A rare Lego collection that one Oregon family spent years building with the hope of helping pay for their grandchildren’s college has become the center of a messy legal fight involving consignment law, franchise control, public pressure, and what copyright attorney Leonard French described as a deeply troubling example of how expensive civil justice can become.
In a recent video on his legal YouTube channel Lawful Masses, French said the dispute began with Brian Mansell, a Salem-area collector whose 83-year-old father helped build a massive sealed Star Wars Lego collection over roughly 15 years. According to French, the family had spent around $30,000 assembling the collection, which included about 780 sealed Star Wars sets and more than 1,000 minifigures.
The plan, French explained, was not just to cash in on a hobby. Mansell’s family hoped to sell the collection at the right time and use the proceeds to help fund the grandkids’ college.
That is why the family took the collection to Bricks and Minifigs in Salem-Keizer, Oregon, a franchise store built around buying, selling, and consigning Lego. At first, French said, the arrangement appeared to work: the store sold some items and paid Mansell his agreed share.
Then, according to French’s account, the corporate parent stepped in, took over the store, and the family’s collection became trapped in a legal fight that quickly grew far bigger than a dispute over toys.
A Collection Advertised As Worth More Than $200,000
French said the collection had been treated as a major consignment by the store itself. He reported that the store’s own pre-seizure inventory spreadsheet valued the sets alone at roughly $60,000 on the low end and just under $100,000 on the high end.
But the full collection was apparently described in even bigger terms. French said a Facebook post used by the store to advertise the consignment in November 2023 called the collection “estimated to be worth well over $200,000.”
The franchisee, according to French, was Bricks and Minifigs Salem Keizer LLC, owned and operated by Crystal Law Gorman and her husband, Benjamin Gorman. French said they signed the consignment agreement, ran the store, and paid Mansell his 65 percent share every month for nearly a year.
The corporate franchisor was BAM Franchising Inc., an Oregon corporation with a principal office in Orem, Utah, led by CEO Ammon McNeff and COO Matt McNeff, French reported. French said BAM’s leaders had grown the system from 35 stores to more than 300 after taking over in 2018.
The new operators who later entered the picture, French said, were Brandon Best and Joshua Johnson of Baker Bricks LLC, who first appeared as inventory contractors after the corporate seizure before becoming the new owners of the location.
That cast of parties is important because this dispute turns on a question that sounds simple but is legally loaded: who actually owned the Lego once the store changed hands?
The Consignment Trap Most People Never Think About
French said many people assume consignment works in a very simple way. A person brings property to a store, the store sells it, and the original owner keeps title until each item sells.
That is the common-sense version. But French said the law can be more dangerous than that, especially under Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code.
According to French, a consignment of goods worth more than $1,000 to a merchant can be treated like a secured transaction, which means the consignor may need to file a UCC-1 financing statement with the Secretary of State. Without that filing, he explained, the goods can sometimes be treated as the merchant’s inventory and reached by the merchant’s creditors.
In plain language, French said, someone can have a signed contract saying they still own the property, yet still be forced to fight if the store fails or gets taken over and the property is treated as part of the store’s assets.
French said Mansell almost certainly did not file a UCC-1, but he also argued that this does not automatically doom the family’s claim. He pointed to a possible exception for merchants generally known by their creditors to be substantially engaged in selling the goods of others.
Because Bricks and Minifigs operates around a buy-sell-trade resale model and the Keizer store publicly advertised Mansell’s consigned collection, French suggested there is a serious argument that creditors should have known the store sold other people’s goods.
Still, his practical advice was blunt: anyone consigning valuable property should file the UCC-1 anyway. French said it costs little, takes little time, and avoids forcing the owner to rely on a defense that may be difficult to prove.
That is a useful takeaway because the story shows how a simple missing filing can turn a family collection into a corporate legal fight.
French Says Bailment And Conversion May Be The Core Of The Case
French also focused on the older legal concepts of bailment and conversion. A bailment, he explained, occurs when someone gives property to another person or business for a specific purpose while keeping ownership.
In this case, French said, Mansell gave the collection to the store to sell on consignment, not to own outright. That means the franchisee could not transfer ownership of the collection to BAM if the franchisee never owned it in the first place.
French summarized the principle with an old rule of property law: no one can give what they do not have.
That point cuts directly against the argument French attributed to BAM, which he said relied on a franchise agreement clause allowing corporate to take the assets of the franchisee after termination. In French’s view, that clause could not transfer title to third-party property that belonged to Mansell.
When BAM took the inventory anyway, French argued, it stepped into the shoes of a bailee. When the collection continued to be sold after Mansell demanded its return, French said the case began to look like conversion, meaning the wrongful exercise of control over someone else’s property.
