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Alright, lets talk about the LEGOs.
In case you have been living under a rock, here's the story so far:
Elderly man has $200,000 LEGO Star Wars collection.
Elderly man enters into a consignment agreement with the local Bricks and Minifigs franchise.
Said franchise undergoes a messy ownership change mediated by Bricks and Minifigs corporate. The new owners stop honoring the previous consignment agreement and refuse to give the LEGOs back.
Elderly man's son gets the runaround trying to get his father's LEGOs back. Corporate tells him to deal with the franchise owner. The franchise tells him to deal with corporate.
Frustrated, the elderly man's son turns to YouTuber Reckless Ben. The resulting video goes viral.
The situation escalates into a wild goose chase as Reckless Ben attempts to serve legal process onto the store owners, aggravated by encounters with the suspiciously hostile American Fork, Utah police department (oh yeah, both the new franchise owners and the Bricks and Minifigs CEO are Mormon)
All of this is complicated by the fact that Reckless Ben is, well, reckless. He wears hidden spy cameras. He uses false pretenses to get into situations and locations. At one point he gets arrested for stalking. Despite this, it's hard not to root for him. He seems to have the franchise owners dead to rights for conversion (aka stealing), and Bricks and Minifigs corporate seems at best lackadasical that one of their franchises is defrauding counterparties, and at worst complicit.
I don't see how Bricks and Minifigs survives this as a company. This story is everywhere and nobody is on their side. This is not a particularly lucrative buisiness to begin with, and right now their name is mud. They did, finally, two weeks later, sort of admit that they were wrong and that Brian will get his LEGOs back. It's been radio silence from the principles since that last message went out. I would be surprised if we've heard the end of this saga.
It just seems like they should have started a lawsuit and it's really suspicious that they didn't just start a lawsuit. They went down a lot of wacky schemes to avoid doing so and I have no earthly idea why the ceo bothered talking to them at all. Seemed like no one involved had any idea what they were supposed to do, probably because even if you dot your is and cross you ts people won't take you seriously if you're some obnoxious youtube personality doing skits interspersed with your legal challenges. The cops seemed to really fuck up at multiple points though.
Everyone In This LEGO Dispute Should Have Spoken To A Lawyer Earlier Than They Did says Techdirt and I’m inclined to agree.
I found that insight noteworthy. Simultaneously, this range of cases is not only legally/financially a bit of a crapshoot but usually these players are among the least sympathetic so they don’t really have strong advocates for reform
I think the police thing is in a certain sense a red herring and just rage bait especially since Mormons as a group are easily hateable and says more about policing than it does Utah specifically. Police being dicks is well known. Police jumping to conclusions and then defending them irrationally is well known. Police being tragically ignorant of laws is well known, and so is the fact that they have pretty idiosyncratic and often infuriating responses to “this is a civil matter”. Police occasionally defending a buddy is well known (but I’ve seen zero evidence beyond the bare basics circumstantial type to indicate this was the case).
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I'm going to give my rundown to those following along at home, tagging @Quantumfreakanomics, @The_Nybbler, @mr_bailey, and @gattsuru since this will include responses to your comments as well. I first want to disclose that I have not watched the Reckless Ben video, have no plans to watch it, and will be relying on the above summary for that side of the story. The day I spend 90 minutes watching outrage porn from a guy named Reckless Ben is the day that I ask anyone here to track me down and slit my throat because I'm obviously brain dead. With that out of the way I have read the relevant averments in the lawsuit against the son and Reckless Ben and the whole Reckless Ben crew, with the caveat that complaints are drafted to put the plaintiff in the best light possible and are accordingly not objective. That being said, there is a duty of candor involved, so I will assume that nothing contained therein is an outright lie.
