The store and the collection

Chapter One

#The collection that vanished

A son consigned his father’s life-long Star Wars LEGO collection to a friendly neighborhood brick shop in Oregon, on paper that said it stayed his until sold, and then the shop, and the collection, were gone.

The collection had taken a lifetime to build. Retired Star Wars LEGO sets, still in their boxes; loose minifigures, the little plastic people that LEGO collectors prize above almost everything; the kind of hoard that a certain sort of person assembles patiently over decades and a certain sort of son inherits with a lump in his throat. By the autumn of 2023 it belonged, in effect, to Bryan Mansell, who had decided to do the sensible thing with his elderly father’s trove and sell it through people who knew what it was worth.

So on November 22, 2023, Mansell walked into a Bricks & Minifigs store serving the Keizer and Salem area of Oregon and signed a consignment agreement. Consignment is an old and simple arrangement: you hand a merchant your goods, the merchant sells them from the shop floor, and when something sells you split the proceeds. The crucial point, the entire point, is that until the sale happens, the goods are still yours. Mansell’s contract said exactly that. Section IV provided, in plain words, that “Consigned merchandise shall remain the property of Mansell until sold.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 The agreement was governed by Oregon law. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 In the language of the Uniform Commercial Code that every state including Oregon and Utah has adopted, a consignor in Mansell’s position keeps title and holds a security interest in his own inventory; the store is merely a merchant known to sell the goods of others. Utah Code Ann. sec. 70A-9a-102(a)(20), UT ST sec. 70A-9a-102^✓ His Star Wars sets were sitting on someone else’s shelves, but they were still his.

The shop was a franchise. Bricks & Minifigs is a chain of LEGO-resale stores, buy, sell, trade used and new brick, operating across the country under a single brand. The brand and its franchise system belong to a company called BAM Franchising, Inc., which had registered the “Bricks & Minifigs” trademark and built out the network store by store. FDD - Franchise Disclosure Document Bricks & Minifigs 2023 FDD By the time Mansell signed his paperwork, the company was issuing franchise disclosure documents describing the system to would-be store owners, and assembling a portfolio of marks around the brand. The federal trademark office would, in late 2025, register BAM Franchising’s standard-character “BAM” mark to the company. USPTO TSDR, BAM (SN 98706031) On paper it was a tidy little empire of plastic, and the company still markets the system to its own customers, inviting them to become tomorrow’s owners. (BAM franchise recruitment)

The Keizer-Salem location, like the others, was independently owned. The franchisee on the ground, the people Mansell was actually dealing with, were the local operators of the Salem store, names that recur through the later court record: Bryan, sometimes rendered Benjamin, Gorman, and Chrystal Law. Compl., No. 260200029 They ran the shop. BAM Franchising, up in Utah, ran the brand. To a customer handing over a box of vintage minifigures, the distinction would have seemed academic. It would not stay academic for long.

For a while, presumably, nothing happened that a consignor would notice, sets moving, the slow ordinary commerce of a hobby store. Bricks & Minifigs marketed itself, in the warm way these shops do, as the place for LEGO people; somewhere in the sales patter, according to the later filings, came the suggestion that the store was an authorized LEGO reseller, part of the official family. Compl., No. 260200029 That representation, the franchisees’ own side would eventually argue, was false. LEGO itself said so. The non-affiliation is stated flatly in the February 28, 2025 correspondence the litigation relies on: “Bricks & Minifigs isn’t affiliated with the LEGO Group in any ways.” Exhibit A Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-A-LEGO-Email, No. 260200029 The franchise’s own disclosure document, read carefully, conceded as much, it carried a disclaimer that LEGO “does not sponsor, authorize or endorse” the business. Exhibit B Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-B-Franchise-Agreement, No. 260200029 The franchisor’s own public storefront carries that same disclaimer and stops short of calling itself an authorized LEGO seller, describing an aftermarket brick shop rather than an official one. (Bricks & Minifigs official site) The friendly neighborhood LEGO store was not, in any formal sense, a LEGO store at all.

That is the kind of detail that only becomes load-bearing in hindsight, once something has gone wrong. And by late 2024, something had gone very wrong. The store was gone. Where a year earlier there had been a going concern with Mansell’s father’s collection on its shelves, there was now an absence, the Salem-Keizer franchise shuttered, and most of the consigned collection gone with it.