Conversion, as French explained it, does not depend on whether the person taking the property had bad intentions. If someone takes or sells property that is not theirs, good faith may not save them from liability.
The Corporate Takeover And A Disputed Warning
French said the crucial date was November 14, 2024, when the Gormans approached BAM about selling the store. According to French, the Gormans had an overseas job offer and wanted to recover their investment before leaving.
The same day, French reported, corporate dispatched a representative to the Keizer store. By BAM’s account, the Gormans owed about $200,000 in unpaid royalties, and BAM terminated the franchise agreement after negotiations broke down.
French said the Gormans describe the event differently. In their account, they approached corporate about selling, not closing, and corporate responded with a same-day forced removal, no notice, no inventory, and only a box of personal belongings.
French said Crystal Law Gorman claims she informed a BAM representative on site, who was on speaker phone with corporate director of operations Key McAllister, that there was an active consignment in the store and that Mansell had not been fully paid. According to French, Law Gorman said McAllister responded that the new operator would be “taking over the consignment as well.”
French called that a critical factual claim. He also noted that McNeff has declined to address some issues on the record because of pending litigation, while McAllister has not responded to media requests.
If the Gormans’ account is correct, the corporate side may have had actual notice from the beginning. If it is not, French still questioned how a large public-facing consignment advertised for a year could escape corporate knowledge in a franchise system with audit and oversight rights.
Reckless Ben Enters The Fight
French said the dispute went nowhere publicly for about 15 months. Mansell reportedly consulted lawyers and was quoted $60,000 to $70,000 just to seek an injunction before trial, a cost he could not afford.
Then Ben Schneider, known online as Reckless Ben, entered the case after the Mansell family reached out. French said Schneider drove 16 hours from Los Angeles to Keizer with a crew and created more pressure on Bricks and Minifigs in 72 hours than the formal legal process had produced in more than a year.
French was careful to say he was not endorsing Schneider’s tactics. Some of them, he said, were legally unsound, while others were risky enough to invite lawsuits or even criminal trouble.
But French also said Schneider’s pressure campaign produced results. He confronted the store, went to BAM’s headquarters in Utah, recorded interactions, created public pressure, and eventually helped build a series of small claims actions tied to the remaining collection.
The most effective maneuver, according to French, was a 10-plaintiff small claims strategy. French said Schneider and nine others each bought about $10,000 worth of Mansell’s still-consigned sets from Mansell, sent demand letters, and filed separate small claims actions after Bricks and Minifigs refused.
When the store failed to appear, French said, default judgments were entered, totaling about $100,000 in face value. The day after those default judgments were filed, French said, the Keizer store permanently closed.
That sequence, in French’s view, was one of the most damaging facts in the dispute. The store had a chance to appear in a lower-stakes forum and contest the claims, but did not.
A Dispute That Became A Brand Crisis
French’s broader point was that the entire fight could likely have been avoided if the corporate side had settled early for the wholesale value of the remaining consigned property, which he estimated somewhere in the $60,000 to $100,000 range.
Instead, according to French’s autopsy of the dispute, BAM terminated the franchise, took inventory that allegedly included third-party property, placed inventory contractors in the store, denied knowledge of a consignment that had been publicly advertised, refused to return the property after written notice, and continued selling identifiable third-party sets.
French said that what began as a defendable conversion claim in November 2024 became a multi-front crisis. The former location closed under default judgments, the brand became publicly associated in collector communities with accusations that it had taken a family’s life savings, and civil and possible criminal questions remained unresolved.
The legal issue may be complicated, but the human issue is not hard to understand. A family built a collection for years with a purpose behind it, trusted a specialty store to sell it properly, and then found itself in a system where police called it civil, lawyers were too expensive, and the property allegedly continued disappearing set by set.
French ended by saying institutional legal process failed Brian Mansell, while Schneider’s controversial tactics, flawed or not, were the only thing that forced attention.
That may be the most troubling part of the story. If a family needs a viral YouTuber, public embarrassment, and risky legal theater to get movement in a property dispute involving a collection advertised at more than $200,000, then the story is not only about Lego or franchising. It is also about the cost of getting anyone with power to listen.
Mark grew up in the heart of Texas, where tornadoes and extreme weather were a part of life. His early experiences sparked a fascination with emergency preparedness and homesteading. A father of three, Mark is dedicated to teaching families how to be self-sufficient, with a focus on food storage, DIY projects, and energy independence. His writing empowers everyday people to take small steps toward greater self-reliance without feeling overwhelmed.