The complicating factor here is that the son (Bryan) has potential claims against three parties: The franchisee with whom he entered the agreement (Chrystal), the franchisor (BAM), and the new franchisees (Josh [there's also Brandon but I'll keep things simple]). The correct way to go about this would be to sue all three entities and let the chips fall where they may, with the plaintiff being fully prepared to let parties out of the suit once information becomes available that shows they aren't liable. It's highly likely that the latter two parties would have been voluntarily dismissed once depositions had taken place, though it's possible BAM could be held in under a theory of principle-agent liability.
To recap the facts as they're presented in the suit, Bryan went to the BAM franchise owned by Crystal to sell his father's Star Wars Legos, which at the time were valued at $80,000, though this was later adjusted to $60,000. I don't know where the later $200,000 claim came from. There was supposedly a consignment agreement, though nobody has to date produced a signed copy, and he was told that the items would be stored off-site. After Chrystal violated her franchise agreement with BAM a cursory audit was done, showing that there was about $38,000 in inventory at the store, about $5,000 of which was Star Wars-related. Josh entered into a new franchise agreement to take over operation of the store.
Shortly after taking over, Bryan entered the store and confronted Josh about the consigned goods, and presented him with an unsigned copy of the agreement and an incomplete inventory list. Josh said that he wasn't aware of anything being held on consignment, but he was free to look through the Star Wars-related inventory and see if he recognized anything. At his point, Bryan became argumentative and started demanding payment of $80,000. Josh checked the back room for any inventory he might have missed and asked store employees if they knew anything about the consignment agreement or the subject goods, but they did not, and Bryan became irate when learning this, and accused Josh of theft. He came back later with police and ask that the store owners be arrested, but the police told him that it was a civil matter and escorted him from the premises when he became belligerent. He then began privately harassing the store. He contacted Chrystal and demanded payment, but she told him she had no money to pay him.
After the the sale of the franchise was formally completed, Josh gained access to the POS system, which showed sales of approximately $60,000 of Star Wars-related items, though there wasn't enough information to specifically identify the items or whether they were sold under consignment. It should be noted that, upon abandoning the store, Chrystal refused to provide any accounting, inventory, or other records to BAM. At some point after the Reckless Ben harassment campaign began, Josh discovered Star Wars-related items in a locked cupboard and told Bryan that he could look at them and see if he recognized them. Bryan said he wasn't interested in talking unless they were planning on paying the full amount. As a weird twist, Chrystal was also evidently in cahoots with Reckless Ben's campaign, claiming that BAM took her store from her in bad faith.
The_Nybbler writes about the UCC provisions regarding consignments, and while I don't want to get too in the weeds on that, I don't think that they really matter here. There are questions as to whether the UCC would apply to a consumer transaction like this, how Bryan would have been able to intervene in a non-judicial foreclosure, whether or not he can intervene after the sale, whether the law allows recovery from a creditor or bona fide third party purchaser, etc. But assuming all three parties are indeed independent, common law rules wouldn't save his case. Indeed, had he actually made the proper UCC filing it wouldn't save his case. The contention here isn't that BAM is entitled to the consigned items because they were unaware of any lien, but that the items were never in their possession. It looks to me like Chrystal sold the items, kept the money, and didn't bother telling Bryan about it, eventually just abandoning the franchise and moving overseas. Meanwhile, she has every incentive to tell Bryan that she's also the victim here and has no money besides, so he'll direct his anger elsewhere.
Would suing be worth it? Gattsuru writes:
Which is true if you believe what's in the complaint, i.e. that the prior franchisee sold the goods and absconded with the money, and that neither BAM nor the current franchisees have possession of the goods or knowledge of what actually happened. The problem is that this scenario doesn't justify any self-help remedies being taken against either of those parties. If Bryan has a justifiable, good-faith belief that the items are worth $200,000 and that BAM is responsible for their loss, then it's worth filing suit. Hell, attorneys take suits on contingency that are worth a lot less. It seems to me, though, that what he wants is for BAM to take him at his word and accept responsibility for something they have no responsibility over. Any way you see it, his actions are unjustified. In any event, they're going to cost him a lot more now than if he had just kept his mouth shut.