What had happened, in the broadest strokes that the documents support, was a collapse in the relationship between the franchisor and its franchisee. The franchise agreement that bound the Salem store to BAM had two different off-ramps for a store in trouble: one section allowing automatic termination with no chance to cure, another requiring ten days’ notice and an opportunity to fix a payment default before the franchisor could pull the plug. Exhibit B Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-B-Franchise-Agreement, No. 260200029 BAM, the franchisees would later allege, terminated under the no-cure clause for what were really payment defaults that belonged in the cure track, and did so, they claimed, after itself failing to meet conditions it owed, so that it had effectively manufactured the very defaults it then invoked. Compl., No. 260200029 Those are allegations in a complaint the franchisees filed against BAM in the Utah Business and Chancery Court; no court has ruled on them. Law/Gorman v. BAM Franchising, Utah Business & Chancery Court No. 260200029^⌖ BAM has its own answer to all of it, and the case is unresolved.

But strip away the contractual quarrel between two businesses and a smaller, sharper fact remains, the one that should have been untouchable. Mansell’s collection was never BAM’s to take. It was not the store’s either. Under the contract he had signed, and under the commonest principle of consignment law, title to the unsold sets had stayed with him the whole time. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 Conversion, the legal name for exercising control over someone else’s property in defiance of their rights, does not even require an intent to keep the goods forever; it requires only the wrongful dominion. Alta Indus. Ltd. v. Hurst, 846 P.2d 1282 (Utah 1993)^✓ When the store was seized and resold, the franchisees would allege, Mansell’s Star Wars collection was swept up and sold along with everything else, by parties who had no ownership interest in it and were on notice that it was disputed. Compl., No. 260200029 He had done everything right. He had the paper. And the paper said the collection was his.

How much was it worth? That question would turn out to be a battlefield of its own. The collection was a substantial one, the sort valued, in the loose currency of a hobby-store promotion, in six figures. A figure of $200,000 would later attach itself to the affair, but the franchise litigation traces that number to a 2023 in-store promotional valuation rather than any appraisal of what was actually taken, and even the genuinely unexplained gap in the accounting is alleged to be far smaller, on the order of ten to twenty thousand dollars. Compl., No. 260200029 What the precise number was, and who exactly was answerable for it, the franchisor in Utah, or the local operators of the Salem store, are matters still in dispute. Compl., No. 260200029

Set the dollar fight aside, though, and you are left with the human fact that opens this story and animates everything that follows. A man consigned his father’s life’s work to a store that promised to keep it safe and keep it his. He signed an agreement that said so. And when he went looking, the store had vanished and the collection had vanished with it.

That disappearance is the thread. Pull on it, and it runs a very long way, out of a strip-mall LEGO shop in Oregon, into franchise courts and trademark tribunals, into a tangle of Utah and Alaska shell companies and an asset-protection business with a history all its own, and eventually into a documentarian’s camera, a stalking warrant, and a judge’s order to take it all down. But it begins here, with a box of plastic that was supposed to stay where it was put, and didn’t.

The most-repeated number did not survive scrutiny. The viral figure was $200,000; the franchise filings trace it to a 2023 in-store promotion rather than any appraisal, and put the real value nearer $107,000. Compl., No. 260200029 On camera, BAM’s own chief operating officer produced a roughly $10,000 night-of inventory of the seized Star Wars sets and allowed that corporate was “very likely” still holding them; the moving truck BAM denied sending turned out to have existed, as the investigator Coffeezilla reconstructed from the primary footage. The genuinely unexplained gap, on the franchisees’ own accounting, is closer to ten or twenty thousand dollars, and part of it points back at the store’s local operators, not the franchisor. Compl., No. 260200029 A public archive of the dispute, maintained by an outside follower, hosts an item-level inventory that bears the deflation out: the minifigures are valued there in a roughly $25,000-to-$42,000 range, with about $12,000 in sales recorded before the November 2024 seizure and the boxed sets carried on a separate ledger, numbers that sit far below the viral figure and squarely around the deflated one. (Salem Brick Trials archive)

CONFIRMED The reconciliation that pins those numbers down is the work of Collin & Bubba, two independent analysts. The method: they took BAM’s own point-of-sale export of what it actually sold of Bryan Mansell’s consigned goods — the spreadsheet BAM filed with the court as Exhibit B — and reconciled it, line by item, against Mansell’s consignment inventory and his 65% split, separating sold sets from unsold ones and netting out the items Mansell himself retained and resold. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 The result is the modest, itemized figure above (a conversion gap on the order of $10–20K net, never the viral $200,000), and it is two-sourced: the court’s filed exhibit is the public basis BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353, and Collin & Bubba’s independent reconciliation is published in full as two line-by-line workbooks — the Sets reconcile and the Minifigs reconcile.

