and injection molding cannot be easily replicated.
When I was ten, my mum questioned whether my sister and myself were 'too old for LEGO'. In Woolworths we had to reassure her that Set 376-2 Town House with Garden was what we wanted as it came with lots of lovely red bricks that we 'needed'. To be honest, at the time, I thought my mum was right, and that we were getting too old for LEGO, but we had sunk costs...
For us, LEGO was all about ingenuity, improvisation and imagination. We would build a set once, with the alternate back-of-the-box design, without the instructions. Then the real fun would begin, as the new set went in with the bricks we had.
At secondary school (age 11 in UK), the LEGO was cast aside as a mere child's toy. We had moved on and the idea of 'still playing with LEGO' would have been a social faux pas.
Nowadays kids have a ridiculous abundance of LEGO but where is the ingenuity and imagination? Or even the play time? With tablets, phones, video games and so much else, it seems that the set gets built as per the instructions and that is it, job done. The play hasn't even really started.
My parents hosted dinner parties, as was the custom at the time, when restaurants were rare. They quite liked to have our current creations on show, in a low-key way. That is how adults should do LEGO, proud of their kids' creations.
None of our LEGO had a market value, however, every brick had utility and colour value within our LEGO world. We had other things for collecting, even stamps, and they notionally had value.
Hence I am not sure what is going on with people having $200k LEGO collections. That level of abundance just isn't about play, and certainly not for kids. I have no sympathy for the guy, and although the loss is painful, at least he has a chance to grow up a bit!
P.S. Corporate LEGO also ruined it by promoting the whole AFOL thing, but the success of the company has been astounding, considering the product is plastic waste.
You played with legos as a kid. Congratulations, so did lots of other kids at the time, and so do kids right now. Nothing has actually changed. Legos are still sold in a box with instructions, just like they were 20 years ago and 40 years ago and so on and so forth.
The idea that adults can't play with or enjoy legos is, well, genuinely sad, as in, it invokes the emotion of sadness. Adults are allowed to have fun and play games, whether that be building race cars out of metal or out of lego or any other activity they find joy in.
> At secondary school (age 11 in UK), the LEGO was cast aside as a mere child's toy. We had moved on and the idea of 'still playing with LEGO' would have been a social faux pas.
I genuinely wish you had a better childhood. Maybe you would have grown up into a person who can feel empathy for others.
The toy market is under continual change and every child is borne into the context and culture of their era.
There is also opportunity cost. Had I listened to my mother on that fateful day in Woolworths, we could have moved ten foot one way to have bought ourselves sports gear. Since neither my sister or myself can catch a ball, maybe we should have got into badminton, table tennis or football. But we denied ourselves that opportunity because we bought yet more LEGO.
Things were different in period in the USA, particularly for middle class kids, where the abundance of toys was entirely different. My American counterparts of the period had 10x the toys we had. Not jealous, just saying.
As an outsider looking in on American culture in general, there is too much infantilisation going on for my liking. Adults going to Disneyland with no kids in tow, adults watching MARVEL movies with no kids in tow, adults eating McDonalds, adults eating cereal with cartoon characters on the box, adults drinking Coca Cola and so on. Even the car culture is somewhat infantile.
Why has American gone the wrong way, to retreat into a nine-year-old 'inner America'?
Going back a bit, the finest literature came out of the USA, not yet more infantile cruft. Something is amiss.
We have been here before. After WW2, plenty of men returned to retreat into their inner nine year old selves, which kept model trains going for a while after the kids lost interest. But the adults changed the hobby from playing trains to this micro-realistic world with running trains becoming a rarity, rather than what it was all about. This was their coping mechanism, and I understand that.
The only place in Taiwan to get good hot wings is Hooters, so I was there the other day with some folks, and we noticed this dude alone at a table for a bit. His beer arrives, and he pulls out an unopened Lego box set for some car. For the next hour he slowly drinks his beer while building the entire set. Finishes the beer and set simultaneously, puts the car in his bag, pays his bill, and walks out.
There's few strangers I've encountered that I've respected more and the rest are all firemen.
The pokemon company intentionally limits the supply to drive up demand. Cardboard is in no way a limited resource, they could print as many cards as there is demand for if they wanted. The problem is not the scalpers but the corporation who values the artificial scalped demand more than gameplay. That no one in the so called community can correctly place blame is an indictment of their intelligence.
Star Wars LEGO seems to be the worst. I went to the Bellevue, WA store a few years ago before Christmas. I have no interest in SW or SW LEGO (I'm much more into the Architecture series).
I was walking around though, and an associate came up to me and pointed out that the Death Star (IIRC) was about to stop being sold so if I wanted one I should grab it... "... and that we have several of it, so if you want allll of them."
I assume they were talking about 75159 right before it retired.
I think that was when Lego speculation was just becoming a bigger thing.
Now, I don't think something like that could retire with stock being on the shelf.
I grabbed Betrayal at Cloud City (75222) from my local Lego Store after it retired because they still had one in stock. I don't think I'll get that lucky again.
Especially with the push for exclusive Gift With Purchase (GWP) sets. It's become slightly ridiculous.
But I'm not a speculator, I'm just a dude who likes assembling plastic bricks.
I hope it’s true because I still have heaps of these silly bricks lying somewhere on my grandma’s attic. I hold your word on it that they are now worth a fortune
Let’s keep them for a bit more appreciation and compound interest then…
Move out of the way blue chips, plastic chips are the real investing. Who needs bricks of gold when you have bricks of finest danish plastic?
Okay but you get the point. This is not investment, this is playground. No one buys Lego thinking “oh they will make me rich if I just keep them unopened for next 20 years” cmon
Arbitration only works if both parties are at least somewhat co-operative with the process. If someone decides to just not co-operate with the process or actively impede it, you need to escalate far beyond arbitration, which gets very expensive very quickly (with maybe some small chance that if you can pay for it, you might be able to get some of it back at the end. The belligerent side is generally just betting you'll run out of funds and willpower before you get there).
The problem with the legal system in cases like this is if you have the police in your pocket, you can manipulate the perception of the truth and feel confident in bullying your adversary.
i feel bad for the family but that's the nature of the business, the cost of doing business is always a risk. If the collection was worth or appraised at 200k then the family should have done more due diligence. I mean its their life savings. How much paperwork could be done to protect the assets. branding the boxes with tamper proof stickers
You are being disingenuous. They had a signed contract (consignment) with the franchisee. The other entity then just took what is physically in the store.
It is however a civil matter.
Please enlighten us what other "due diligence" these people should have done for your point.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this more criminal?
BAM / new franchisee claims that any consignment deal is null and void after their takeover. If they knowingly possess items that therefore do not belong to them legally (because they were never owned by the previous franchisee), is that not theft (and therefore criminal behavior)?
Like imagine the previous franchisee left their phone in the store. Then the new owners say "nah, it doesn't belong to me". But actually it does. That is theft.
If the allegations in the article are true (doxxing the victim, leading to injury), "losing" the contract, refusing to accept delivery of a copy of the contract, etc, etc, the corporation is clearly acting in bad faith. This is so egregious that pain and suffering would likely enter into any judgement. In the US, that means punitive multipliers on a high base value.
DDG's LLM-thingy estimates a $1.5M-$5M judgement if the judge is in a sufficiently bad mood, or a $10-50M jury award that'd be reduced on appeal.
I'm hoping they get the high range of those estimates.
I'm really confused by this blog. There seems to be a large portion of the story missing. I can't figure out the correlation between the owner losing their franchise and the rest of the story. Why did they want to steal the sets? If they're really a $400M company (whatever that means), why would they do this over (at most) $200k?
I couldn't figure out what is being claimed here. I'm not saying it's not true, I just can't follow the story at all.
EDIT: After reading other sources, it seems that the franchise owed $200k to BAM (unrelated) and also made a deal with the Mansell's directly. And it seems like the parent company is saying the unsold sets have been returned but the money is theirs because the store owed them money, while the Mansells are (correctly) saying consignment means they own the sets, not the franchise. BAM crossed into definitively illegal territory when they continued to sell sets after the Mandells asserted they wanted their property back (as confirmed by a "sting" operation).
The Reckless Ben stuff is actually pretty interesting: https://youtu.be/14ktgvoH4Mc?si=yhSzpEDo5ut6s8eS&t=880
It's not that hard to understand.
A man gave a store merchandise on consignment, signed a contract with the store manager.
The manager lost control of the store to corporate. The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
Corporate says, "this is mine now" and refuses to honor the contract. "It wasn't our name on it, says right here that the previous store manager signed this, and she's no longer with us." They sell the goods and keep all of the revenue, rather than just their 10% share.
It seems like theft, but it's a very common civil contract dispute. The side with possession and deeper pockets is the side with the leverage, sadly!
> "It wasn't our name on it, says right here that the previous store manager signed this, and she's no longer with us."
this seems kinda obvious that if they dont have a contract to do consignment, they don't have a contract to the lego at all, and cannot sell the lego
Corporate is also claiming that they don't allow stores to take on consignment deals, contrary to their franchise agreement explicitly allowing franchise owners to take on consignment deals.
I have absolutely no doubts a court would consider it impossible to transfer goods under consignment to a different entity free of the burden of the consignment contract. So the corporation trying to reach into the franchise to grab these goods without honoring the contract is absolute BS and they should be dragged through the mud over it.
The unfortunate loophole here is that, potentially, by shutting down that franchise in a bankruptcy the corporation may end up being preferred for being made whole on debts relative to the consigner. Bankruptcy is complicated so while I am pretty sure any remaining goods from the consignment would be returned to the original owner the proceeds from sales that were successfully made might end up in the pocket of the corporation.
Personally, I absolutely loathe consignment. It is an incredibly complex agreement with a lot of weird edge cases about deprecation of goods and the duty to seek a good price that get complex quick. If you have goods like this and can find a store that will buy your goods in bulk you should be very careful in considering how much you care about the price difference between that bulk price and the percentage they list for consignment. A single transaction is usually much cleaner and easier for both sides and in this case (trying to pay for medical costs) having the money immediately can be quite attractive.
If you look at the latest stuff from the previous owner where they recorded multiple conversations / pulled security footage... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zedmOopRTm0 1, they were allowed to do consignment deals, 2, when corporate took control, they said they'd take on the consignment liability, 3, BAM outright threatens them with making the legal process too expensive for them.
All of which contradicts the current corporate response
yeah, it’s plain as day they say blatantly they’ll take on the consignment.
the reckless ben youtube videos are pretty clearly laid out with contracts, video evidence, etc..
the crazy part to me is how blatant the executives of bricks and minifigs are in saying go ahead and try to sue us, we’ll drag this out until you’re broke from lawyers fees. we’re a lawyer rich corp and you’re not. they don’t even try to hide it.
bricks and minifigs are just crazy dickens movie tier evil it’s crazy.
Unfortunately this makes every Bricks and Minifigs store a risk to do business with, selling or buying. You're either supporting a criminal enterprise or risking being a victim of one.
"the crazy part to me is how blatant the executives of bricks and minifigs are in saying go ahead and try to sue us, we’ll drag this out "
To my experience this is a common strategy in disputes when the corporate party has people who operate as uncivilized brutes. I think it's part of the McKinseyfication of companies - profits at all cost - and here's the playbook.
My personal experience is from private parking control. Rather than be professional about my reclamation, their first response was "only criminals dispute these and we win all the court cases".
So I think trying to be imposing and villanous to scare the other non-corporate party to back off is a common global corporate playbook in situations in matters where companies enter contractual complex space with individuals.
Very rarely do corporations act like this once there’s any sort of spotlight on them. Especially over such a relatively small number. This is nothing to do with any standard corporate tactics and everything to do with the guys in charge being complete dick heads.
I wish it was so as well but
"When McKinsey Comes To Town" by Bogdanich and Forsythe
documents exactly standard tactics such as these in e.g. insurance.
Sign of the times. It's not enough to be rich and powerful, the goal is to be able to gloat about your impunity. Little Epsteins.
That has always been the goal. There is, has, and always will be a powerful caste system to ensure that they are gods and we are trash. "Stay in your lane" / "Know your place" / etc. have been watchwords for thousands of years.
yeah you cant just unilaterally cancel the contract in which you agreed to hold the goods for sale, and then take possession without any reimbursement.
You either need to pay the sales price of the consigned items, or just give them back.
If you do neither, its the same exact thing as theft. Which is what they did. They took possession of the 200k lego set with no reimbursement. Just plain ol' theft.
> I have absolutely no doubts a court would consider it impossible to transfer goods under consignment to a different entity free of the burden of the consignment contract.
Reminds me of the whole "disney must pay" debacle.
Was that the incident where they stole an artists tiki design?
No, they came up with some legal theory in which they’d bought the assets of some company, including the company’s ownership of some art, but not obligations like paying royalties.
Oh yes, the incident with the star wars extended universe authors royalties. Disney is the worst.
That’s like when I got my shower sealed and then it started leaking within the warranty period. The company claimed that they were the new owners and had purchased the business but not the warranty obligations (!) and I’d have to find the original owner and try to make him honour the warranty. Which was complete BS, obviously, but it wasn’t worth taking to court. :/
There actually are legal ways to do that… instead of buying the company, you start a new company, and just buy assets of the old company (e.g. phone numbers, web sites, trademarks, customer lists). Seems shady but apparently it’s pretty common.
A letter from a lawyer or small claims court might be worth it though. It’s not going to take that much of your time, or cost very much.
Perhaps:
“Authors Have Formed a Task Force Because Disney Refuses to Pay Them”
https://bookriot.com/disney-must-pay-task-force/
> Authors like Neil Gaiman have formed a task force to fight for the royalties Disney has refused to pay for Star Wars and other tie-in novels.
The problem with consignment is that the consignor wants the maximum price but the consignee wants a quick sale because 10% of a few bucks more means very little and they have to hold the inventory.
Selling on consignment can be an absolutely great deal for shops, under the right conditions.
If I'm a lego trader and I buy your set for $900 hoping to sell it later for $1000, in the meantime that's $900 I can't invest in anything else. And maybe I guessed the set's value wrong and I end up unloading it for $800, taking a loss.
On the other hand, if I agree to sell that same set on consignment? Zero capital outlay, zero risk of me taking a loss - just some shelf space and admin work.
> just some shelf space
Unless the store owns its building and has too little inventory to cover the shelves, the cost of not filling the shelves with the right goods is quite serious. In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".