From Coffeezilla's video, the $200,000 valuation came from a press release Crystal released.
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/local/2026/03/21/sign-on-closed-keizer-oregon-business-accuses-lego-resale-store-of-theft/89138490007/
This article quotes from the press release.
If there's one thing I'm reminded of it's that many small businesses have absolutely abysmal record keeping!
From Coffeezilla's review of the PoS data he seems to find that most of the collection was sold or layawayed and the proper records for the lawaways weren't passesld with the freanchise sale.
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I'm... skeptical about crediting the duty of candor to the court too heavily. There's a lot of things that courts seem perfectly fine with that normal people would call lies, and a lot more than can be done by implication.
In particular, specifics like a lock able rather than locked cabinet, or Chrystal supposedly using parentheticals in a phone call that BAM quotes (and, while not as prohibitive, referring to themselves as "they"), or the 80k-no-60k-no-30k valuation, are not the sort of things that make me trust the complaint as being deeply honest. Doubly so where these are core to the claim, rather than incidental. The parenthetical in particular is very much core to bringing the RICO claim, bolded, and afaik, not written as an insertion by the transcription, and just not a believable thing for even a pretty dumb criminal to say.
Maybe those are all real and supported with strong evidence, or maybe they're the client's claims rather than the lawyer. But they're not written like it.
And there's some weird errors. Did Brandon start the 300k USD valuation in February of 2026, or in "early 2025"? One of these is a factual claim (90) and one is a legal predicate (172), and they seem to both be talking about the same incident. [EDIT: actually, it's weirder than that. One is tied to "Chrystal and Benjamin", while the other is tied to "Bryan (Mansell) and Chrystal"; I'd assumed the 2025 was just a typo since it's logically inconsistent with BAM's larger timeline, but bringing in different names?]
Similarly, the >$200k USD number seems to have come from previous marketing material from the store, and while some of that's probably puffery and none of it can attribute to either BAM or Josh, it also seems to be matched by third-party estimates of the value of the whole original consignment. Some of the disparity comes because the majority of the value was in the minifigs, not the sets, which the pleading very carefully occludes in the valuations even though it highlights Chrystal's alleged taking (but not theft?) of a Boba Fett figure. (no, I don't know why people pay so much for the minifigs)
It's possible that Chrystal/Gorman sold a large portion (or even Brandon took it back without notice to BAM/Josh) and Brandon's just doing a scam artist routine, although BAM having access to the POS system this long and not knowing or providing evidence one direction or the other raises serious doubts that direction.
That doesn't make Chrystal, Gorman, and Bryan in the right: this very much looks like a 'pox on all their houses' situation.
Yeah, if BAM's version is true, BAM was either blameless and legally not-at-fault or at worst ethically negligent about management, and Bryan was screwed. Even more so than the BAM pleadings admit -- Chrystal's partner dirtbag-left'd his way out of the country and near-certainly would have most of the money, in a way that would make recovering funds even more impossible than the normal judgement proof version -- so there's even a good explanation why Bryan might have felt like he had no option but to team up with Chrystal in the hope of getting some questionable settlement from an innocent part to get him to go away.
It would be really weird if Chrystal had control of the consignment for nearly a year and didn't sell anything from it.
But honestly, I think it's pretty serious risk even if the current franchisees did have possession of (a large portion of) the goods when they took the store and sold them, either not knowing or not caring about the complicated ownership. It's not the most likely situation, but it's not impossible or improbable one. Still, shops like this aren't going to have a ton of cash-on-hand, they'll liquidate the value of property trying to fight the case, and they've got logical reasons to fight rather than give a token settlement because of the tight financial situation to start with. BAM is a more tempting legal target, but in turn it has a ton of (legitimate!) doubts about actual liability.
There's a bit of a survivorship bias, here. Attorneys also refuse to take suits on contingency that are worth a lot more, either because the defendants are judgement proof, they think the odds are low, or just because it'll take so long that any victory won't be worth the sauce.