Chapter Two

#The takeover

How a LEGO franchisor allegedly engineered the defaults it needed, seized a store and a stranger’s Star Wars collection overnight, and months later sold the wreckage to its own two men.

Every franchise deal has two or three small hinges on which the whole thing swings. In the sale of the Bricks & Minifigs store in Salem, Oregon, there were two. The bank account had to change hands. The lease had to be assigned. Do those two things and the buyer becomes the store: rent comes out of her account, the landlord’s notices go to her mailbox, the auto-payments to the franchisor run on their own. Leave them undone and the buyer is running someone else’s store on someone else’s paperwork, and that someone is the franchisor.

According to the franchisees’ sworn complaint, those two hinges were never set. Compl., No. 260200029 The store’s operating company, BAMF Salem 1, LLC, bought the Oregon location in early 2023 under a written Franchise Agreement and a Business and Asset Purchase Agreement with BAM Franchising, Inc., the Delaware corporation that owns the national Bricks & Minifigs system. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 The purchase agreement, by BAM’s own account, required the buyers “to obtain landlord consent to a lease assignment” and “to coordinate account transfers.” Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 Those were the conditions precedent. The franchisees say they were BAM’s to complete and BAM never did.

Read BAM’s own verified complaint and the gap is right there, stated as fact by the company that benefited from it: “the lease and various accounts were never properly transferred.” BAM frames that sentence as the franchisee’s failure. The franchisees’ complaint frames it as the trap. Compl., No. 260200029 Because the lease was never assigned, BAM remained the tenant of record; the landlord’s bills and notices kept flowing to BAM, not to the operator who was actually behind the counter selling LEGO. Compl., No. 260200029 Because the bank account never transferred, the automatic payments the franchise ran on could not run from the right account. The franchisees allege the result was not an accident but a mechanism: the very “payment defaults” and “unpaid lease” that BAM would later invoke as grounds to terminate were, on their account, manufactured by BAM’s own failure to throw the two switches. Compl., No. 260200029

Whether that is a fair reading is for a court; none has ruled. But the franchise contract itself shows why the distinction matters so much. The Bricks & Minifigs Franchise Agreement has two different doors marked “termination.” FDD - Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 Section 14.A, “Immediate Termination,” lets the franchisor declare the agreement terminated “automatically, without notice, at our discretion”, no warning, no chance to fix anything. FDD - Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 Section 14.B, “Notice of Termination,” is the slower, fairer door: for a franchisee who fails “to make payment of any amounts due,” the company must send written notice and give the franchisee ten days to cure before the termination bites. FDD - Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026

Here is the catch the franchisees point to. A money default and a lease problem appear on both lists. Section 14.A treats “Failure to Make Payments” when due, and “Breach of Lease; Loss of Right of Possession,” as grounds for no-cure, no-notice termination. FDD - Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 Section 14.B covers the same failure to pay and the same loss of the premises, but with the ten-day cure attached. FDD - Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 A franchisor confronting an unpaid balance can walk through either door. According to the franchisees’ complaint, BAM chose the no-cure door, 14.A, for defaults that its own non-performance had produced, skipping the ten-day cure that 14.B would have required for exactly the same dollars. Compl., No. 260200029 Exhibit B Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-B-Franchise-Agreement, No. 260200029

The contract gave BAM one more thing it needed. The franchise agreement reserves to the company the right to “assume the lease upon your termination,” and a recordable option to step into the premises if the deal ends “for whatsoever reason.” FDD - Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 Stay the tenant of record, terminate under the clause with no cure, and the franchisor can take the keys, the four walls, and everything inside them, without ever handing the operator the chance to make the payments right.

#The night the store changed hands

BAM dates its move to November 14, 2024. On its own telling, it issued a written “Notice of Immediate Termination” to the Salem operating company, “exercised its priority rights to the collateral,” and “repossessed the Salem LLC store on or after 11/14/24 and assumed the lease,” taking “any and all fixtures, inventory and other assets.” Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 BAM puts the unpaid balance at “an estimated $175,000,” and says it credited the seized store against that debt at “an estimated $38,000 paltry value.” Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 The operator’s complaint describes the seizure differently, an after-hours clearing-out of well over $100,000 in store assets, taken without the notice-and-cure the operator says it was owed. Compl., No. 260200029

One detail survives in both accounts and it is worth pausing on. BAM’s complaint admits that, as its people took the store, the departing owner “removed certain receipts, a high value Boba Fett minifig and possibly money in the safe, over Brandon’s objection.” Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 “Brandon” is Brandon Best, and who Brandon Best was on that night is the hinge of everything that follows. By BAM’s own sworn words, he was “engaged as a contracted inventory inspector for BAM” and “was requested to inspect and inventory the Salem LLC store at the time of repossession.” Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 He was the franchisor’s man, sent to count what the franchisor was taking.

