Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

Ed Mansell built the largest personal LEGO Star Wars collection in history. Over $200,000 worth of sets, years of his life. Bricks & Minifigs is trying to steal his collection.

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. As his father got up there in age, Ed and his son Bryan made the difficult decision to sell the collection they've spent years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars building. Bryan partnered with his local Bricks & Minifigs franchise in Salem, Oregon on a simple consignment deal: sets go in the store, store keeps 10% when something sells, Bryan gets the rest. Contract is signed, and the collection gets handed over.

Bricks & Minifigs Salem-Keizer was thrilled about this arrangement. They posted about it on Facebook glowingly, as the post describes "this beautiful collection belonging to _Ed and_ _Bryan Mansell_, estimated at over $200,000." Those posts are still up, by the way:

Then Bricks & Minifigs Corporate took control of the Salem location from the original franchise owner, Chrystal, who desperately tried to get the inventory that belongs to Bryan out of the store and back into his possession. But suddenly Bryan's signed contract was nobody's problem but his own despite his $200,000 collection still physically sitting in their store. People showed up with the contract in hand to retrieve it and were immediately thrown out and permanently trespassed. Employees had been told by corporate that Bryan had already been "reimbursed" and was "just not happy about it." A lie told to their own staff so they'd become unwitting defenders of an evil they didn't understand.

Bryan was told what essentially amounts to:

You're going to walk away from this, you're not coming back, and if you choose to sue us, we'll drag this out in court way past what the collection is worth.

A $400,000,000 company with lawyers telling a private citizen they know he can't afford to fight them and that they intend to use that fact as a weapon. They have his property and they know he can't get it back without a lawsuit.

The current store owner's defense? "It's not my name on the contract."

Enter Reckless Ben

While Bryan was being stonewalled, a YouTuber named _Reckless Ben_ took it upon himself to start applying pressure and documenting everything. What he's done over the course of this story goes well beyond a few videos calling out bad corporate behavior.

He walked into Bricks & Minifigs corporate headquarters and talked directly to the CEO. The CEO played dumb, acting like he had no idea what was going on, until Reckless Ben pressed him. He went to the Salem store with all of the original paperwork that BAM Corporate's own official statement claims they have been "trying so hard to obtain." The paperwork they claim they never received. He showed up with it. He was kicked out, trespassed, and had the police called on him. Multiple times.

The police, for their part, kept calling it a "civil matter" and declining to investigate. Every single time.

The Men Behind the Takeover

To understand what happened next, you need to know who was actually running this operation. When BAM Corporate moved on the Salem store, two men were central to the transition: Joshua "Josh" Johnson and Brandon Best. Brandon and Josh also own the Eugene location, and were allegedly selling Salem inventory through the Eugene website as well.

Brandon Best was, by all accounts, the boots on the ground. He was physically present when the previous franchise owner was removed from the store. According to documented accounts, he was the one who blocked her from returning consigned merchandise, including Bryan's collection, to its rightful owners. He was the one doing the dirty work in person.

Josh Johnson was the other half of the equation. Over the course of his investigation, _Reckless Ben_ spoke with Josh on the phone multiple times. What emerged from those conversations was a pattern of deliberate evasion that is itself telling. In documented phone calls, Josh acknowledged the collection's existence at the store, going so far as to say _"when we got the store, we put all those sets aside specifically"_ before later reversing course entirely, claiming the sets never existed. At one point, Josh told Ben he had permission to visit the store to speak with the manager, that the sets would be returned. Ben showed up. The manager called the police and refused to speak with him.

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.

When the Police Become the Weapon

What followed represents either a striking pattern of coincidence, or something considerably darker, and the documented record makes coincidence difficult to defend.

The Keizer, Oregon Police Department responded to call after call from the Bricks & Minifigs side of this dispute. At virtually every moment when Ben or his associates attempted to pursue legal remedies, confronting management, attempting to serve lawsuit paperwork, police were called, invariably presented with a version of events favorable to the store. Officers responded, took the store's account at face value, and treated the people trying to recover a stolen collection as the criminals.

At one point, Ben spent hours outside a Josh's residence attempting to serve legal papers: a legal process required for the lawsuit to move forward. During that time, police were called four separate times. Officers repeatedly asked why he was on the property; he was sitting at the curb to serve a lawsuit, which is legally protected activity. On the fourth call, he was arrested. The courts had already confirmed to officers that the lawsuit was legitimate. No explanation for the arrest was given. He was jailed overnight.