This is definitely not uniform. I worked on inventory management at Target, and stores had quite a lot of shelf space—to the point where we'd hold large amounts of cheap, non-perishable stuff like cat litter because, well, we had the space for it.
Stores also wanted to look full. We actually had parameters in our inventory management logic to increase inventory just for presentation reasons. If inventory is expensive, having some free, quality inventory can be valuable in and of itself even if it moves slowly.
Bricks and Minifigs stores are like 2000 square feet, much different than a Target. Their overhead per square foot is almost certainly far higher than Target.
On the other hand, every BAMF I've ever been in had more open space than any of the other businesses it shared a strip mall with.
If you have no shelf space, of course you can refuse the consignment. And this was a really big one, but the shop was initially very happy with it. Advertised widely with it. Brought in more shelves to display it all. From what I understand, it was a very large part of what was for sale in that shop.
But the shelf space is part of it either way... It's not like consignment stores take everything offered. Most of them are incredibly selective.
My wife owns a retail business where some part of their sales is consignment. Taking anything in with only a 10% consignment fee would be laughable, there’s no way that’s a money making deal when you account for all the overhead of a small retail store. My suspicion is the original store owner made a bad consignment deal to sell the Star Wars stuff with only a 10% commission and the new owner didn’t want to live up to it. Of course, at that point they should have just given it all back, but it turns out they’d rather be evil.
The videos identify the consignment fee as 35%, not 10%.
I head them say 35% at some point later in the videos, but they definitely said 10% first, so I’m not sure which is correct.
> In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".
However, in this particular case, the legos were initially displayed as a customer attraction, and then kept in storage. Presumably there's still some inventory cost in storage, but the shelves are clear.
>> The collection will be on display in the store's party room from 10am till 6pm on Saturday, November 11th, and 11am till 6pm on Sunday. The collection will be available for sale immediately, so the best time for pictures will be Saturday morning. The collection will not be stored on-site after hours for security reasons, and after Sunday the sets will be available for purchase but stored elsewhere.
Much better deal for a diamond ring than a giant kayak, then. Gotta pay rent to sit on the shelf!
"Holding inventory" is only problem if the store is full.
It isn't - deprecation of held goods is always a risk and if you're working on consignment then that comes with weird financial liabilities. If there's a flood and you lose your inventory it sucks - if there's a flood and you lose an inventory of consigned values then suddenly you're potentially exposed to paying market value for a number of items in addition to all the site damage you'll need to address. Capacity is one aspect of the costs of holding inventory - but breakage is the much more expensive consideration and consignment just makes it even more expensive.
I believe in this case the consignment contract requires the store to hold insurance on the consigned merchandise, which I assume is intended to address this concern.
None of this is a risk with Lego.
Depreciation: not going to happen on Star Wars sets that are not longer in production.
Water damage: Lego is water proof.
Breakage: being easy to take apart and put back together is Lego’s core principle.
a large part of the value of secondhand stuff is in the box and packaging, assuming those nice boxes in the image were from his collection - those are a little more fragile than the Lego pieces themselves.
Edit: wait, the whole collection was sealed and new in box. Yea, just water damage to those boxes would cut the value by at least 10%. Collectors are picky as shit.
They were sealed in box? Yeah you'd be right that damage would be easy and could significantly reduce the value.
I didn't realize people bought Lego to leave in the box. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised because it's a common thing for collectors to do in other hobbies.
Yup, if I worked in a field where consignment was an option I'd refuse to do it - it's a huge headache. So I'd absolutely believe that the corporation has a policy against accepting consignment offers and might have a case to recover damages or something against the original franchisee. But the way they've handled this situation still appears to be atrocious. Lets say you consigned 200k at a 10% commission, 50k sold under the original franchisee and you were paid 30k already. If the franchise transferred and the company wanted out there should be an exit[1] in the contract to pay the additional 15k and then return the goods to the original owner. I think it's important to remember this sort of an option was always on the table.
1. Even if the original consignment contract was poorly drawn up without a clear exit clause I think it'd be reasonable to expect a resolution somewhere close to this in mediation.
The original contract very specifically allows consignment. It's published.
So you "absolutely believe" something that was already proven false, and which you would know if you had even _skimmed_ the facts.
You clearly didn't read the article. The original franchisee's contract allows consignement.
I have read that article and a few other sources since the first few ways I heard about this story were heavily biased. I have not yet seen B&M confirm that the contract that was leaked is genuine - it is incredibly unlikely that they would, of course, but it still remains one the facts in this case that I tenatively believe but have some reservations around.
I thought it was interesting to, from the assumption that the corporation actually banned consignments, still work through how it doesn't free them from wrong doing. Even in the best light B&M has acted in bad faith.
Your alternative is that the contract was forged. Something easily falsifiable in court and absolutely devastating to any case brought, not to mention any follow-on charges that may result. Is that what you're putting forward?
In bankrupty a court appointed liquidator can seize assets and sell them to repay creditors. Of course none of this happened here.
They can seize assets that belong to the entity. They can’t seize assets that belong to other people just because it happens to be on their premises, in the same way that they can’t seize and sell the cars that happen to be in a bankrupt store’s parking lot.
I saw an analysis from a lawyer who said that there are situations where a creditor can claim consignment items, but that it didn't apply here.
They can't sieze consignment stock though?!?
"Can't" is a really bad word to use and I am not certain if "they" here are the corporation or the liquidator.
If you're talking about the corporation I think that any sensible neutral party would probably come down on the side that the corporation has no entitlement to those goods.
If you're talking about the liquidator then the goods were held by the franchise so if it went through bankruptcy those goods would be under consideration by the steward - I think they'd usually find that the original owner should be entitled to the goods since they're relatively non-fungible. The proceeds from sold goods are likely a more complicated answer since money is fungible and divisible. I could accept that there would be scenarios where a steward would think that the corporation should recover a portion of the proceeds.
The court can do almost anything. Its happened before.
https://www.cozen.com/news-resources/publications/2020/is-yo...
I think if the consignor has not taken the correct steps then there is a risk the receiver would be able to pay other secured creditors using the consignors assets. For example if there are other creditors with liens on the inventory then you are meant to take steps to notify them of your claims on the consigned goods because otherwise the consigned goods could look like inventory to the secured creditor (https://www.lowenstein.com/news-insights/publications/articl...)
bricks and minifigs is going to lose a hell of a lot more than this 10% in business
regardless of the law, it’s a very stupid move on the company’s part.
if they had half a brain they’d pay double the commission and pretend it aas internal miscommunication. $40k is cheap versus the pr hit they’re taking right now
The (former) franchise owner shared their contract with BAM that explicitly allowed consignments.
I’ll make sure if I’m ever listing anything through a store via consignment that I remember to ask if the contract with their their franchiser allows consignment in the event that the franchisees folds. You know, typical stuff.
Corporate is lying a lot, and is pretty clearly guilty of theft at the very least.
The bigger problems I see here are:
1. You can't really sure large corporations like Bricks & Minifigs. They've got deeper pockets and can drag it out until you go bankrupt. There's no good legal recourse for this, meaning larger corporations can basically do whatever they want and ignore the law, as long as they only hurt people smaller than them.
2. The police refuses to treat this as the theft it is. There have been several confrontations with police that give a very strong impression that the police is corrupt and protecting the Bricks & Minifigs and its crimes.
3. Reckless Ben's questionable shenanigans seem to be the only way to fight for justice in unequal situations like this. The offending franchise is now closed. The victim still doesn't have his lego or money back, but thanks to Ben, Bricks & Minifigs is now also feeling the pain. Without that, they would have simply gotten away with it. Chance are they've done stuff like this before.
Also interesting are some of the stunts Ben has pulled:
1. Confronted with the claim that it's a civil matter, he tried turning it into a crime, by holding a raffle for one of the stolen sets that's still legally owned by the victim. The winner of the raffle went to pick it up, and was refused, making it theft from a lottery, which is a crime that the police is supposedly required to investigate (they didn't).
2. Several people buy $10k worth of lego from the victim and claim it from the shop. When they're refused, they go to small claims court, which is now possible because it's only $10k. Bricks & Minifigs ignored it and closed the shop instead. There are default judgements in favour of the people helping the victim, but there doesn't seem to be any way to enforce them.
3. He went out of his way to get the company to sue him, which is apparently better than him suing the company? I'm not sure why. But Bricks & Minifigs didn't bite.
The most effective thing has simply been the PR. The public attention may finally get law enforcement to investigate and punish Bricks & Minifigs. Or at least the broader public will know and avoid Bricks & Minifigs, so at least the company gets punished financially. That won't help the victim, but at least it would be some measure of justice.
#1 is a bluff. It would be really hard to drag it out and judges hate that. You are much more likely to end up paying the costs of the little guy as sanctions than bankrupting them or whatever.
This is also straightforward enough and enough evidence exists that it would be hard to drag it out.
>you can’t really sue
You definitely can sue a large corporation and win or force a settlement. The “we’ll drag this out until you are bankrupt” thing is more bluff than reality. Courts do not react favorably to that. Especially when they have direct evidence of those threats.
A corporation may have a litigation cost advantage, but they’re still going to spend more than the $180k or whatever that they owed to execute this drag it out forever strategy.
(sprinkle a bunch of IIRC's) You're glossing over the fact that they have continued to sell the items in spite of a cease and desist from the brick owners which makes them totally culpable of selling other people's property, and that they're also being sued for unfair termination because the managers were calling in good faith to let them know they were going to take a job abroad.
But the end of the blog post says the man sued and won.
But the store closed to get out of paying.
Which makes no sense if the store was corporate-owned. So why isn't the corporation paying?
The store in question was a franchise so potentially the liability will be limited to just the assets of that franchise. But there's a lot of weird stuff here and it looks like the corporation may have (in a legally questionable manner) removed assets from the store to the corporation during proceedings to shield them.
A representative of the corporation, while taking over the store, expressly states that the corporation is taking over the consignment agreement, on camera and with several witnesses.
Courts are allowed to pierce the corporate veil when that happens.
They absolutely are and a good lawyer, I'm sure, could audit the accounts and find some misdeeds - the issue is that the auditing and even getting access to those records in court is extremely expensive. To my knowledge there isn't a way to trigger that kind of a discovery in small claims so you need to go through the pricey legal system.
The money in question here is the proceeds from selling a collection valued at 200k - the recovery (unless you start to get into punitive territory) is likely to be rather meager... and it's a large risk so there may be few bites on firms willing to take it on purely commission.
> unless you start to get into punitive territory
Is there not potential grounds here for punitive damages? The false police reports and harassment seem egregious even by corporate standards.
And the corporation is valued at $400 million, so it's not like the pot isn't sweet enough
In the UK you can make an order of information to compel directors of a company that is in debt to answer questions about company assets, accounts and records under oath. This can be done in County Court and my understanding it is inexpensive. I'm not sure how useful this is for carrying out an audit because I think its meant to be used for seeing if the debtor has the ability to pay. I think generally incorrect trading during an insolvency is meant to be discovered by the receivers during the insolvency process. Also, I'm not sure if there is an equivalent to an order of information in the US system.
Seems like it would be hard to know which blue Lego was Bryan’s
It was sealed sets, still NIB, not individual pieces. No one would bother selling $200k of loose bricks on consignment.
Let me rephrase: “blue Lego set”
Somewhere in one of the long videos, they mentioned that there were unique stickers on each of his items that he was selling on consignment. They had to have known which items were his.
This is a collectible market so Lego sets aren’t fungible, so being unable to keep track of that sounds like negligence.
*grey, since it was Star Wars
because, i assume, that they sued the salem location directly?
They wouldn't make any sense, if the whole thing started because corporate took over control and ownership the location.
It sounds like corporate took away ownership and gave it to a new franchisee.
The original franchisee claims to have lost their life savings in that move. I have no idea how exactly that happened. Their story really sounds like something from Russia back when western investors had their company simply taken from them by someone well-connected.
It sounds like the original franchisee doesn’t want to admit that they were losing a lot of money already. Only someone really desperate would take on a $200K lego collection and only collect a 10% consignment fee. It would also explain the corporate “takeover” if they were already behind on paying their franchise fees or whatever they might have owed to corporate.
That being said, it’s not illegal to be a bad business person, and none of that excuses the subsequent behavior by BAM corporate or the new franchise owner.
* The store's consignment fee was 35%
* They had sold about half of the consigned inventory
* The old franchise owner said they had a job offer outside the country
* Said franchise owner was current on a restructured fee schedule that, they allege, was the direct result of corporate bungling the transfer of accounts from the franchise owner previous to them
From what I understand, the original franchisee wanted to sell the store because they wanted to leave the US (for "political reasons"; I suspect they don't want to live in Trumpland anymore, but that's pure speculation). The way it appears, the moment they announced that desire to sell, B&M corporate showed up to take control of the shop. And the consignment.
When the parent buys the store, they are also buying their contracts and obligations.
Unless the contract was written so poorly this didn’t happen?
It is hard to understand if you only read the blog posted here. They left out a lot of this specificity.
This is because poster takes sides
Yes? Take the side of the person getting railroaded by a giant corporation, a bunch of corrupt cops, and a legal system that is built to protect the big, and milk the poor.
Whats the other side in this? Feel bad for the 400 million corp with their army of lawyers? Feel bad for the store owners who scammed the person and acted like a total dick? Honestly, whats your take on this?
> Whats the other side in this?
The difference between you and the person you replied to is that, despite neither of you knowing what the other side is, the other person was curious to learn it instead of assuming they know everything and attacking.
> This is because poster takes sides
Is an attack on the credibility of the writer.
As soon as there is a shred of dispute every theft becomes a contract dispute
Well, you might say that.
> The police, for their part, kept calling it a "civil matter" and declining to investigate. Every single time.
On the other hand...
> In a subsequent conversation after the store closure and lawsuit loss, when Ben indicated the logical next step was to pursue Johnson personally, Josh's response, according to documented accounts, included the threat: "If you try to pursue me legally, YOU stole the LEGOs."
> Shortly after that conversation, someone called in a police report claiming Reckless Ben was transporting heroin.
This is a strange choice by Johnson, since it instantly transforms the civil dispute into a criminal offense.
I have heard of the same thing happening with fancy used car dealerships, where cars that were to be sold on consignment have been lost.
And dealers have gone to prison for that.
This is a gofundme I would gladly donate to. Fight the power for what's right.
There's a link at the bottom of the article
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-bryan-recover-his-lego-colle...