Then the inventory man became the buyer. BAM’s complaint lays out the sequence without apparent embarrassment: “After Brandon secured the location incident to the termination and completed the inventory, Josh expressed to BAM his interest in acquiring a franchise for the store location.” Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 “Josh” is Josh Johnson, described in the same filing as another insider in BAM’s orbit. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 Best and Johnson, the complaint continues, “agreed to jointly do so and formed Baker Salem,” believing they could “purchase the assets free and clear, assume the lease from BAM and infuse new inventory.” Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 In the first quarter of 2025 BAM sold the repossessed store and its contents to that new entity, owned by its own inspector and its own recruit, under a January 9, 2025 franchise agreement and a March 27, 2025 purchase agreement. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 The franchisees’ account compresses the turnaround harder still: the store seized one night, the franchisor’s two insiders installed as the new owners within roughly a day. Compl., No. 260200029 The public record bears the timing out. Oregon’s business registry shows the buyers’ company, Salem-Baker Bricks Inc., was incorporated on November 15, 2024, the day after the repossession, with Best, the franchisor’s own inventory inspector, named on the filing. Salem Baker Bricks INC OR And BAM’s own 2025 franchise-disclosure filing lists the Keizer store under “Outlets Owned and Operated by Corporate … as of December 31, 2024,” placing the seized store in BAM’s own hands in the weeks between the seizure and the insider sale. BAM Franchise Disclosure Document (2026)

The neatness of it is the allegation. A store is declared in default under a no-cure clause; the franchisor takes it, values it at a fraction of the debt, and resells it to two men who already worked for the franchisor, one of whom had personally inventoried the assets he would shortly own. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 Best and Johnson are now co-plaintiffs alongside BAM in the lawsuit that grew out of all this, represented by the same Salt Lake firm. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 None of it has been tested at trial. BAM insists the resale was an “arm’s-length and legitimate corporate sale” to “bona fide third-party purchasers” who “acquired the business from BAM” with no knowledge of any competing claim. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 The franchisees say the buyers were never strangers at all. Compl., No. 260200029

And the Salem playbook was not a one-off. In Oregon’s Clackamas County, BAM has pursued other departing franchisees in court, against the Baumans and K2 Bricks in 2023 (Clackamas County Circuit Court No. 23CV16003) and against Plastic Palette the same year (No. 23CV36974), and Plastic Palette turned and sued BAM back, a roughly $1.45 million jury demand alleging the franchisor engineered the very default it then enforced (No. 24CV06902). Those pleadings are allegations, not findings. But the clearest echo of the Salem move is in the corporate registries: on December 12, 2024, weeks after the Salem seizure, the same two insiders, Brandon Best and Joshua Johnson, incorporated Wesley Chapel Baker Bricks Inc., a Florida corporation for a store in the Tampa suburbs, mailing to a post-office box in Sandy, Utah, the same “Baker Bricks” naming the pair used in Oregon. That the Best-and-Johnson vehicle reappears in a second state is documented in Florida’s registry; whether it carried out the same engineered takeover is not proven to the Salem record’s depth, and is set out here as the pattern it appears to be, not a second proven seizure.

Florida also surfaces the franchisor’s own store-entity naming, and where it points. BAM organizes its store companies as “BAMF [City]” LLCs: the Oregon plaintiff is BAMF Salem 1, LLC, and the Utah BAMF-Orem reacquisition ran through BAMF Orem 1 LLC, whose manager of record is Ammon McNeff, BAM’s CEO. Two more sit in Florida. The Wesley Chapel store the Best-and-Johnson vehicle later claimed had a prior life on the same registry: it was organized in December 2020 as BAMF Wesley Chapel 1 LLC, renamed Stone River Bricks, LLC in December 2022 under franchisee Gabriel Ribeiro, then administratively dissolved on September 26, 2025, weeks before the insiders’ new “Baker Bricks” company surfaced for the same location. And in Port Charlotte, BAMF Port Charlotte 1 LLC, an active company filed October 1, 2025, names its manager as Matthew McNeff, BAM’s chief operating officer, mailing to the franchisor’s Provo, Utah address. These are public-registry facts, not allegations: in at least one live Florida store, the operator of record is the franchisor’s own COO.