To be clear, I don't credit it that heavily, just more than somebody yammering away on YouTube. I've since learned more about this case and it's clear that the facts alleged in the complaint are selective at the very least, but that's to be expected. It's also clear that both Bam and the new franchisees aren't entirely free from blame in terms of how they handled themselves, but I'm still skeptical as to whether they actually had as much of the inventory as Bryan claims they did.
Apparently about half the collection was sold at the time of the takeover. This is why even if the collection was correctly valued at $200k, making a demand for that much is ridiculous. Bryan was entitled to 65% of the sale price, and with $100k of inventory presumably remaining, his damages would be in the neighborhood of $65k, which is nothing to sneeze at but well under half of what he's alleging was stolen. Anyway, Chrystal was supposed to pay Bryan monthly and provide some kind of sales statement. Apparently there's some dispute over the amount he was actually paid, and I don't know if these statements were itemized or if they just listed the dollar amount. One of the few advantages of litigation is that it forces you to put the evidence on the record or shut up about it.
So there are two possibilities here. The first is that Chrystal either stole the product or sold it and underreported the sales to Bryan. She did suddenly discover some of it at her house a year after the dispute started. I agree that if this is the case, then a lawsuit isn't likely to accomplish anything. I still think it would have been worth going after BAM, though, because from what I've since learned, even if they didn't do anything, they certainly didn't act in a way that would suggest they did nothing wrong. Chrystal claims that the product was in the store when corporate evicted her. Video evidence shows what appears to be some of it on the shelves the night she gets kicked out, and she's telling them about the consigned merchandise and the new operators don't seem to care. When Bryan went to the store to ask about it, he was given the bum's rush, and Josh and Brandon took the position that since they weren't a party to the consignment agreement, we don't owe you anything and get off our property. I saw enough of the video that it's clear that these guys are assholes in general.
And from what I've seen there's probably enough to keep BAM in the case. What one would normally expect after a franchise foreclosure would be for corporate to run the store while a new buyer is found, and then transfer the store to the new franchisee at a later date. From November 2024 to March 2025, the BAM location in question was in a sort of limbo where the successor franshisees were operating the store but didn't actually have the franchise yet. If any of the items were sold during this period, then BAM is responsible. But it gets better. The new franchisees were running the store beginning the night of the foreclosure, and continued to run it while it was legally owned by corporate. The goods were the subject of a dispute throughout the entire period in question. The nature of the arrangement creates a legitimate question as to whether the franchisees were acting as an agent of BAM corporate, which if proved, would expose corporate to liability even after the new franchise agreement went into place. There are enough factual questions involved here that BAM isn't going to get out on an MSJ, which means settlement is a real possibility. And if they stick by their story blaming Chrystal they'd have to make a case against her for conversion, which is a tall order.
But that's really neither here nor there, because my ultimate point is that this guy had better options than running his harassment campaign, and this isn't some justified act of vigilante justice to protect the little guy when the legal system is inadequate and expensive. The consignment agreement required that the collection be insured. The guy would be nuts for not obtaining his own policy, but it looks like someone was paying for insurance on these items, and it looks like Chrystal was cooperating with him, so the proper thing to do would be to file a claim, the same as you would if someone had broken into the store or if the collection had been destroyed by fire. This is why you get insurance. The claims handler is certainly going to question the circumstances of the loss, and if they think that BAM or the successor franchisees are liable, then they would be able to file a subrogation claim against them, but Bryan would get paid, Chrystal would get paid (though possibly sued if BAM claimed they were entitled to the commission), and neither would care if the insurance company was reimbursed. The claim could, of course, be denied, but if that happens you're back where you started in terms of having to litigate, except it's a lot easier this time. An insurance bad faith claim is a lot easier than the conversion claim they were dealing with, as there's only one party, the facts are a lot simpler, and you know the money's there.
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Uh yeah. When I do expert witness stuff the shit that the lawyers and less ethical expert witnesses do is absolutely bananas.