Yeah, but you don't know the whole story. There was a young motorcyclists who ran from the police and killed in a crashed. His family has a go-fund me still just to collect money.
You should post the link to that. Police chases costing people’s lives is an awful thing, anybody that’s ever seen a cop driving 130mph because they think they’re Knight Rider might want to donate.
Report it. GFM has rules around fundraising around crimes.
I used to sometimes do consignment with artistic products I made, and 80% of the time I ended up being jerked around by the store. Even stores that kept good records and paid for a while would, after a few years, end up with inventory left that they never returned or paid for. Sometimes the stores would close and disappear with the inventory. Other times they’d avoid me. Sometimes they’d insist they paid for everything already, and have done such a poor job of documenting what payments were for that it was difficult to tell. Some people just straight up ran their stores like Ponzi schemes - paying off old consignment with sales from new vendors. As an individual artist, I became very wary of consignment as it’s essentially an unsecured loan. Even worse was that some people who faded away and kept inventory were friends and good business partners, and it’s not like I would sue them for $400.
Forgive me if I'm trying to figure out what's going on here. I just read the linked blog and some of the links within, but I don't have time to watch all these long YouTube videos
> The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
The store says the full inventory was not discoverable at the store. They said the person gave a written statement in the past saying the collection was "moved off site for security reasons" so I don't think this is really as cut and dry as the YouTuber and blogger people are trying to make it look.
> Corporate says, "this is mine now"
Their statement says they located what inventory they could and offered it back.
I think there's a lot more to this story. I wouldn't really trust the YouTube influencers for the whole story.
The store (as managed by the second group) lost the suit, if they were negligent they still owe the consigner. What's missing is the relationship between the second group and the corporate parent. Seems there's some reason the liability from the lawsuit doesn't transfer to the corporation.
> The store (as managed by the second group) lost the suit, if they were negligent they still owe the consigner. What's missing is the relationship between the second group and the corporate parent.
This does seem like a very key point that keeps getting ignored for the sake of a simpler story.
Everyone keeps talking about this lawsuit loss, but what lawsuit? Against whom? The article doesn't even explain, but it's starting to look like the lawsuit was against the former owners, contrary to the ragebait "Bricks and Minifigs stole..." title
The lawsuit was *from* the previous owners against the new owners that kicked them out of the store.
Here's a video from the previous owners explaining their story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zedmOopRTm0
I haven't watched this particular video, but I've read her 46 page suit. That's not the case that was lost. The case(s) that were lost are small claims actions made by the YouTuber and 9 of his friends, essentially. They got default judgments from the court on 10 claims each worth $10k. The previous owner's suit was just filed in March of this year, I believe.
Now as for the previous question of who was at the pointy end of those default judgments, I haven't been able to find that answer. I assume they should have named the local franchise as an entity and it's owners individually. Closing the store to avoid paying is arguably a fraudulent transfer of assets, but that would need to be taken to court in an enforcement action.
Oh yeah sorry, I misunderstood the suit the comment was referring to.
It is my understanding that BAM took direct ownership of the local store and therefore the small claims case was also directed against them, but at the moment I can't find where I've heard that so I'm not 100% sure.
According to the former store owner's lawsuit, and what comports with what I've seen in the original video, the store was seized by corporate and then sold quickly to the owners of the Eugene, OR BAM store.
If that's the case why did they lose the small claims cases?
They lost default judgements because they did not appear. Either they thought it was fake or they thought they'd lose, but they were served and did not appear.
Or they thought that the losses were acceptable to avoid having to make sworn statements about the series of events that are still at issue in the previous owner's case and some events that may very well still be charged by Oregon prosecutors.
They didn't even lose any money, because by closing the store the damages were never paid.
It's really depressing to see to be honest.
I believe they would need to dissolve the business entity. These default judgments against them should count as debt that needs to be paid before the business is closed unless they declare bankruptcy in court and not like Michael Scott.
So they chose to lose a case on merits related to the other case instead of making statements that would help (if they are in the right)?
That’s one possibility, yes.
Quantum physics guarantees us anything is a possibility. The question is, is it a likely one at all? And the overwhelmingly likely reasons are obvious to anyone with half a brain, given all the surrounding context here.
A default judgement is still a loss. Why would not they not fight back small claims cases, which would be trivially easy for someone with their resources, if they could win?
I am not stating that I think B&M would win. B&M's original intent was to force Ed and Ben into a pyrrhic victory via dragging out one lawsuit, even if they lost that one suit.
Without being able to run up Ed/Ben's legal costs, trying to defend these suits at all is just a further loss for B&M for no benefit.
I don't think it was the deciding factor, but Ben also sent a fake Guinness award to the store around the same time they were being served. It is within the realm of possibility that they thought Ben was bluffing with the lawsuits and tried to call his bluff just to find out it was all real after they failed to appear.
Nah, the whole Guinness thing was obviously just a bit for the video. Clearly the franchise would not fall for that, when you can easily check that you were summoned to small claims (and they also probably get some form of direct communication from the court I would guess).
Legal costs for a small claims suit is tiny, and would be easily doable for them if they could win it. Again, there is a reason they lost those cases.
They can't even serve papers because they're being relentlessly harassed by Police who have immediately banned them from serving them. In part 2, cops even verify the court case and he has a process server-- but they just refuse to. One of many different cops eventually took the papers to serve them, and ended up coming back saying "he didn't want them."
Additionally, the original business in Kaizer shutdown as soon as the default judgements went through.
Would it count as being served if bodycam shows that police handed him the papers and he gave them back or tossed them on the floor?
According to Ben, the bodycam footage of the officer's attempt to serve the papers is fully redacted, no audio/video at all.
Is there an Uber for process servers? Eventually someone would get through...
[retracted]
I don't know what point you're trying to make. But also please watch the video, they submitted multiple separate claims via different aggrieved parties, this totaled $100k, despite the low individual small claims maxima.
Ooh, I missed that! I thought I’d watched it a couple days ago but I might have dozed off due to unrelated life tired; will revisit, thanks.
Who is "they"?
Bricks and Minifigs? Or the previous owners?
Do you mind citing your sources at least? The linked article refers to a "lawsuit loss" but doesn't explain who it was against or what it was for.
Reckless Ben's video I would rank as one of the top 3 best YouTube videos I have ever seen. I had never seen this guy before but this video was wild. It's a mix of reporting and trolling and questionable legal tactics. The evidence in the video seems pretty hard to dispute. Of course there is 2 sides to everything but I strongly believe bam is the bad guy here.
Theft by conversion.
If the consignment contract was not legal then BAM never owned the goods and would not have had the right to sell them.
EDIT: as other commenters point out, BAM actually did lose the lawsuit over this and now the issue is the consigner is trying to collect the judgment. In that case it would normally be irrelevant that the store was a franchise location, because BAM would have become the successor to all liabilities upon taking over the store (in the U.S., at least). With deep pockets BAM could drag out the collections process long enough to try an extract a settlement from the consigner; the risk with doing so though is that interest accrues on the settlement at statutory rates that are normally higher than market rates and they face the possibility of court sanctions for any attempts at delay that have no reasonable legal basis.
Lucky though, you can find somebody with deep pockets to step in and take his share of the case should you win.
They were actually getting a 35% share. This is pure greed.
> It seems like theft
It is theft!
Sounds like theft to me.
> It seems like theft, but it's a very common civil contract dispute.
What if he reported theft? Wouldn't they have to prove how did they come into possession of the goods they are selling?
> It's not that hard to understand.
FWIW, I couldn't follow it either from the blog.
This is essentially what is going to happen with Monetary Metals (although I hope not!)
By this logic, nothing is theft, and everything is just a civil contract dispute.
There is no need for us to accept your sociopathic assertion that the rich should and will win.
> The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
This appears to be in dispute.
As per bricks and minifigs:
>It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
>A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition.
It appears they are alleging that the prior operator had sold a larger portion of the consigned goods than they had claimed to the family.
Do they have any evidence of those claims? So far, all evidence seems to be against them.
I read about this previously and had the same reaction - something seems missing, it’s too crazy, this has gotta be just one side of the story. Normal reaction in this media landscape. But this seems to be one of the rare cases that, yes, it really is a case of an edge case of law allowing theft.
From what I can see: Franchisee entered into a consignment agreement to sell the lego. They were not allowed to do that, so corporate took over the franchise.
BUT rather than unwind the agreement and return the lego, they just kept it. Argued for it to be dealt with legally. It was, they lost, so they closed down the store rather than return the lego.
> They were not allowed to do that
Incorrect as the article points out with an image of the contract:
> However, it was brought to my attention by site user @luddevig that Chrystal Law, the Bricks & Minifigs Salem-Keizer store's original owner, was able to pull the franchise agreement between her and and the B&M Corperation, that clearly states that consignment is allowed.
Yup, agreed. B&M making every PR screwup you'd expect!
They hired a PR firm that was looking at the base case and those averages. As Nassim Taleb points out, we live in Extremestan. No idea what the value was of the Bricks and Minifigs, but I'd be shocked if it hasn't dropped by 2 or 4 million dollars. Their biggest moat was their reputation.
According to the former franchise owner this is a lie from corporate and they were indeed allowed to sign consignment agreements. They showed a contract that says as much as evidence.
Incorrect.
New video from the previous franchise owners gives more details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zedmOopRTm0
The Reckless Ben video is the best thing I've seen on youtube in the last several years.
We really need an eccentric billionaire going around trolling all sorts of petty legal trolling. Ben is actively making the world a better place with this, and every person with a networth worth a damn is barely a toenail the man he is.
I didn't know Ben dealt with cults until he revealed he started the "Scientology Sucks" religion, but as soon as the cops started baiting him into agreeing they had cause for arrest, I instantly guessed he had completely accidentally walked right into another cult corruption video. If I had a penny for the amounts of times I saw this exact type of cult discovery happen, I'd have 4, which is a pattern -> ALL cults are corrupt.
The store owner was allowed to sell things on consignment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ktgvoH4Mc has a good overview.
Yeah, it's textbook theft by conversion
> Bricks & Minifigs CEO Ammon McNeff is a graduate of Brigham Young University. Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best are, by public record and documented account, members of the LDS community. When Reckless Ben's team, following the pattern of obstruction by local law enforcement, looked into the individual officers involved in these incidents, they found that multiple officers were also BYU alumni.
I thought “it has to be some kind of corruption here”. And yup it’s the mormon mafia apparently
Honestly that pattern of actions by law enforcement was the most disturbing thing. There was a moment where they knew this person was present at a private property to serve a warrant in a legitimate lawsuit. Clearly the right and moral action for the police at that moment was to help serve the papers AND then escort the litigant from the property. They chose to behave more like mobsters than defenders of the public trust, like they were taking over responsibility from the courts
when people say that the police are there to enforce laws to protect capital, this is what they mean.
This is the main reason I read comment threads on law enforcement stuff on HN. There's a bunch of people trying to square their opinion of policing ("protect and serve") with the reality of policing ("protect and serve the wealth").
My understanding is that 50% of people in the state of Utah are mormon. I'm not saying there wasn't corruption, but it could very well be pure chance with those odds.
If cops are pulling over another person from Utah probably not a big deal but when dealing with an outsider from out of state the situation is different.
I can personally attest to this, along with many of my friends and family.
I've driven hundreds of extra miles per trip going around that damned state.
Hate to break it to you but the Mormon belt extends well up into Idaho (probably all the way to Montana on the East side) and down into Arizona, and diffuses out quite far from there. Probably need to go through Montana or skirt the Mexican border areas to avoid it, but border areas these days come with their own issues self created by our government...
I lived in Idaho Falls (well within the majority Mormon area that extends farther North at least to Rexburg) and never had an issue, but I definitely knew I was not part of the club.
Do you know all these involved parties aren't mormons in some mormon area/mormon company? Eg the old guy, the franchisee?
> multiple officers were also BYU alumni
American Fork, UT is literally 10 miles from Brigham Young University, and BYU represents 1/4th of the state's bachelors degrees.
It's a bit like saying police officers in Italy are Catholic. I'd be more surprised if they weren't tbh.
(Disclaimer: I live near that area and also graduated from BYU.)
Yeah, as a non-Mormon, I agree. I think the Mormon connection is a paranoid distraction. The behavior of the police can be explained by the same kind of corrupt-small-town-police-defending-locals-from-outsiders behavior that happens across the country.
> The behavior of the police can be explained by the same kind of corrupt-small-town-police-defending-locals-from-outsiders behavior that happens across the country.
Mormons aren't implicated, but I fail to see how this can explain the behavior of the Oregon police.
Stereotyping and bigotry are accepted if done against Christians.
Ki Mcallister was also BYU
The best part about this is that the CEO insists that the agreement with the previous store owner is null (thus relieving him of the burden of paying 200k), and yet he also insists on keeping the Lego collection set and selling it. It's comical.
From what I understand ownership of the Lego sets never left the Mansells. The consignment agreement states as much.
Even if we take what corporate says at face value (there was no agreement, or the agreement is null, or it's an agreement that the previous owners agreed to) that still just means that the store possesses property that they do not legally own. Whether or not they legally came to possess the sets seems irrelevant here.
I'm not a lawyer but I don't see how the Mansells ever stopped owning the lego sets.
I watched a video from a lawyer who was explaining some of the legal aspects of this debacle, and this one stuck out. Basically, if the Mansells had filed a form with the Oregon Secretary of State, they would have a much simpler claim. That form basically just says "X company is holding Y merchandise that is mine for consignment". Because they (likely) didn't do that, the process for determining their ownership may be more complicated in certain events, and closure of the store might be on that list. Reasons the new owners and BAM corporate are screwed: 1) they made statements during the seizure of the store that they are aware of the consignment and that will transfer to them 2) they were made aware of the consignment in writing by Mansell in a letter terminating the agreement and demanding return of the merchandise after a missed payment in Nov 2025 3) they sold a set from Mansell's collection after 1 & 2 to one of Mansell's confederates 4) they knowingly removed stickers placed on the collection by the previous store owner to identify it as part of the collection
Even if the consignment was undone, they don't get to just keep the collection. The agreement can almost certainly be terminated, but the collection would then be returned to Mansell.
Oregon case law comes off looking terrible here. Who would want to do business in this environment?
In what way? It’s not a local concern that when you buy a business you get its obligations. That’s pretty common.
Their B2B goods exchange tax is 0.
That would be why.
Mormons who have Mormon friends in the judiciary.