The heroin report, meanwhile, was treated as credible by the American Fork, Utah Police Department. Officers stopped Ben and his associates and held them for hours. By accounts documented in the investigation, officers were not neutral about the situation. They reportedly insisted they _knew_ the subjects were lying, demanding to know where the drugs were, directing sustained intimidation at people who had done nothing illegal and were, in fact, the victims in the underlying dispute. No drugs were found. No charges were filed related to the report. The stop ended without resolution and the false report appears to have faced no scrutiny.

Bodycam footage from these interactions was partially redacted. Specifically, audio that, by the account of investigators, did not protect any private individual's information but did obscure officers discussing the absence of any legal basis for their actions. One officer's camera reportedly failed to have its audio redacted, and the synced footage from other cameras makes clear what was being said during the redacted portions.

The situation escalated further when, following Josh Johnson's threat and the subsequent false report, a search warrant was executed in American Fork, Utah. The warrant's stated target: _"Any stolen merchandise, specifically Lego merchandise... unlawfully acquired or unlawfully possessed."_ The framing, lifted almost directly from Josh Johnson's retaliatory claim that Ben had _stolen_ the LEGOs, was used to justify a raid on Ben's Airbnb at gunpoint. During that raid, according to documented accounts, an officer pulled Ben's arm back far enough to dislocate it despite bodycam footage showing Ben as being completely cooperative with officers.

Ben was booked and held. His bail was subsequently revoked, keeping him jailed for approximately a month. Among the factors the detective cited when justifying continued detention, according to accounts of those proceedings: the plan to start a GoFundMe. It is not a crime to start a GoFundMe. The detective, apparently, was uncertain about this.

Josh Johnson's complaints, the basis for the warrant, were redacted in the materials provided to Ben's team, leaving them unable to see what he had told police or what specific allegations formed the basis of the charges.

A Note on Affiliations

This section requires care, because affiliations are not guilt, and guilt by association is not a legal standard. But affiliations are facts, and facts are relevant.

Bricks & Minifigs CEOAmmon 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.

None of that is, by itself, proof of anything. What it is, is context. The LDS community is famously tight-knit, with strong social and institutional bonds that operate outside formal channels. Whether those bonds played any role in a series of police responses that consistently, remarkably, benefited the people who stole $200,000 from an elderly man is something each reader will have to weigh for themselves.

What is not a matter of opinion: the documented pattern is one in which law enforcement treated the victims of a theft as suspects, treated false police reports as credible, redacted bodycam audio in ways that served the accused rather than protected the innocent, and jailed a man for trying to start a crowdfunding campaign.

The Official Statement

BAM Corporate put out an official statement, found here: A Note to Our Community about the Bricks & Minifigs® Salem, OR Store

It's worth reading if you enjoy watching a company use 500 words to avoid answering a single direct question. The core argument is that corporate wasn't a party to the consignment agreement, consignment deals are actually prohibited under their franchise agreements, and therefore this is all the original franchisee's problem. What the statement never addresses is who currently has physical possession of Bryan's collection. That question goes conspicuously unanswered.

"Our franchisee shouldn't have made that deal" is not a legal or moral justification for keeping someone's stuff.

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.

In my opinion, it seems that Bricks & Minifigs literally cannot stop lying about literally everything regarding this situation. I cannot recall a single instance during this entire investigation where any single person involved with the Bricks & Minifigs corporation stated something that was actually factual and not misleading or an outright lie or fabrication. It's not difficult to see that they have begun to panic, realizing this will not simply go away on its own.

Where We're At Now

The Salem store was eventually sued. They lost. And then rather than pay the judgment, the store closed permanently. That closure went somewhat viral a little while back:

Here is the full documented sequence: Bricks & Minifigs took possession of _Bryan Mansell_'s $200,000 LEGO collection with zero legal justification. They refused to return it. They threatened him with financial ruin if he pushed back. They lied to their own employees about the situation. They had people physically removed when those people showed up with paperwork. They called the police on victims attempting to serve legal papers, repeatedly providing false information to officers. They were found liable in court. They closed the store rather than pay. And in the process, a man trying to document and expose this spent a month in jail, had his shoulder dislocated during a raid, and was targeted with a fabricated drug report, all while pursuing entirely legal remedies.

The man who a court found liable for keeping $200,000 worth of someone else's property walked away. The people who tried to stop him got arrested.

If you would like to donate to _Bryan Mansell_, find his GoFundMe here:

https://gofund.me/e275fe40d

For more information, watch Reckless Ben's videos on the subject here:

[I tracked down the thief who stole $200,000 of LEGO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wscQpkcwgNU)

[Bricks and Minifigs responded to my video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWg2bnAqW6k&t=36s)

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_This post reflects the author's opinion based on publicly reported events, attributed direct quotes, and statements made by the company on their own platforms.__mybricklog.com__is an independent hobby site unaffiliated with any LEGO reseller._