Just because you can understand something to be "nothing but the truth" doesn't mean it's not wildly misleading.
On a more silly note: my daughter ran across a recommendation for "The Best Policy", a 1950s SF short story by Randall Garrett, and we quickly found a copy online a couple nights ago. It's one of the funniest illustrations of this trope I've ever read.
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Isn't this what the "whole truth" clause is supposed to be for? If I testify that you have never denied being the serial killer known as the "Scranton Strangler" then I have said nothing but the truth, but if I fail to add that this is because you have never been accused of being the Scranton Strangler then I have not said the whole truth.
How you ask a question matters a whole lot. "Did Dr. Smith make the right decision?" "What would you have done treating the patient with the information available at the time?" can easily point in opposite directions.
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That language is more convention than anything else. The FRCP, along with a lot of state rules, only specify that:
A witness is certainly under no obligation to volunteer information that isn't asked of him. Witness prep 101 is that the witness should answer the question asked and only the question asked, and to limit answers to yes, no, I don't know, and I can't remember wherever possible. In other words, if the attorney asks if the witness knows the time, the preferred answer is "yes", not "4:00". There are obviously exceptions for responses that require additional clarification, though in my experience witnesses generally volunteer too much information as it is, and I've been in too many depositions that took longer than they should have because the witness couldn't answer a question without going off an an irrelevant tangent.
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The law is on the store's side, as I described below. They only have a valid lawsuit against the original storeowner, if he hasn't actually declared bankruptcy, and he's likely insolvent even if he hasn't. The law allows a consignors goods to be lawfully taken by the lender/repossessor in this case. So extralegal measures are all he has.
Having looked at the case further since posting and seen what legal commentators are saying, they all seem to believe that the UCC filing requirement wouldn't apply in this case. The purpose of the filing requirement is to protect creditors from finding out after a default that the property in which they have a security interest isn't actually owned by the debtor. Hence the requirement that the debtor business not be known to its creditors as typically selling consigned merchandise. It would be difficult to argue that a store dealing primarily in used and resale items wouldn't fall into this category, especially when the creditor in question executed a franchise agreement that explicitly contemplates consignments. Furthermore, courts have proposed a cutoff of 20% of inventory value, and the value of the consigned product in this case was allegedly 50% of total inventory value. There's also the possible consumer goods exception, though this is a weaker argument because the Legos in question were in sealed boxes that had arguably been held for resale and not purchased with the intention of using them for normal consumer purposes.
Honestly it's an outdated rule that should be nixed entirely, since no banks are extending credit based on a visual inspection of the store's inventory. At the very least, they're looking at the average running value of inventory on the books, which would exclude anything held on consignment. But I don't think BAM has a credible argument that they had no idea that the store might accept goods on consignment, which would defeat any argument over a UCC filing. I also don't have much sympathy for Mansell for not making such a filing. I understand the argument that Joe Consumer isn't going to be sophisticated enough to make a UCC filing, but Joe Consumer doesn't generally consign $200,000 worth of goods. I know lawyers have a reputation for saying "should have talked to an attorney" in situations when no normal person would, but I don't think I'm out of line to suggest that when you're entering a complicated transaction that involves entrusting property worth as much as a house to a stranger, it might be worth spending a couple hundred bucks to make sure you don't get taken advantage of.
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A lawsuit would be expensive relative to the value of the goods and they might not win it (the law here is fairly involved, under commercial law it's not clear that he isn't just another creditor against the bankrupt franchisee as other suppliers supplying goods on credit would be). Morally and in the court of public opinion he has a much stronger case.
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Unfortunately, this is the sort of lawsuit that takes ten thousand bucks for a trivial chance of actually being made whole (and mostly in a settlement), a large chance of getting a useless judgment on a defunct or judgment proof target, and a larger chance of just never having a conclusion that’s mostly a shrug.
Doesn’t make the Reckless Ben response good…
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