I believe that's the one thing BAM refuses to acknowledge, they have no legal possesion of the lego sets, that's the beginning and end of it. They are trying their damnest to hide that fact behind a consignment/contract/franchise/corporate/arrests/heroin/lawsuit curtain of smoke.
> I'm not a lawyer but I don't see how the Mansells ever stopped owning the lego sets.
The store declares bankruptcy, and corporate is a prioritized creditor. From a certain view, based on the consignment contract means they wanted money, and I could see an argument that they're really owed $200k rather than the physical legos. Ie they're effectively just another creditor, and probably not a prioritized one.
"Ownership" gets very odd when you hand goods over to someone with the expectation that you'll never see those goods again, but will get money. It gets even weirder when that someone ceases to be a legal entity, and the goods are now in possession of someone you never had an agreement with. The store obviously has an obligation to hand over either money or the goods, but it's not clear that obligation is transient to anyone that ends up with the goods.
I don't know how effective the wording of the original consignment agreement would end up if tested in a suit. It reads "Consigned merchandise shall remain the property of Mansell until sold".
On the other hand, without the agreement, how can one prove the expectation that the goods were handed over with, at all? Without establishing that expectation wouldn't the ownership of the goods just stay with the original owner at all times?
It would make sense that there are some ways you can abandon property you own in a way that someone else can swoop up and take ownership it without having to give it back, but do any of those potentially apply here?
> The store obviously has an obligation to hand over either money or the goods, but it's not clear that obligation is transient to anyone that ends up with the goods.
It is extremely clear. You are just detailing the buffer being used to pretend otherwise.
It's not even paying 200k. It's returning the sets that haven't been sold. They hadn't paid for the sets, they just hold them in stock until they're sold
"This agreement is null and void except for this part that works in my favour"
Would a simple audit not completely destroy this case?
"How did you acquire these sets?"
"Uhm... don't know they just appeared out of nowhere"
Straight to jail.
It goes more like:
"How did you acquire these sets?"
"We acquired them from the previous franchisee when we purchased the store. Here's the contract we signed to acquire the store and contents, here's the payment we made"
"Okay thanks that checks out"
There wasn't a signed contract with the previous franchisee from what I can see.
And even then, the trail audit goes further as the previous franchisee didn't have a proof of purchase of $200k of inventory.
Way to do millions of dollars in PR damage over 200k.
As this story spreads people will just assume the whole chain is bad.
The bigger story is an elderly man needing to sell his toys to pay for cancer treatment.
We could give all people free cancer treatment, but defense contractors need money.
> people will just assume the whole chain is bad.
The whole chain is bad.
We're far past the point where the company bigwigs should have fixed this. It's not like they don't know.
> The bigger story is an elderly man needing to sell his toys to pay for cancer treatment.
Idk. Straight up corporate theft of $200k, backed up by the cops, is a more visceral story than 'yet another person merked by our predatory healthcare system'.
> We could give all people free cancer treatment, but defense contractors need money.
Yes, and that's important - but there are unique aspects to this story which shouldn't be overshadowed by the higher priority problem for the nation. The immediate problem for this elderly cancer patient isn't going to be solved by Americans suddenly realising that they have people power - but getting his Legos back might save his life.
I think it's more visceral, but a smaller story. 'yet another person merked by our predatory healthcare system' is a headline that will be relevant again, with new participants, tomorrow, or next week.
This headline about star wars lego? Less so.
> a smaller story
Sure. Any one person's story will be smaller than the whole picture - is that your whole point? What are you proposing - that we ignore stories like this until we fix healthcare?
Because if that's not what you're saying, why bring it up as if one cancer patient's life and property rights aren't important (even beyond tomorrow and next week)?
> 'yet another person merked by our predatory healthcare system' is a headline that will be relevant again, with new participants, tomorrow, or next week.
And so will corporate theft, and bureaucratic Kafkaesque nightmares, and police corruption, etc. There's no lack of overlapping evil to look at here.
Individual stories are still important and relevant, and ignoring them to look at the bigger picture is like ignoring water to look at the ocean.
> is that your whole point? What are you proposing - that we ignore stories like this until we fix healthcare?
IMO that's a pretty antagonistic read of my comment. GP said 'bigger story', you said 'visceral story'. In no way do I read myself or the GP dismissing the B&M story - quite the opposite, as GP says, noting "millions of dollars in PR damage" doesn't sound like ignoring something.
The second half of my comment was criticizing the news cycle, and its preference for unique headlines.
Apologies for reading your comment in an antagonistic way, but, I couldn't find a better way to read it. If you're saying that it was just about adding context, okay, but I think there's a way to do that with out painting this a "smaller story" that will be forgotten about "tomorrow or next week".
A guy is dying from cancer and unable to get treated because a $400m company stole his unique $200k life-long Lego collection ... That is a smaller story than America's murderous healthcare system - but until the guy's situation is corrected, no amount of media coverage is too little.
America's media failures also are a critical piece of the picture, but as written your comment reads as if painting this as a forgettable little story about Star Wars lego:
>This headline about star wars lego? Less so.
... I'm glad to hear that wasn't how you meant it.
I totally don't get it. If I were the head of corporate I would've just given them the sets back to avoid all of the backlash.
But you're not. The head of corporate is someone who thought he could get away with this. And almost did, until Reckless Ben showed up.
but ... they did get away with it? based on the blog post, it ends with the store closure? (which I don't understand why)
If you search for "Bricks and minifigs", every result apart from their main website is about this controversy. One of the values of a franchise is the branding; at least for the forseeable future, this will be a negative value. For a company that serves a small niche community, this seems like suicide.
It seems they closed the store rather than give back the lego. That seems like a win of sorts, because I'm sure it hurts B&M to some degree, but it's not getting the stolen lego back.
I've now also seen part 2, in which the amount of police harassment that B&M seems to be able to bring to bear is absolutely disgusting.
I read the counterclaims from Bricks and Minifigs here:
https://bricksandminifigs.com/blog/blog/2026/05/28/bricks-mi...
This post and TFA have a common issue: no one seems to have a clear, compellingly evidenced account of basic questions about the collection and its history under consignment:
1. What exactly was in the collection?
2. What happened to the collection after it was consigned: which sets were sold, which were stolen or lost, which were moved to off-site storage, etc.?
3. How much money did the original franchise owner owe the consigner for the sets sold?
The peripheral claims about e.g. police malfeasance are disturbing, but without this basic evidence about the substance of the matter, I don't know if it's a great idea for an online mob to take sides.
You're right that we don't have the facts. That said, the way that Bricks and Minifigs handled this has been horrible. The CEO should have said on camera that he's willing to work with the lego owner to return the property and to work with police to charge the former franchise owner with theft.
If you see this clip, this is when corporate was removing the previous franchisee https://youtu.be/wscQpkcwgNU?si=_k_EDfs4NmO5riB5&t=126
Have you seen the youtube videos? They paint a pretty clear picture.
Seems like the ex-franchisee, Chrystal Law, essentially stole the sets and still has possession of them in some off-site location.
TBH the fact that Chrystal was not making payments and the store had to forcibly repossess the store, points to her being the problem.
You are more or less accusing a named individual of severe crimes without much to back it up.
How is there “justice” if everyone knows the party with less money cannot get into a legal battle?
How is then America free and democratic? I’m not American and I’m very confused by this and also the concept of bail money.
Haha, good catch- we’re not.
I just don’t understand why a company with $95m in sales would steal $200k. That’s a fraction of a percent of sales for the year.
There’s now a boycott against them that will easily cost them more than that.
If the case is as this blog says, it cannot be hard to find a lawyer to do this one pro bono. Breach of contract is one of the few things in America where you can sue for your legal fees. If you take over a business you assume it’s contracts even though your name wasn’t on them. You gain anything the business owns but a consignment shop doesn’t own the inventory.
BAM is going to lose millions and for what? Is this article just wrong on substantial facts? Simple greed wouldn’t explain this as it will almost certainly lead to far less money, even in a short period, than returning it.
Something must be missing.
I have a family member who works in estate planning. From all the stories he's told me, a lot of wealthy people compulsively screw over people / refuse to follow the contract they agreed to / etc, simply because they can and know that it is too expensive for most people to file a lawsuit.
I agree with you. It makes no rational sense for the corporation to act this way. I can see how they end up losing a court case but can't explain why they don't pay up.
It sounds like the first franchise collapsed owing money. I expect the company had created strong incentives for employees to claw that back. Someone has followed those incentives against the interest of the corporation. This happens all the time although in this case they break the law.
Eventually there's a lawsuit and a lot more people get involved including people without any incentive to do illegal things. However those involved originally present some varnished version of the truth (to avoid getting fired!) the company trusts this version of events. They decide to fight the case in court.
Then they lose the case. Those who decided to fight it realise they made a bad choice and they now look bad too. It's at this point that the weirdest thing happens. Why do they choose to close the store instead of paying up? My guess is that it became personal for someone.
> It sounds like the first franchise collapsed owing money.
It did not, the franchisees simply wanted out because they were offered better paid work overseas.
They told corporate they wanted to sell the franchise back to them, as they say they wanted to recoup their investment in the franchise before they left the USA.
Corporate arrived the same day and started saying the franchise owes them $200,000, didn't inventory the franchise, terminated their franchise that day, seized the franchise that same day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ktgvoH4Mc&t=590s
I don't have the facts about who's right about that, but that corporate behaviour seems remarkably aggressive and fishy to me.
It’s a farcical notion that people are uniformly rational actors, as well as the notion that rational is adjacent to just.
It’s an unfortunate fact that many people in positions of wealth and power default to “F-you my lawyers will drown you and I will win” in every single case, regardless of merit.
Many times, that is the singular strategy that has put them in that position of wealth and power. Many times, they apply this strategy to every situation where they already possess an asset or service for which they have not paid, and that asset or service is valued higher than an ongoing good faith relationship with the person or entity that they owe for the asset or service that they received.
It’s a wholly predatory strategy but it can be a very rational calculus, and it can propel you to the very pinnacle of wealth and power. Its continuously surprising to plebs because it goes against the fantasy of the fundamental justice of society that they have been inculcated with, a convenient lie that keeps powerless people in their lane and justifies the use of police powers to protect the criminal activity of the owner class.
I say this as a member of the owner class. I try not to be one of those people, but it’s easy to see justice as an unnecessary and frivolous expense. I’d estimate that a significant fraction of my peers are in this category, and nearly everyone else occasionally dabbles, often without even being aware of it as their lawyers push in that direction.
Ultimately, it’s a side effect of obscene inequality. I don’t know how to fix it, much less how to make the world somehow intrinsically just. IMHO there is no justice except the justice we go out of our way to create. Justice is not the natural state of the world.
I agree people and especially corporations act this way. Indeed many people believe that it's a corporation's fiduciary duty to lawyer up if that's expected to be cheaper than paying up.
Here, they are looking at small amounts of money, but they close a store, which presumably involves writing down an asset and forgoing future revenue. This only gives them a small chance of avoiding payment and risks the reputation of the entire firm.
The earlier decisions all fit the narrative of coldly rational, but I find the final decision to close the store doesn't fit. It's almost impossible to imagine how it ends well for the corporation.
I agree. At face value it seems reactive and wonky.
My take is that this all comes down to the stores being franchises.
Yes, franchisor hold a lot of power, and in the big picture the franchisees are small owners and a move like this ($200k of merch they haven't paid a dime for) can affect the PnL quite a lot on the local level. It seems like the average Bricks and Minifigs franchise store has annual revenue of just $600k. At that's revenue. Another search shows that their margins are around 10%-20%
If these franchise owners managed to pull of this, and sell the collection for $200k on top of the expected annual revenue, that would put their store margin for that year around 45%-55%!
I'm guessing Bricks and Minifigs, the corporation, just assumed this would fly quietly under the radar, and let their franchisees.
I think it just comes down to greed. A couple of franchisees figured they could make a killing, and become one of the most profitable franchise stores with no effort.
Because this isn't the first collection they've stolen from someone, presumably.
It's a lot easier to become a really successful company if you can keep your inventory costs down. Perhaps by investing in local law enforcement instead, to make sure no one looks too close at said inventory?
Donald Trump is famous for not paying even really cheap contractor bills, because he knew he could get away with it.
This is the answer. They thought they could get away with it. And from what I understand, they nearly did, because the original victim couldn't afford the risk of a lengthy and expensive lawsuit.
How is this company, BAM Franchising Inc, valued at $400M?
They aren’t publicly traded so it’s hard to find out.
It seems like there’s almost no employees and they collect a franchising fee and 6% royalty on the 200+ franchises that BAM claims makes $570k average annual revenue [0].
.06 x 570k x 200 = 6,840,00
So not sure how a $400M valuation comes from $7M/year in revenue.
And this is revenue, who knows what the profit is.
Still, I was surprised there’s 200 franchisees.
[0] https://franchise.bricksandminifigs.com/the-financials/
This guy should call the ACLU -- The cops' behavior might get them involved here.
This YouTube video covers it with much more detail, and (imo) more entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wscQpkcwgNU
And if you want a (less entertaining but very interesting) legal analysis of the various legal tricks Ben used in this video Lawful Masses with Leonard French has just released this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ktgvoH4Mc
Some of the people in this thread making very definitive claims about consignments contracts without considering this specific jurisdictions should watch it... the victims here could have had an almost open and shut case if they did a bit more paperwork (and paid $20), as there is an exception for consignments over $1000 that gave some undue leverage to that corporation.
+1: I'm so glad I happened to watch Mr. French's video first.
It's just as depressing as the other one, it shows that BAM knows exactly how to abuse the law to get away with stealing.
I tried the other person's videos and had to stop after about five seconds. Mr. French's was a good watch.
Big, if true. Mansel received ineffective counsel from several lawyers, because no lawyers he initially consulted mentioned this form.
That's the original material and indeed is entertaining, part 2 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxZPfj8AlmY
If you like Part 2 (it shows the most egregious police misconduct I've seen in the USA in a while) then please consider Ben's Patreon where he will post Part 3 next week. The Part 2 is technically "paywalled" but the link has leaked. I think everyone needs to see Part 2 as it really blows the story fully open.
His Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/RecklessBen
The latest updates on the whole scenario are happening here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RecklessBen/
Holy mother of God this seems like one of those landmark cases by the looks of what's going on. So much rot in there... Bro also fled to Mexico, they could even make a movie out of this.
100% would watch the shit out of this movie
> Then Bricks & Minifigs Corporate took control of the Salem location from the original franchise owner
> They were found liable in court. They closed the store rather than pay.