The pattern is national, and here it cuts the other way: BAM’s own disclosure admits these stores are company-owned, and the state registries confirm it while naming the insiders the booklet leaves as job titles. In Montana, BAMF Billings 1, LLC lists Matthew McNeff, the chief operating officer, at BAM’s Orem, Utah address (now an inactive foreign registration) as its sole manager of record, behind a Kalispell commercial-agent nominee. In Connecticut, BAMF Southington 1 LLC lists the chief financial officer, Reed Brimhall, as its member, mailing to 4844 North 300 West in Provo, the registered address of the McNeff-managed BAM IP Holdings, LLC. So this is not the “independently owned” misdescription seen in Salem; what the registries add is the line home to the same Orem-and-Provo nexus, plus a few smaller drifts from the booklet: the disclosure’s “BAMF Southington CT LLC” is on the record “BAMF Southington 1 LLC,” a Billings entity the financial statements say was formed in November 2024 was in fact registered in July 2023, and the on-site operator the disclosure names, “Zach Giles,” appears on none of the filings.

#The collection that wasn’t theirs to take

There was a problem with the inventory BAM hauled away, and its name was Bryan Mansell. More than a year before the seizure, on November 22, 2023, Mansell had signed a consignment agreement placing “a large collection of retired Star Wars Lego sets and minifigures” with the Salem store to sell on his behalf. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 The terms were ordinary and explicit. The store would take 35 percent of each sale and send Mansell 65 percent. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 And the title never moved: “Consigned merchandise shall remain the property of Mansell until sold,” the contract reads, with any unsold sets to “be returned to Mansell within 10 days of termination.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 The store was a shelf, not an owner. The collection belonged to a man who had never been party to anyone’s franchise deal.

When BAM cleared the store, the franchisees’ account holds, it swept Mansell’s consigned LEGO into the pile of seized “assets” it credited against the operator’s debt, taking goods that the consignment contract says it had no right to take. Compl., No. 260200029 BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 Two failures hide in that one act, and they answer to different parties: carrying off the unsold collection — which the contract says had to be returned within ten days — is BAM’s, the entity that cleared the store; but whether Mansell was ever paid his 65 percent on the sets that did sell is the local operator’s accounting duty, owed under a consignment signed by Chrystal Law for the Salem-Keizer store, not by the franchisor, so the proceeds shortfall is principally the store’s to answer. BAM’s answer to the taking is that it had no idea the collection existed: it took the store, it says, “as a bona fide purchaser, without notice of any third party claims or liens of any kind,” including the “undisclosed and alleged” consignment with Mansell. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 The company also disputes how much was even there, contending its inspector found “less than $5,000 worth of Star Wars LEGO product” onsite. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353

Mansell did not go quietly, and BAM’s complaint records what happened when he came looking. Within a day or two of the seizure he telephoned the store, then arrived in person holding his consignment paperwork and demanding the return of his collection or payment of $80,000. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 He was told the new occupants were not parties to his contract and turned away; he came back that evening with the police. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 By BAM’s own account the responding officer “concluded this was a private civil matter” and left without taking anyone’s side. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 A man’s Star Wars collection had been folded into a franchise repossession, and the system’s first answer to him was that it was somebody else’s problem.

#What BAM did next

For most of a year the dispute lived in demand letters and small-claims paper. The Salem operating company sent BAM a legal demand on December 24, 2024, claiming it had been damaged by the termination; BAM denied it on January 10, 2025. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 In Oregon, the fight also reached small-claims court, in complaints against L2 Bricks, LLC (an earlier Salem franchise entity that preceded the Gorman ownership, not the store’s post-repossession operator) and, separately, against Josh Johnson personally. Compl. Compl. Oregon-Small-Claims-26SC06134-benjamin-schneider-v-joshua-johnson-claim-cc-1726577 BAM would eventually recast that scatter of filings as a sinister “campaign”, “splitting claims in multiple ineffective small claims actions”, in the sweeping Utah racketeering suit it brought in 2026 against the operators, against Mansell, and against a YouTuber named Benjamin Schneider whose video about the store drew more than 1.3 million views. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 Those racketeering allegations, and the criminal charges that trail behind them, are unproven and contested; they belong to later chapters, and to a presumption of innocence that the law extends to everyone BAM has accused.

One important fact about the takeover is what BAM itself did in June 2026, after public scrutiny intensified. It closed the Salem store. It parted ways with Brandon Best and Josh Johnson, the two insiders it had installed as the store’s new owners. And it reached out to Bryan Mansell about restitution for the Star Wars collection it had once sworn was an “undisclosed” stranger’s problem. Verified Compl., BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 BAM v. Schneider-Mansell, No. 260402353 That does not prove liability, but it undercuts the posture in BAM’s filings: lawful repossession, arm’s-length resale, and no franchisor-facing consignment problem.