This doesn't make any sense. If the corporation took control of the franchise, the corporation now owns it and its obligations. They can close the store if they want, but that doesn't do anything about their obligation to pay.
What's missing from this story? Because as presented, it makes no sense.
I believe what is missing is a Brick and Minifig's attorney with a law degree.
This is why you shouldn't buy a business for 1 dollar because you can inherit its debts.
If they were smart, they took the "inventory" as payment for some imaginary debt, bankrupting the store without taking ownership of it.
Hopefully, the courts will see through that tactic, and add a contempt charge on top of all the civil penalties.
do we know the debt is "imaginary"? Was this inventory seized in satisfaction of some debt.
I don't think they won in court, B&M just didn't respond so it went to a default judgement
It is my understanding that they sued the franchise, which then closed, and not the parent corporate entity.
While they won against the franchise due to the default judgement, they didn't win against corporate. The store that is now closed is the franchise they sued.
This entire story started because the corporation took control of the franchise though
Fairly certain it was actually someone affiliated with corporate who took over the franchise, but it is still a franchisee.
I've personally never heard of consignment deals where the consignment store becomes the owners of the goods. Not once.
Back in college I used to make money flipping stuff on Ebay, and did that extensively. I did consignment for others, as well as sending stuff to others to sell.
This sounds illegal, and like a case of the store / new franchise owners trying to bully the consignors into submission.
The part 2 video where the police harass and falsely arrest ben is even more shocking.
Welcome to the Mormon Mafia.
Mormonism is the original cult that survived the first generation. It has all the hallmarks of a cult, singular charismatic leader, polygamy, child abuse, apocalyptic prophecy etc.
Child abuse is not an official sanctioned thing in Mormonism. And they have officially ended the practice of polygamy (yes there was some coercion on the part of the US govt)
The other three were pretty much traits of every major traditional religion at its founding.
The founder of mormonism married a child and given that mormon doctrine is just whatever he said definitionaly it's an official sanctioned thing.
Some coercion? It was entirely external pressure. Some of the mormons haven't even stopped polygamy today.
> Some of the mormons haven't even stopped polygamy today.
Using the term 'Mormon' to refer to the the entire family tree including splinter sects is just a recipe for confusion. Adherents to splinter sects, excluding RLDS, number in the tens of thousands compared to millions of CoJCoLDS. The problems with CoJCoLDS are damning on their own without needing to conflate facts with fringe groups.
In the 1800s, when children had mining and factory jobs and didn't go to school past age 12. Trying to position that as Mormonism condones child abuse is bonkers, imo
So because children were forced to work dangerous jobs it's okay for adult religious leaders to have sex with them? I'm not sure I follow that.
You should research polygamy in the mainline (Brighamite) sect if you haven't already. One of the last marriages to the the mormon prophet Lorenzo Snow was to a 15 year old. Snow was 57 at the time. This was not normal despite any assertion about children working.
Source: www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/1c2omo0/the_wives_of_lorenzo_snow/
> The other three were pretty much traits of every major traditional religion at its founding.
I think this suggests that all major religions are cults, rather than that Mormonism isn't. The lines are certainly very blurry.
Whichever way you want to slice it, the implication that Mormonism is some exceptionally fiendish religion compared to the others, I don't buy it
> Child abuse is not an official sanctioned thing in Mormonism.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Are children more abused by Mormons? I find it highly unlikely just considering on average they are wealthier than other religious groups and poverty and child abuse are highly correlated
It's more like a combination of factors that make child abuse more prevalent: lack of access to the outside world ("we are in the world but not of the world"), a strict patriarchal hierarchy in the home that puts children at the bottom, endorsement by the church of physical punishments, etc.
And your source for this data? Or is this speculation?
How do you explain the genocide in Gaza?
Similarly, even if I fail to see the link between my previous comment and your question. Israel is a settler-colonial project whose ultimate goal is the creation of a Jewish ethno-state where Palestine once stood. Logically, it requires the displacement/murder of the current Palestinian population. POSIWID
Mormonism is a cult.
If it is, it's certainly not because it had a charismatic leader who condoned polygamy. That is basically every major monotheistic religion in the world.
It can be a religion in its beliefs and a cult in its practices and that's exactly what's going on -- especially since it's Utah that we're talking about...
I have very close Mormon and ex-Mormon friends and have dealt with lots of Scientologists via community involvement in music and science fiction...there is no difference.
A married couple that are friends of mine had minor questions of faith and their entire large extended families with immediate no-contact. It was bitter, brutal and painful even as a bystander seeing it happen in real time. Their young children were cut off as well and their families hounded them and made their lives miserable via institutions (police calls, anonymous complaints to their schools & jobs, etc.). The behavior was beyond the pale and this couple are literally the nicest, most loving and reasonable people that I have ever met.
They switched to a different Christian denomination and raised their kids that way and couldn't be happier about their decision. In hindsight. The family wounds 20 years later are still very visible and real.
The BAM case is certainly instructive, it's not one or two bad mormon apples but a whole rotting orchard. From the owners and their employees to the police.
It's good that you're friends made it out of the cult.
If this the same Ben in YouTube then omg was he annoying. I couldn't even get throught the first quarter of the video.
The dude shows up at a store. They ask him to leave multiple times. They call on the police on him. Then he says "the police are in on it" because they trespassed him. Like wow shocking that the police won't get involved in a civil matter. Then they manipulate a store employee that had nothing to do with this? That's where I stopped watching.
This is a basic contract case. If the original owner's son had no intention of suing the other party then why did he draft up a contract in the first place? Just get a fucking lawyer.
The best part is when the officer takes the process server's subpoena, says he'll serve it, then walks back and says the defendant isn't accepting it while refusing to allow her to serve the subpoena.
The search of his person over a call to police is a clear violation of his rights, a phone to call to police is not PC or RAS. The fact they held him for three hours will to be to his benefit in court. Arresting him for starting a gofundme, a clear violation of his first amendment rights, I mean they're just digging that hole. Then they raid him, dislocate his arm, and now he has a warrant out for physical threats?
This story is not blowing up because because of Legos or stealing from old people. It's blowing up because we're watching a corporation and a police department abuse their power and we're all grossed out by it.
Part 2's corruption and civil rights violations makes Part 1 look irrelevant. A lot of the coverage on this is still about the $200k and the lego sets.
Fun part to mention is the officer that takes the subpoena to the would-be defendant is the part of the 3rd set of cops that were sent to Ben's non-moving car that is on public property. The cop's bodycam discussion with the would-be defendant is also fully redacted, for some reason.
After telling Ben that the defendant doesn't accept the subpoena (can you even refuse being served like that?), the 3rd set of cops leave and a 4th set of cops shows up, make a phone call to verify that it's a real lawsuit they are trying to serve, question him further, and then after all that Ben is still arrested.
Ben also shows how the body cams are being redacted in ways that they should not be. Due to sloppy redacting, he gives an example where the content of the redacted audio is one cop telling the other that Ben is basically annoying but the thing he's doing that they got called over for is not illegal.
> After telling Ben that the defendant doesn't accept the subpoena (can you even refuse being served like that?)
They can't, and I'm surprised the officer wasn't aware of that. Confirm the person's ID, hand them the papers or sit them somewhere and tell them, they have been served. Process-wise, all that matters is confirmation to the court that the person is aware of and was given possession of the documents. If they don't like it and set them on fire, that's not the court or the server's problem.
I think there's also generally a process for someone avoiding being served. Ie if you can prove they're trying to avoid being served, that is per se evidence that they are aware they are being served and can be considered as served. Iirc, it's not preferred because it's way, way cleaner for the court to have a signed document but they can and will do it.
Legalities aside, this is why you'd normal hire someone to do this. The cops don't want to be involved, and especially so for YouTube drama. Hire someone completely unrelated who can show up, be completely emotionally detached and do the "I'm just trying to do my job, man" schtick. They're also much better for contested servings. If one party says the other got papers and the other denies it, there's a "he said, she said". If you hire a professional who doesn't care about the outcome of the case then it carries a lot more credibility.
I didn't mention it in the comment you replied to, but during this whole event including the 4 instances of police, Ben is in a car with a process server he hired to serve the papers. Ben himself stayed on public property the whole time.
The cops even tell Ben to get a process server, and he points out to the cops that yes, he has brought the exact person they described, she's right there in the car with him.
I can't speak for Utah, but I sued a valet for crashing my car in small claims. I was given the option for an additional fee to have the subpoena served by the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department. I think you're better off getting police involved if you can when it comes to serving people. In the case of the video I'm pretty sure he hired a certified process server and the police shut it down.
Regardless if it's a civil manner or not the police clearly had no intention on even working towards a solution. They didn't attempt to find out if it was a civil or criminal matter, because he refused to listen.
Find him annoying sure, but it was made very clear why they even had to call in a youtuber to be annoying and get attention. Clearly legally they would bury the original owner with legal fees. If you have a solution that doesn't involve fighting big corperations, that very clearly do have connections with morally questionable cops then go ahead because it is made very clear why "just get a fucking lawyer" doesn't work
I'd say the police did have a clear intention to works towards a solution, a solution that helped BAM and his leaders, not honoring the law or helping the victims. They are obviously colluding, part2 video leaves very small room for imagination.
I do agree that Ben has done a good thing exposing to the public the situation.
Watch part two and you will understand the claims of "the police are in on it". I agree it sounded like a joke in part 1, but after you see the rest of the story it makes sense.
That was part 1. I'm referring the Utah police in part 2.
The police are literally in on it. It's very likely they've violated Ben's civil rights, roughly at the behest of the new franchise owners (who they know personally through the LDS church). I hate to say 'details in part 2' but there are further details in part 2. IIUC it'll be available on youtube in a few weeks.
It's explained multiple times in the video that Mansell has considered suing, but the most likely outcome of that is he pays a lawyer upwards of $60k to get <<100k in awarded compensation, then struggles to collect. The new franchise owners threatened exactly this. It's a classic and well known (and exploited) problem with our legal system.
https://youtu.be/14ktgvoH4Mc?t=1029 talks about the distinction between civil and criminal here (and the whole video is good, worth a watch). There's not exactly an either-or distinction like it's commonly presented. The police can+probably should have investigated the initial refusal to return the legos as criminal theft.
> Just get a fucking lawyer.
First they tried and realized they couldnt afford one. Then they came up with a way to settle this in small claims, won, and the franchisor decided to close the store. The legal process did not work here
This guy tried to resolve a legal dispute without a lawyer. Any competent business lawyer should have been able to straighten this out within days. He even tried to do process service himself, which nobody does. You pay a process server $100 or so for that.
The video has Ed Mansell stating that all the lawyers he spoke to informed him that it would not be financially viable for him to pursue a suit.
Additionally, there is audio of one of the would-be defendants saying that they intend to drag things out as long as possible, basically taunting both Ed and Ben to sue him as they all understand that it is not a viable solution to the problem for Ed.
Part 2 starts with 10 separate $10,000 default judgements won against the store, but they are unable to recover any of the funds.
Ben brings a process server with him to serve new lawsuits against the owners as individuals, and 4 separate times on the same day in the same spot, cops are sent to him. The cops even take the papers from the process server, try to serve the defendant, and then give it back to the process server saying it was refused . After that they don't allow the process server to serve the papers, and then the cops show up the 4th time and Ben is eventually arrested.
No, the guy tried to resolve the legal dispute with lawyers and has been quoted multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.
I haven't dealt with anything like this, so maybe this is naive, but wouldn't you also sue for legal fees as apart of the damages?
Where do you get the money from while the lawsuit is ongoing?
yeah, I guess you would need a lawyer willing to work on spec. This just seems like a winnable case but IANAL.
Can anyone explain WHY a 400M company would do this? This is just bonkers. They are destroying their reputation for $200k of legos???
You should watch the two videos if you haven't because it's full of jewels. The kind of conversations and plays recorded point to a pattern. This is not their first time doing something shady, they think they can get away with it, and they greatly underestimated Ben determination and resources. "are you stupid?", "you stole them", "i swear to god i'll return them if you send me first a false apology/confession" are some of the things these BAM people said to him. Again, the video is really fun to see, you get secret cameras on these guys, police bodycams with redactions undone, plenty of legal stunts, and a healthy amount of human misery documented.
I'm not doubting the claims at all. I simply don't understand why a massive company would shoot themselves in the foot over something relatively small.
After consuming a lot of media around this, reading the former store owners' lawsuit filing, and discussing with a couple lawyers in my life, I think the business is in severe trouble. The decisions they make are that of a teetering company clawing to stay afloat. For example, the former owners' lawsuit says that BAM franchising let it's business registration lapse. Between that and the many many actions that indicate they don't have any lawyers in the loop at any step, I conclude that they must not be able to pay one.
Also, and I know it isn't incredibly rare, but it stuck out to me, the store was owned by corporate before it was sold to the then-manager (who is now suing corporate) for $65k, despite saying that it costs upward of $200k to start a franchise. I couldn't make the numbers make sense, personally. Why would they sell a corporate store for 1/3 of the value?
My guess is that their books are cooked to hell and back
In truth, the alleged $200k lego collection is meaningless. The real smoke is that the previous owners were strong armed out at random.
It honestly would just be franchise infighting if it werent for the fact that the ceo is explicitly running interference at every step
It seems like there is deep, deep fraud. The knee jerk reaction to run legal defense seems to me like they are hiding WAY worse
It's small if you do it once. If that becomes a pattern and you know you get away with it most of the time, it can boost revenues. Would that be a pattern, stealing $200K to a single family probably is too ambitious. If that's business as usual, I hope people will now share their stories.
Because unfortunately, as any Harry Dubois of the world soon screams off the roof naked and drunk, you can't become a massive company in the first place without theft.
Wage theft is the most common crime in the world.
It happens, eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
I encourage you to relieve yourself of your naivete. Your default stance needs to be that every company on the planet would feed you feet-first and screaming into a woodchipper if they thought they could make a dollar from it.
Your comment is so depressing because of how graphic it is, and what makes it so upsetting is that I can't disagree. You and I have lost faith in the world. Oh, to go back to when I was young and I thought theft and abuse were rare...
Why would a billion-dollar company pay their employees so little that they need assistance to live? Or need to urinate in a bottle to keep their delivery times up? Greed and a belief that the rules don't apply to them.
The apt comparison would be wage theft. It's one thing to advertise a job at a particular hourly rate, entirely another to breach the contract and lose public trust for a paltry gain. If you're going to commit what people will interpret as theft at least make sure it's worth your while.
I suppose if you advertise a job for $20/hr and a bunch of people show up and apply for the job, you're probably not going to start advertising the job for $40/hr instead.
And whether $20/hr is a "living wage" depends entirely on your circumstances. If you're a solo adult you can probably swing it. If you have 3 kids you will probably be on food stamps. Should Amazon pay people with kids more? Or only hire single people with no dependents?
I agree the deal from when minim wage was established is broken. A wage you can't raise a family on is not a living wage, as it results in a dead/old age society, not a living society.
As such, this part of the new deal should be reverted as well "We are relaxing some of the safeguards of the anti-trust laws. The public must be protected against the abuses that led to their enactment, and to this end, we are putting in place of old principles of unchecked competition some new Government controls. They must, above all, be impartial and just. Their purpose is to free business, not to shackle it" since business has not held up their side of the new deal.
What's a family? Should it be 2-3 kids max, and then you're on your own?
A solo adult who doesn't want kids is going to have far lower expenses and "living wage" than a single mother with 6 kids.
> What's a family? Should it be 2-3 kids max, and then you're on your own?
As far as the specific concept of a living wage, yes.
> A solo adult who doesn't want kids is going to have far lower expenses and "living wage" than a single mother with 6 kids.
The solo adult can enjoy the extra money. And if they start a family later they'll have extra savings to build on. The baseline should be bringing everyone up to the level that they could afford a family, whether they have one or not. We have more than enough productivity and wealth to make this happen.
For someone with 6 kids, they need help from other sources. That goes beyond living wage territory.
They just "tripled down" a few minutes ago with a brand new unhinged fantasy statement:
https://bricksandminifigs.com/blog/blog/2026/05/28/bricks-mi...
Yikes, you can't find a single sentence in there that doesn't basically say "we're clueless, so we assume that the most convenient thing for us is true". Reads to me like: "We have no idea where the collection is! So we assume it's not our problem!"
The likely explanation is not that they are stupid, but that they are actually being rational and they can do this often and get away with it.
I think you're right. I can't think of any reason an entire organization would act this way unless it had been repeatedly successful for them in the past.
Its a different kind of rational though. There is a world leader who gets away with all kinds of obvious theft and bribery and grift and fraud and self-serving out in the open, but to reasonable people, he doesn't seem rational at all, despite getting away with everything.
Yep, I meant rational in the purely self-interested sense
To protect the corruption scandal already at play. It's not about the company, it's about protecting the church.
400M value doesn't mean they have a big bin on the outskirts of town where they go swimming in 400M dollars of cash.
It seems like their franchisee went bust, and they bailed him out to some $ value. Taking over shit like his lease and probably some other debts.
200K is maybe what they need to recoup their losses from rescuing this store, and they have enough local LDS enforcers to make it stick.
> It seems like their franchisee went bust, and they bailed him out to some $ value.
Not what happened, according to a legal commentator: https://youtu.be/14ktgvoH4Mc?t=590
> The seizure. November 14th, 2024. The [original franchise owners Crystal Law Gorman and her husband Benjamin Gorman] approach B&M about selling the store. They have an overseas job offer, they want to recoup their investment before they leave.
> The same day --- same day -- corporate dispatches a representative to the Kaiser store. By B&M's account, the Gormans owed approximately $200,000 in unpaid royalties. The transition negotiations broke down and B&M terminated the franchise agreement under what McNeff described as a clause permitting offset of store assets similar to an asset seizure in a bankruptcy proceeding. By the Gormans' own account, they had approached corporate about selling, not closing. And B&M's response was a same-day forced removal? No notice, no inventory, and a single box of personal belongings?
> That same evening, Law Gorman says she informed the B&M representative on site who was on speaker phone with the corporate director of operations, Key McAllister, that there was an active consignment in the store, that Mancel had not been fully paid, and that the property remaining in the store was not the store's to sell. According to Law Gorman, McAllister responded that the new operator would be "taking over the consignment as well."
> This is a critical factual claim. McNeff has refused to address it on the record, citing pending litigation. McAllister has not responded to media requests at all. The Gormans say the store's security camera footage captured this exchange and that it has been provided to Kaiser police.
This reads like B&M corporate are hardball-playing morons, and they choose intimidation as their first action. They clearly didn't know or care about what a fuckup they just made in effectively seizing consigned goods while taking over the franchise, even though they were told about it. And they've relied on the stacked-deck of civil proceedings costs to get away with stealing a guy's property, while they taunt the guy and lie about their actions. And the police, instead of prosecuting them for what looks like a criminal offence, are helping them get rid of the annoying guy publicising B&M's malfeasance.
A $200k loss isn't much in the context of the whole company but it may be a very large amount for an individual franchise, and they want to set an example.
Think of it like a restaurant chain pursuing legal action against an internal theft ring at a single location.
(I am not taking the BAM side here, just providing a rationale for their actions).
This isn't an individual franchise. The franchise was already taken over by corporate!
More money & power than sense. Hubris, greed, malice, psychopathy. One, some or all of these combined in various proportions.
Someone at a lower level probably a regional director, noticed that a franchise owed them a debt, took inventory from the store as payment of the debt, and when all this blew up and he realized he needs to give the inventory back, he doubled down bc otherwise he'd need to record a $200k loss on that franchise
This literally involves the CEO.
Keep in mind you are getting one side of the story. The company seems to be claiming that the franchisee sold the sets and (perhaps) did not pay the consignor for the sales. And that the consignor moved his sets out of the store.
> That said, after ownership of the Salem store changed, we thoroughly documented and assessed current inventory. A few days later, we became aware of the previous arrangement, and compared our inventory assessment to the limited documentation provided by the consignor. It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
> A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition. The consignor also provided a written statement to a podcast that his collection was moved offsite for security reasons. Additional attempts to restore what we could with what was in our possession, was also declined, in writing.
I read through all of this too. It just seems that 1. why would the consignor decline? 2. if he did decline, especially "in writing", then why not post proof?
As you suggest, maybe the reason is more complicated, e.g. some was sold, consignor not happy to have what's left returned and no compensation for what was sold, so refused to just have the smaller amount of stuff returned. If so that could have been much more clearly expressed in this letter. And again they could just post the correspondance.
"why not post proof" - possibly because the company wants the issue to be resolved in real court and not in the court of public opinion.
They could have defended the small claims cases against them in that case?
Difficult to imagine why it would be declined. Did they perhaps insist on unreasonable conditions for doing so, such as fully indemnifying them in the matter? (Just wild speculation on my part since for whatever reason neither party seems interested in providing a full, clear, objective telling of events.)
Unless the entire corporation files for bankruptcy, they can't just shut down a store to avoid paying a debt, much less a court judgment.
There's clearly something else going on here that the blog post is either intentionally leaving out or grossly misunderstanding.
> There's clearly something else going on here
Yes, what you're missing on is that it's an intentional stalling strategy. It's obvious the debt goes to either the corporate, or to whoever owns the affiliate store. None of that is the problem. None of that is meant to be what's stated. Closing the store was done to hide the responsibility and the responsibili-tee.
The video has people doing that type of shit down to the leve of the employee
> talk to the owner
> okay, give me their number
> no
They can't nullify the debt by shutting the store down, but can they shut it down to create further headaches and delays for the person trying to collect the debt?
The entity that was sued is the franchise that is now closed, and not corporate.
No one talking about the police brutality & governance issues.
Does HN have a large crossover with Lego collectors? I’m struggling to understand why this is towards the top of the front page. Someone has their legos stolen via some consignment dispute. Why is that so interesting?
hackers are builders; it wouldn't surprise me if the proportion of lego enthusiasts here is far above that of the general population.
New video from the previous franchise owners that explains more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zedmOopRTm0
Seems like a good reason to avoid ever transacting with this business.
And people wonder why Luigi has so much support from the general public?
This looks like a corporation stealing from an old man. It’s clear-cut wrong, even if the YouTuber is annoying. I wouldn’t put it in the same bucket as a common murderer with similar favorable as Stephen Miller.
The Legos were being sold to fund the college education of the old man's young descendants IIRC. So, like the killing, the alleged issue is a corporation stealing from a young man, actually.
> This looks like a corporation stealing from an old man,
I would. They are evil. Treat them like so.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation in the comments, I would assume because the linked article doesn't cover many of the developments.
The youtuber Reckless Ben has recently covered the story and spearheaded a campaign of "provocative journalism" against the store[0]. Regardless of whether you support the way in which he goes about things, his video explains the story in much greater detail, and enormously expands on the malpractice of Bricks and Minifigs and the local police department.
Here are some bulletpoints in case you do not care to watch Part 1 + Part 2:
- Bricks and Minifigs explicitly threatened both the previous owners of the store and the original owner of the collection with lengthy legal battles
- The owner of the collection tried going the legal route but was quoted prices that he couldn't afford, so youtube was his last resort
- Bricks and Minifigs CEO publicly admitted of having the collection, being aware of the issue, and not wanting to give it back, while at the same time trying to run PR campaigns denying the allegations.
- BAM leadership went out of its way to create legal trouble for Reckless Ben, involving the police and fabricating false evidence about him
- The local police went out of its way to legally stop Ben, arrest him without probable cause, try to plant Heroin on his car, and even *ended up swatting his house*, dislocating his shoulder.
- All of this while the police department illegally scrubbed any incriminating evidence from the bodycam recordings they were obligated to provide.
This is an *insane* story that doesn't get enough credit. It not only exposes the inefficacy of (parts of) the American justice system, but also the enormous level of corruption and abuse of power of the American police (and tangentially the Mormon community)
I really recommend watching both videos. I promise you it's even more insane than it sounds like.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wscQpkcwgNU
All the other stuff dwarfs the theft of $200K. I'm hoping this leads to financial damages that are a large multiple of that number, and multiple jail sentences.
Of course, that probably won't happen. I can imagine reform-oriented candidates running on putting an end to this sort of crap, and winning a local election or two. Speaking of which, I wonder if anything's come of the Afroman case in Ohio.
I dont see how B&M can even continue after this. The lego community is small. Why would a single person ever shop at one of their stores ever again? Maybe you can get some families trying to buy stuff for kids, but the vast majority of money here is adults that are very plugged into the lego scene and surely know about this.
https://encyclopedia.uia.org/problem/anarcho-tyranny
putting aside that this deal went sour, which is very frustrating, i am curious how much they actually spent to buy all that lego, and how much they gained, if anything, over just directly saving the money.
The screenshot of the Facebook post says they purchased the sets for approximately $20,000.
Cloud City 10123 is 698 pieces. That would've retailed for around $70-$90 new.
It is worth roughly $10,000 sealed in box.
I have some of the original Lego Star Wars sets. All opened and built and etc.
Including this one which I purchased for like $5 or $10
https://www.ebay.com/itm/198386156944
I also have the only Deadpool figure Lego ever put in a set that goes for $75 or $100 by itself. It was in a $20 set.
So the amount they spent could be somewhere in the thousands, but probably below $100,000.
Wow. I do not want to knock collectors but I will never understand them. That particular set worth 10k looks kind of crappy to me. I understand the star wars crossover appeal but still. And I have three kids and have bought countless sets. Every bday and xmas times 3.
This set is expensive mostly due to rarity.
Lego can be way better than stocks as an investment.
I remember buying one Millennium Falcon set for $250 on sale and then a couple of years later offloading it on eBay for $10K.
But it is then a greater fool "investment" unlike stocks.
Could he take them to small claims court one Lego set at a time, get a judgment against the business then go in with the sheriff and start taking stuff to cover the judgement?
This is one of the stunts tried on the video. The original owner sold the sets to the crew members, and they presented 10 small claims. They won all of them because BAM did not went to court, the next day they closed the store permanently. This story is crazy.
And when they try to serve him they keep being told they need to do it the right way but the cops stop them every time. The system is totally broken.
They already have a judgement against the business for the full amount. But the business chose to close rather than pay
I dont understand how that works: The entire $400M business decided to close over $200K judgment? Or just the single store? If just the store, why did they sue the store and not the underlying business?
In my (possibly flawed) understanding, it's a franchise so they were able to dissolve the LLC that owned this particular store. The franchise is what has physical possession of the lego and signed the consignment contract.
Just the single store closed .
No. Small claims are for claims which are small. This belongs in civil court all at once and you don't get to go in with the sheriff (if you win) unless they are ordered to pay you and refuse to.
There are explicit rules against claim splitting and you risk either the judge combining all of your filings into one case and moving it to a different court or dismissing all of the claims after the first one. There are very good reasons why a person can't keep suing you over and over for the same event.
Watch the video. They worked around this by selling lego sets to 10 different people (as it was still owned by the lego owner), then the 10 different people all opened separate $10k suits, which they all won.
Then corporate shut down the location to avoid paying the suits they lost.
In many counties there's a limit to how many small claims actions you can take in a year. (Where I live, it's 2).
One surprising thing I learned over time from news articles is that "won a judgment for $x from person y" actually doesn't mean very much in the US. The first thing that came to mind is a parachutist site in Lodi, but this one is another one.
I suppose it is indeed as Andrew Jackson said: John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!
If someone is poor and doesn't have the money, sure you can't enforce it.
If it's a corporation, it's pretty straightforward. If they refuse to pay, you get a writ from the court that authorizes seizure of assets.
Usually that means you go their bank and the value of the judgment will be garnished by their bank and given to you.
Occasionally and theatrically, a sheriff will take you to their headquarters to seize property like computers and printers that you can sell at auction until the value is satisfied.
It only becomes difficult if the corporation is bankrupt, which is similar to a poor person who doesn't have the money. Then it becomes a question of prioritization, e.g. do you get paid before or after lenders, and will there be any money left.
Have you actually gone through this process? Like sure, obtaining a writ is technically part of the same case, but it's pretty much starting all over again. And you'll still be paying filing fees, dealing with court clerks, and waiting weeks or months.
Finding a corporation's bank is a whole separate issue, where you have to go back to court for a post-judgement discovery to force them to tell you. And even if they do - or you already knew - you have to get the writ served to the bank, and just hope they didn't move funds beforehand - or else you're back to start.
As GP said, it IS a huge PITA to get judgments paid, and it's particularly menacing in Small Claims. Unless the other side act on some virtue (which, they were already bad-faithed enough to have a lawsuit against them AND lose), your judgment is just an IOU, and actually forcing collection is often way more money — or time in money — than most state's Small Claims limits.
It's a broken system.
No, but my point is that it does work. It's a lot better to be delayed by months and have to pay more but still get your money, rather than by delayed by years and not get it at all.
This is a franchised retailer with over 300 locations, and this is a value of $200,000+ plus so this is way bigger than small claims.
Like I'd definitely agree with you if we were talking about a $5K claim against a single location in small claims. But this seems to be a $200,000+ claim against a corporation in regular court, as far as I can tell.
I mean yeah, but only my final paragraph is about small claims. The accountability and enforcement mechanisms to collect your money from a ruling don't change between a $200K and a $2K lawsuit, it's the same PITA either way - just a few more zeroes on paper.
It stuns me when I read about people investing in Lego in order to make money later, and in this case it was to pay for someone's college. That info is from the fundraising page that's trying to pay for the lawyers.
The CEO's brother (the COO) appeared on a live stream tonight and showed the Temporary Restraining Order they obtained against everyone -- Ben, Chrystal, etc. which requires them to remove all their media on all platforms etc.
The basis for the TRO was that they offered "sufficient evidence" that Ben, Chrystal etc were a "criminal conspiracy" subject to RICO.
This shit is crazy.
Here's a screen grab of the TRO:
https://imgur.com/a/ICUDXxa
Here was the live stream:
https://www.youtube.com/live/K-lc6XWV3ms
I have never been more convinced of guilt than the COO's actions in this live stream.
Those who hire a crisis management team rarely win in the court of public opinion. BAM just continues to dig a hole when they could instead facilitate fixing the situation regardless of if they think they are a party to this or not.
One of the saddest things about modern capitalism is that people stealing from businesses is criminalized and heavily punished but businesses stealing from people (eg. wage theft, illegal contracts, medicare/PPP fraud, and outright stealing like this case) is treated as a civil violation and almost impossible to prosecute.
The only cases of white collar crime I've seen get prosecuted is securities fraud and that's rich people stealing from other rich people.
Federal and most state civil courts are pay-to-win, too. They have absolutely nothing to do with justice. The only time "the little guy" wins anything is when the lawyers stand to make a windfall in contingency fees.
(...See, e.g., authors vs. Anthropic. The most prolific author might make somewhere in the low six figures, the average author is gonna make ~$10k, and the lawyers representing the class asked for $300M!)
The legal system is captured by legal professionals. The average American is bound by a system that they can't engage directly with. The middlemen who most people must hire to navigate through it generally will not help unless there's a substantial payday in it for them. And in civil matters, defendants have no right to representation.
(Also, the judge is colleagues with counsel, opposing or otherwise; none of them think much of you, which a trip to /r/LawyerTalk will confirm.)
All of this is a choice. Essentially the same choice that we have to have medical insurers instead of a single-payer system; a broken housing market controlled by large corporate interests, instead of one where prices are moderated by a stock of residences built by the government and sold at-cost or lower, as in Singapore or pre-Thatcher Great Britain; broken and spread-thin policing instead of the kind of sophisticated social support system that you would expect the richest country on the planet to be able to afford (and avoids sending the same armed ex-jock to domestic disturbances, mental health crises, car accidents, public school security, etc.). My suspicion is that the fight against change in any of these cases is so fierce because breaking one cartel threatens the others.
You correctly identify the problem as an over-complicated legal bureaucracy in your first paragraph, and propose more government as the solution in your third?
The solution here should be to simplify the legal system so legal adjudication is more accessible to non-lawyers, not add more layers of government bureaucracy on top of the existing ones.
?
The bureaucracy is not the body of law or the judiciary, which were the only government-related targets of my criticism. I agree that the legal system needs to be more accessible to non-lawyers. At the heart of that grievance is the professionalization (read: privatization) of the legal field, which turned a tool for finding justice, despite disputes into a career pursued for prestige and wealth. The problem is that the law and the people who adjudicate it have been captured by private enterprise. The bureaucracy is, like... the court clerks. Who I don't have a problem with, they're quite helpful.
In fact, they'd be integral to this "simplification of the legal system", since what that's essentially asking for is not to make adjudication more accessible, but to move disputes out of adjudication into a procedural venue (where the rules are simple, everyone knows them, and you either follow them and win, or don't and get the hammer).
Across all of the examples - legal recourse, healthcare, housing - what you're looking at is the end of the ambiguity of paradigms driven by private companies with opaque policies and conflicts of interest, and the arrival of an institutional monolith which can be changed by voting in elections. They don't even have to have a monopoly, they just have to be there as an option. I suppose policing is the exception, and while the vision there is unbundling instead of bundling, you're still looking at wresting control for social services out of the hands of the professionals who have captured it.
If you ask me, the solution to this matter in particular should be: (1) That all sides to civil litigation use court-appointed attorneys who are assigned at random and are sworn to not waste the court's time with delaying tactics, (2) That all persons should be granted the right to representation in civil court, an (3) That default judgments should not exist in the absence of the above; all matters should be adjudicated fairly.
In my opinion that would do little to solve the core problem, which is that adjuration is extremely expensive. It would just pass that high cost on to taxpayers and probably simultaneously 10x the demand because you just made it "free".
"The only cases of white collar crime I've seen get prosecuted is securities fraud and that's rich people stealing from other rich people."
There are thousands of YouTube videos of people being arrested or being in court on charges of embezzling from their employers, committing fraud, presenting bogus checks at banks, etc.
Hacking is white collar crime. So is mortgage fraud. So is tax evasion and bribery. There are tons of prosecutions of these crimes every year.
All of your examples show the same pattern - the smaller party (in terms of capital) stealing from the larger party.
The law protects capital and binds humans.
All your examples are also in the category of "individual vs. organization" though.
It's extremely rare for a rich / famous person to get prosecuted for securities fraud.
For instance, Martha Stewart (the only example that comes to mind) was convicted of lying and obstruction of justice, not for any actual crime that was being investigated.
It's not like she was the mastermind of the 2008 securities fraud meltdown, but she was the only person to go to jail for it.
There is an active criminal investigation into this from the Keizer police. Your implication that this is only being treated as a civil matter is false.
Did the criminal investigation start before or after the social media campaign. I suspect after.
It happened before part 1 from Reckless Ben was released. So it was before this latest wave of attention.
The public events depicted in part 1 also happened before the publishing date. Particularly the banner stunt that got local media attention is what I suspect prompted the criminal investigation.
My understanding is that Ben was making a fuss and got local media to report on the story before he released any videos.
> The only cases of white collar crime I've seen get prosecuted is securities fraud and that's rich people stealing from other rich people.
I was trying to popularize the phrase "the only thing which is illegal in America is defrauding investors" but I have no social media presence. Feel free to take it.
Regardless I agree with you on capitalism, but my take on securities fraud is less cynical. In late stage capitalism it makes _perfect sense_ that the only crime is to steal from investors - that's capitalism protecting itself.
> I have no social media presence.
You know HN is just social media for nerds, right?
No, it's not. It's just social. No media. I mean I realize there's links, don't I don't follow them, so to me it's just social without the media.
Besides, the actual point which is that I have no profile, still stands.
I interpret the “media” part as in “medium”, meaning it’s a medium/method over which you can be social, not “media” as in “multimedia”
Text is a medium.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bfkwlfkjf is plenty to build a profile of you on.
This is comic book villain shit. The story isn't told well anywhere that is covering it, YouTubers aren't always exactly great journalists or incentivized to tell a coherent and concise story. But, it's obvious the Bricks and Minifigs folks are lying about damned near everything at every turn and not engaging in good faith.
So, the facts are hard to follow, but I know for a fact the old guy who lost his collection to a shitty corporation is not the bad guy in the story.
He kind of is. The right thing to do here is go straight to court. All this drama, grandstanding, conspiracist thinking, and stunts are bullshit. Sue. Get the judgment. Collect.
It's wild to me how willing people are to torch their company's reputation. If you've seen some of the videos and comments around this it really seems like the corporate owners, and possibly the new franchisee, are arguably, for lack of a better descriptio0n, egotistical bullies, the "yeah? sue me then" types. They've probably gone their entire life just being a-holes and not being held accountable. And now they're digging their heels in.
The facts and the law here are quite simple. Man consigns LEGO collection to the store. He has a contract. The new store owner still has that liability. The existence of a contract is in dispute. The franchisee's and corporate owner's positions seems to be that the contract is with the previous owner not the owner's store.
Well, if that's true, the LEGO collection still belongs to that previous owner and the new owner has simply stolen it. So their legal argument is ridiculous.
Allegedly that previous owner was basically kicked out of the store and denied the opportunity to take inventory so that owner probably has a case against corporate and the new owners as well.
There is no world in which this ends well for the company of the new store owner. And it's wild to me that they're sticking to their guns here. Beyond the legal issues, the reputational damage is massive. These stores are for LEGO collectors and they're screaming bloody murder. Plus ordinary people who hear about this story have an innate sense of fairness so immediately side with the people who've had their $200k LEGO collection effectively stolen.
Plus this now has so much publicity that there are any number of lawyers who will take on this case just for the publicity.
It's also funny that the Utah police who got involved when people went to corporate are basically just acting like corporate's security arm.
> It's also funny that the Utah police who got involved when people went to corporate are basically just acting like corporate's security arm.
When it comes to disputes between the poor and the rich, the police always choose to act as the rich's private security arm.
>The facts and the law here are quite simple. Man consigns LEGO collection to the store. He has a contract. The new store owner still has that liability.
That would only be true if a new owner purchased the business. In bankruptcy consigned goods become property of the consignee's bankruptcy estate and cannot be returned to the original owners. The original owners have a cause of action against the estate, but they are not guaranteed the return of the consigned goods or full recompense for the value of the goods. It largely depends on how corporate took over the franchise.
From https://www.abi.org/abi-journal/navigating-the-consignment-r...Bricks and Minifigs is a very popular birthday party destination for my kids peers. I will make sure to share this story with anyone considering to go there and allow them to form their own conclusions.
I wonder if it would hurt them if many people went in, bought an item, and returned it? Either by restocking fees or credit card headaches.
The individual franchises can always get the clue and drop being a franchise, just be a local store.
How the "justice" system intends to undo the wrong arrests?
i ignored this for the last week. but after enough people who’s opinions i trust wouldn’t shut up about it, i caved and watched today. this is fucking bonkers. part 2 (and i don’t say this often) is f’ing crazy.
i was like, “a story about legos? cmon.” and then part 1 was a 7/10 and hooked me enough to subscribe to his patreon to see the next part early and wtf, the stuff going on in utah is crazy. i cannot recommend this enough. i’m confident this is going to blow much wider, and once it breaks these utah cops containment, more than a few people will be going to prison.
That would just about cover the price of a B&MF franchise license.
There should be class action lawsuits just from widespread recognition of corporate wrongdoing.
Here's a thread on Reddit from the original owner of the store:
https://old.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/1tos7p5/bricks_and_mi...
>Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best are, by public record and documented account, members of the LDS community.
Ah there it is. Classic.
Mormon Mafia.
Damn, I didn't realize this was a huge chain. I've hundreds of dollars at a local store and need to rethink that (easy enough to just go to the actual Lego store instead). This is crazy behavior, shameful.
So infuriating. Seems there is a gofundme link deep in there. I hope this gets him and his family back what he deserves + lawyer fees so he can get justice.
Someone needs to do a movie about this. If anyone from Disney or Lego is here, this is a phenomenal way to get some free advertising + do good in the world.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-bryan-recover-his-lego-colle...
If this was 200k of anything else I don't think I'd care as much. I'm not sure why childish objects are worthy of more vitriol than anything else, but I definitely feel that way.
It seems like the guy who put them on consignment is getting screwed but it doesn't seem like this Reckless Ben is helping things by doing weird stunts https://kotaku.com/youtuber-starts-a-cult-and-is-raided-by-p...
People always say this in these situations.
What do you think would be helping things? Passively sitting in the house waiting for the CEOs to change their minds? Writing polite letters to the local newspaper? Like, whats your theory here?
a lawyer
We would never be talking about it if it wasn't for Ben. Yeah, he's weird, but he's the one that finally got a light shone onto this insanity. The fact he has literally fled to Mexico to avoid any more police harassment is wild.
I actually am from this town and I have watched this play out over the last five years. I moved away from Oregon because of these exact kind of problems. My daughter's e-bike was stolen and we had a tracker in it and we attempted to get the police to help us recover it from a homeless encampment where it has been tracked to. We have ever possible way to prove ownership of the bike from beginning to end multiple times over.
The Keizer Police laughed at us and acted like it was absurd that we would try to get our property back or that they would help us in any capacity whatsoever.
I have a video of a KPD officer telling me that he's not going to arrest a junkie because only some spit landed on my daughter because the junkie was spitting on my daughter.
It sucks because Keizer used to be a really nice town and it's where people went to retire. It's where I went to retire as well and that's not how it works anymore.
Oregon is a failed trash fire now. I moved to rural Montana and don't regret a second of it.
"Justice" is pay2win
I’ve watched both videos by RecklessBen (Part 2 is on his patreon, and apparently will be made public when he has Part 3 ready)…
The videos are damning of the behavior by Brick and Minifigs, the two owners who took over the store in Kaiser, and both the Kaiser (Oregon) police for and American Force (Utah) police.
Brick and Minifigs both corporate and the owners who stole the legos, have consistently and thoroughly lied as well as threatened Ben numerous times. He has recordings of it. It’s all in his videos. He even got the franchise agreement which states consignment is allowed. He got a default judgement in small claims court that caused the original location to permanently shutter its doors. He’s now trying to sue them in civil court, but he can’t even serve the papers.
Ben has tried every legal channel, and been hit with at least trespass at every point. His AirBnB was raided, he was searched for three hours for heroin possession allegations, the police continuously and non-stop targeted him. They’ve issued warrants, and they have been redacted so Ben doesn’t even know what he’s gotta defend against.
I’d really encourage folks to go watch the part 1 since it’s freely available on YouTube, but part 2 is where the Utah police seem to full throttle shit all over his civil rights to protect a Bricks and Minifigs, and the franchise owners, who stole $200k of legos from an 83 year old man.
If this all seems crazy, it’s because it absolutely is crazy. Ben does an absolutely incredible job, attempting to document everything and goes to huge lengths to do things the right way.
Edit: Fix autocorrect mistake and minor readability tweaks.
Part 2 is here: https://youtu.be/cxZPfj8AlmY
I hope that they continue to sue until there's justice.
For the alternate side, Bricks and Minifigs claims much of Mansell's inventory had been sold, or relocated by Mansell himself. The liability for any discrepancy in sales and his compensation is the responsibility of the franchisee with whom he sign the contract.
> It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
> A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition. The consignor also provided a written statement to a podcast that his collection was moved offsite for security reasons. Additional attempts to restore what we could with what was in our possession, was also declined, in writing.
> BAM denies allegations that we “stole” this consignor’s collection, let alone a collection worth what has been claimed online. However, we remain willing to provide any appropriate assistance in recovering any and all portions of this collection or funds generated off of its sale to the original consignor and their family, through appropriate means.
> Serious claims require serious evidence. We have repeatedly asked for the original documents and undoctored recordings that support these accusations. Selective social media posts and misleading investigative-style videos are not a substitute for the complete records and legal agreements that govern the rights of all involved parties.
> If a legitimate claim exists, there are established legal and dispute-resolution processes to handle it fairly. Attempting to force a business outcome through public pressure, especially on unrelated stores and employees, is not a productive or fair path forward.
https://bricksandminifigs.com/blog/blog/2026/05/21/salem-ore...
I don't have first-hand corroboration of the facts, though I am surprised that the article favorable to Mansell did not simply publish the consignment agreement with the franchise owner.
All of these quotes are false and directly contradicted by publicly available statements made by the CEO + Corporate.
Looks like a more detailed followup statement was just posted today:
https://bricksandminifigs.com/blog/blog/2026/05/28/bricks-mi...
This is worth the read.
The strange part continues to be that the 2023 franchising agreement that explicitly permits consignment. While BAM is also claiming that the 2023 owners manual prohibited franchise owners from consignment agreements.
I would guess that BAM simply had poorly audited, conflicting documentation. It's one part they haven't addressed (albeit not central to their claims).
Do you care to disclose your relation to the leadership of Bricks and Minifigs? Did you go to the same university as those involved from the company? Are you affiliated with any of the same organizations?
No affiliation, other than being a fan of building bricks in general, and making a couple small purchases from one of their franchises (not in Portland, OR).
So why are you lying to defend them?
What is my lie? Quoting the posted counterclaim?
Uncritically posting lies from the accused party
Why didn't you say they were mormons from the beginning? That all makes sense now. Truth, lies, and morality doesn't mean the same in that case. Read Under The Banner of Heaven by Krakauer.
This is the much reveered capitalism we love. Atlas cheered!
This is abhorrent and unfortunately not surprising. This corporate culture of fascism is deep, including the culture of YCombinator. The police were founded to protect corporate interests and nothing else.
What you are all missing about this story:
> Ed Mansell spent years building what many believe to be the largest personal LEGO Star Wars collection in history, over $200,000 worth of sets
Note that it says "$200k worth of SETS". The collection, in the possession of any single individual or entity, is worth many times that. That's why it took years to build the collection, and why it is what many believe to be the most extensive. Others might be trying to acquire a complete set like this, but rarity dictates that other collectors will be reluctant to sell.
If I were to speculate I wonder if BAM already sold the collection to some billionaire for millions and doesn't want to admit it.
Since it is done under guise of a corporation, there will be zero actual consequences for the individuals involved in the theft. Nor will there be any consequences for the officers involved in violating rights.
There really needs to be consequences for blatantly manipulating courts to waste money and delay judgement.
That remains to be seen. Individuals absolutely can be held to account. Corporations are not pass to behave illegally.
Someone should let bigTech know about this
Adults ruined LEGO. There I said it.
Ruined seems like very strong phrasing when nothing important has been ruined.
They sell new Lego sets in stores every day. They might seem expensive for a few bags of plastic bits and some instructions, but then: They've never been cheap.
A kid can still grow up playing with Lego today, just as they've always been able to.
I still remember building my first new Lego widget. Set 918. It was just a small basic spaceship and no real accessories but a little Lego space dude. I'd already scattered the pieces around and stuck them together in strange ways when I noticed that there was an instruction book so I could assemble it the "right" way. That may have been the first instruction book I'd ever followed; I remember the sense of wonderment as I learned the value of it. That model didn't last long before I tore it apart and went back to sticking the pieces together in strange ways. :)
Anyway, it seems like it would have been about $6.50 back then, or about $31 in today's money.
That's not so different from today's prices -- in fact, it looks things may have actually gotten a bit less expensive since then for a given amount of complexity.
That's not ruination; it's the opposite of it. The kids are fine. Lego is fine.
---
I do see that someone on eBay that someone hopes to get over $2,000 for a new, sealed copy of set 918. That's a about sixteen more fuckton more than $31.
And I can't justify spending that kind of money on some Lego.
But I don't have to spend that kind of money. If I have a Lego itch that I want to scratch, then I'm a grown-ass adult. I can just go to the store or some online seller or whatever, and buy a new set that I like, and put it together.
I don't need to spend $2k to pretend relive a part of my childhood. I already experienced it once, and I remember that part very fondly.
Nothing here is ruined.
Ruined as in - Lego sets are glorified EZ-mode puzzles and not creative toys anymore. Too many limited sets means it's trending toward "collector items" and not kids toys.
I see both kinds of sets for sale. I do not see ruination. Both kinds present an empire of creativity when they're disassembled and mixed up together in a box, as tends to happen with Lego. It's fine.
Or, alternatively, it may be possible for a person to be such a profoundly grown-up adult to be unable to see it that way. If that's the case, then I guess you're right: These adults are incapable of being creative with Lego, and therefore adults have ruined Lego. For themselves.
But if that's the case, then it was ruined for the old coots from the very beginning. :P
If you can't build a millenium falcon out of any set you're given, whose fault is that?
It's interesting to me that Lego can't be easily made at home in 2026. That whatever they do with plastic, dye and injection molding cannot be easily replicated.
When I was ten, my mum questioned whether my sister and myself were 'too old for LEGO'. In Woolworths we had to reassure her that Set 376-2 Town House with Garden was what we wanted as it came with lots of lovely red bricks that we 'needed'. To be honest, at the time, I thought my mum was right, and that we were getting too old for LEGO, but we had sunk costs...
For us, LEGO was all about ingenuity, improvisation and imagination. We would build a set once, with the alternate back-of-the-box design, without the instructions. Then the real fun would begin, as the new set went in with the bricks we had.
At secondary school (age 11 in UK), the LEGO was cast aside as a mere child's toy. We had moved on and the idea of 'still playing with LEGO' would have been a social faux pas.
Nowadays kids have a ridiculous abundance of LEGO but where is the ingenuity and imagination? Or even the play time? With tablets, phones, video games and so much else, it seems that the set gets built as per the instructions and that is it, job done. The play hasn't even really started.
My parents hosted dinner parties, as was the custom at the time, when restaurants were rare. They quite liked to have our current creations on show, in a low-key way. That is how adults should do LEGO, proud of their kids' creations.
None of our LEGO had a market value, however, every brick had utility and colour value within our LEGO world. We had other things for collecting, even stamps, and they notionally had value.
Hence I am not sure what is going on with people having $200k LEGO collections. That level of abundance just isn't about play, and certainly not for kids. I have no sympathy for the guy, and although the loss is painful, at least he has a chance to grow up a bit!
P.S. Corporate LEGO also ruined it by promoting the whole AFOL thing, but the success of the company has been astounding, considering the product is plastic waste.
What a weirdly hypocritical post.
You played with legos as a kid. Congratulations, so did lots of other kids at the time, and so do kids right now. Nothing has actually changed. Legos are still sold in a box with instructions, just like they were 20 years ago and 40 years ago and so on and so forth.
The idea that adults can't play with or enjoy legos is, well, genuinely sad, as in, it invokes the emotion of sadness. Adults are allowed to have fun and play games, whether that be building race cars out of metal or out of lego or any other activity they find joy in.
> At secondary school (age 11 in UK), the LEGO was cast aside as a mere child's toy. We had moved on and the idea of 'still playing with LEGO' would have been a social faux pas.
I genuinely wish you had a better childhood. Maybe you would have grown up into a person who can feel empathy for others.
Nothing has actually changed?
The toy market is under continual change and every child is borne into the context and culture of their era.
There is also opportunity cost. Had I listened to my mother on that fateful day in Woolworths, we could have moved ten foot one way to have bought ourselves sports gear. Since neither my sister or myself can catch a ball, maybe we should have got into badminton, table tennis or football. But we denied ourselves that opportunity because we bought yet more LEGO.
Things were different in period in the USA, particularly for middle class kids, where the abundance of toys was entirely different. My American counterparts of the period had 10x the toys we had. Not jealous, just saying.
As an outsider looking in on American culture in general, there is too much infantilisation going on for my liking. Adults going to Disneyland with no kids in tow, adults watching MARVEL movies with no kids in tow, adults eating McDonalds, adults eating cereal with cartoon characters on the box, adults drinking Coca Cola and so on. Even the car culture is somewhat infantile.
Why has American gone the wrong way, to retreat into a nine-year-old 'inner America'?
Going back a bit, the finest literature came out of the USA, not yet more infantile cruft. Something is amiss.
We have been here before. After WW2, plenty of men returned to retreat into their inner nine year old selves, which kept model trains going for a while after the kids lost interest. But the adults changed the hobby from playing trains to this micro-realistic world with running trains becoming a rarity, rather than what it was all about. This was their coping mechanism, and I understand that.
The only place in Taiwan to get good hot wings is Hooters, so I was there the other day with some folks, and we noticed this dude alone at a table for a bit. His beer arrives, and he pulls out an unopened Lego box set for some car. For the next hour he slowly drinks his beer while building the entire set. Finishes the beer and set simultaneously, puts the car in his bag, pays his bill, and walks out.
There's few strangers I've encountered that I've respected more and the rest are all firemen.
and Disney
and My Little Pony.
They ruined Pokemon too, not that it was any good to begin with but these scalping chuds took it subterranean.
The pokemon company intentionally limits the supply to drive up demand. Cardboard is in no way a limited resource, they could print as many cards as there is demand for if they wanted. The problem is not the scalpers but the corporation who values the artificial scalped demand more than gameplay. That no one in the so called community can correctly place blame is an indictment of their intelligence.
Star Wars LEGO seems to be the worst. I went to the Bellevue, WA store a few years ago before Christmas. I have no interest in SW or SW LEGO (I'm much more into the Architecture series).
I was walking around though, and an associate came up to me and pointed out that the Death Star (IIRC) was about to stop being sold so if I wanted one I should grab it... "... and that we have several of it, so if you want allll of them."
I despise scalping, though, but perhaps I should.
I assume they were talking about 75159 right before it retired.
I think that was when Lego speculation was just becoming a bigger thing.
Now, I don't think something like that could retire with stock being on the shelf.
I grabbed Betrayal at Cloud City (75222) from my local Lego Store after it retired because they still had one in stock. I don't think I'll get that lucky again.
Especially with the push for exclusive Gift With Purchase (GWP) sets. It's become slightly ridiculous.
But I'm not a speculator, I'm just a dude who likes assembling plastic bricks.
As one commenter said PRICKS & MINIDICKS
200k for Lego.
Hard for me to sympathise with anyone with such a bad money judgment. What other strange decisions did they make in the agreement?
They also made the decision to get cancer. Such bad judgment. I always choose to not get cancer. What a loser.
You can’t be in your full mental health capacity if you put 200k into Lego
Instead of kids, education, house, transport, renovations they put all their hard earned cash into plastic bricks for kids…
What other stupid, no not stupid, insane decisions they made with this company that we weren’t informed about?
Single word: Credibility
Why don't you go away, do some googling of how much money there is to be made in rare lego collecting and then come back
I hope it’s true because I still have heaps of these silly bricks lying somewhere on my grandma’s attic. I hold your word on it that they are now worth a fortune
Let’s keep them for a bit more appreciation and compound interest then…
Move out of the way blue chips, plastic chips are the real investing. Who needs bricks of gold when you have bricks of finest danish plastic?
Misc bricks aren't worth anywhere near as much as full sets (unless you happen to have some of the rarer bricks people are after)
Okay but you get the point. This is not investment, this is playground. No one buys Lego thinking “oh they will make me rich if I just keep them unopened for next 20 years” cmon
This seems like an easily arbitrated dispute. But I'm not privy to all the details and IANAL.
Arbitration only works if both parties are at least somewhat co-operative with the process. If someone decides to just not co-operate with the process or actively impede it, you need to escalate far beyond arbitration, which gets very expensive very quickly (with maybe some small chance that if you can pay for it, you might be able to get some of it back at the end. The belligerent side is generally just betting you'll run out of funds and willpower before you get there).
The problem with the legal system in cases like this is if you have the police in your pocket, you can manipulate the perception of the truth and feel confident in bullying your adversary.
I don't understand this style decision in web page design.
I don't want to read content like a receipt from the grocery store.
I instantly go to Reader Mode in my browser when I see pages like this. Is this because of phones? Why can't it adapt? My 42" monitor wants to know.
i feel bad for the family but that's the nature of the business, the cost of doing business is always a risk. If the collection was worth or appraised at 200k then the family should have done more due diligence. I mean its their life savings. How much paperwork could be done to protect the assets. branding the boxes with tamper proof stickers
You are being disingenuous. They had a signed contract (consignment) with the franchisee. The other entity then just took what is physically in the store.
It is however a civil matter.
Please enlighten us what other "due diligence" these people should have done for your point.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this more criminal?
BAM / new franchisee claims that any consignment deal is null and void after their takeover. If they knowingly possess items that therefore do not belong to them legally (because they were never owned by the previous franchisee), is that not theft (and therefore criminal behavior)?
Like imagine the previous franchisee left their phone in the store. Then the new owners say "nah, it doesn't belong to me". But actually it does. That is theft.
>Please enlighten us what other "due diligence" these people should have done for your point.
$20 filing with the state
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14ktgvoH4Mc
It's easy to say after the fact, how are people supposed to know that before doing business with a nationwide franchise?
If the allegations in the article are true (doxxing the victim, leading to injury), "losing" the contract, refusing to accept delivery of a copy of the contract, etc, etc, the corporation is clearly acting in bad faith. This is so egregious that pain and suffering would likely enter into any judgement. In the US, that means punitive multipliers on a high base value.
DDG's LLM-thingy estimates a $1.5M-$5M judgement if the judge is in a sufficiently bad mood, or a $10-50M jury award that'd be reduced on appeal.
I'm hoping they get the high range of those estimates.