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Ed Mansell is 83 years old. He spent roughly 30 years building one of the most impressive Star Wars LEGO collections you have ever seen. Sets from the early 1990s. Rare pieces. The kind of stuff that takes decades of patience and real money to put together. His collection was worth over $200,000.
Ed is also in poor health. So he and his son Bryan decided it was time to let go of the collection and hopefully make some money from it. They walked into a Bricks & Minifigs store in Salem-Keizer, Oregon in 2023 and signed a consignment agreement. The store would sell the sets, take 35 percent, the Mansells would get 65 percent, and anything unsold stayed theirs.
A completely normal, reasonable arrangement.
What happened next is one of the wildest stories to hit the LEGO community in a long time, and it has now exploded well beyond LEGO circles into mainstream internet drama with millions of views, a YouTuber getting arrested, a Patreon CEO publicly telling a corporation to stuff it, and leaked police bodycam footage that nobody was supposed to see.
Buckle in.
The Store Changed Hands. The Collection Disappeared.
The original owner of the Salem-Keizer Bricks & Minifigs store was a woman named Chrystal Law-Gorman. She signed the consignment deal with the Mansells and everything was going along fine.
Then in November 2024, Bricks & Minifigs corporate stepped in and took the franchise away from Chrystal. Two new franchisees named Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best took over the store. And here is where things go sideways fast.
When Bryan Mansell went to recover the unsold portion of his father’s collection, a significant chunk of it was simply gone. Not on the shelves. Not in the back. Gone.
So Bryan contacted the new franchise owners and corporate to sort it out. Corporate’s response? They claimed that consignment was never part of the Bricks & Minifigs model, was never authorized by the franchise agreement, and that no franchisee ever had the right to do consignment deals in the first place.
There is just one problem with that claim. It is completely false.
Chrystal Law-Gorman still had her franchise contract. She released it publicly. It explicitly states that the franchisee may offer consignment services. BAM corporate looked the Mansell family in the eye and told them something that their own paperwork proves is a lie.
Let that sink in.
An 83-year-old man consigns his life’s collection under a legal agreement. The company takes over the store. The collection partially vanishes. Corporate denies the agreement was ever valid. Then their own franchise contract surfaces proving they knew consignment was allowed all along.
Enter Reckless Ben
Bryan Mansell eventually connected with a YouTuber named Ben Schneider, who goes by Reckless Ben on YouTube. At the time Ben had around 1 million subscribers. He is an investigative-style content creator who digs into consumer fraud and corporate wrongdoing.
Ben went deep on this one. In May 2026, he dropped a nearly two-hour video titled “I tracked down the thief who stole $200,000 of LEGO.” The video currently sits at 4 million views and counting.
The internet responded the way the internet does when a large corporation gets caught lying and an old man gets hurt. A GoFundMe for the Mansell family exploded past $400,000. That is more than twice the value of the original collection. People were furious.
More videos followed. Each one topped a million views. Ben was not letting this go.
BAM’s Response: Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Silence
Rather than sit down with the Mansell family and make this right, Bricks & Minifigs corporate went on the attack.
On May 30, 2026, BAM filed a lawsuit against Ben Schneider, the Mansells, and others, accusing them of running a harassment and extortion campaign. They invoked RICO statutes, which are typically reserved for organized crime. The same day, Ben was arrested by the American Fork Police Department in Utah on charges of stalking and targeted residential picketing, stemming from multiple visits to Joshua Johnson’s home while trying to serve him with legal papers.
To be clear: showing up at someone’s house repeatedly is not the smartest legal move, and Ben has acknowledged that. But the framing of these charges as RICO-level organized crime, when what actually happened is a YouTuber with a camera was trying to get someone on the record about a missing collection from an elderly man, tells you a lot about how BAM chose to handle this.
BAM also sent a legal notice to Patreon demanding they shut down Ben’s account. Patreon CEO Jack Conte made a public YouTube video in response and said, and I am quoting this directly:
“Bricks & Minifigs can stuff it. We are keeping Ben’s page up. And if Bricks & Minifigs doesn’t like that, they can sue us.”
A corporation tried to silence a YouTuber and ended up getting publicly roasted by the CEO of one of the biggest creator platforms on the internet. Not a great week for BAM.
The Utah Police Angle
This is where things get uncomfortable beyond just a corporate dispute.
Bricks & Minifigs is headquartered in American Fork, Utah. The franchisees at the center of this are based in Utah. The American Fork Police Department has been heavily involved in Ben’s arrests. And a growing number of observers, journalists, and legal commentators have raised serious questions about whether the AFPD is running interference for BAM and its associated franchise owners rather than objectively investigating the original claim: that an 83-year-old man’s property went missing.
Then came the bodycam footage.
Somehow, between 52GB and 88GB of unredacted bodycam footage from the American Fork Police Department ended up publicly accessible in a Dropbox folder. The department confirmed the footage was “not intended for public release” in a Facebook post they later deleted. Whether it was an accidental upload or something else entirely, nobody has confirmed.
What the footage shows is revealing. BAM CEO Ammon McNeff can be heard on camera telling police that Ben Schneider was attempting to extort the company and had threatened to kill a manager. Those are serious allegations. They are also exactly the kind of allegations that would justify police treating this situation the way they have, if true. The problem is that the public record of Ben’s actual behavior on camera, across dozens of hours of his own video, does not match that characterization at all.
The AFPD has faced formal misconduct accusations. Civil rights lawyers have weighed in. The question of whether the police department in BAM’s home city is a neutral party in this dispute is a legitimate one, and it is not going away.
StudDad’s Take
I am not going to sit here and say Ben handled every move perfectly. He didn’t. But the only reason any of this exists is because a franchise corporation took over a store, watched an old man’s life collection disappear on their watch, then lied to his face about the legality of the agreement he signed. That is where the blame starts and it is where it mostly stays.
Where Things Stand Right Now
On June 4, 2026, Bricks & Minifigs announced they were permanently closing the Salem store and “parting ways” with Johnson and Best. They called it mutual. The internet laughed.
BAM CEO Ammon McNeff also appeared on a LEGO community podcast to apologize publicly to the Mansell family and offer mediation. Whether that actually results in Ed Mansell being made whole remains to be seen.
The RICO lawsuit against Ben and the Mansells is still active. Ben is still fighting two criminal charges in Utah. The GoFundMe sits at over $400,000. And every major commentary channel on YouTube has now weighed in.
LegalEagle‘s take is worth watching. His framing is that everyone made legal mistakes here, which is fair. But the reason any of those mistakes happened is because BAM corporate put a family in an impossible situation and then hid behind lawyers when the public found out.
This story is not over. Not by a long way.
Why This Hits Different for LEGO Families
We talk a lot on this site about LEGO as an investment, as something worth buying and holding, as sets that retain value and matter beyond the box. Ed Mansell understood that better than most people. He spent 30 years building something real.
The idea that a franchise corporation could take over a location, watch that collection disappear, and then tell a man in his 80s that his legal agreement was never valid in the first place is genuinely enraging. It is not just bad business. It is wrong.
If this story has you thinking about building a collection worth protecting, we track the LEGO deals worth buying before they disappear off shelves for good. Because the only thing worse than not owning a set is losing it.
Follow Reckless Ben’s channel for ongoing updates. This one still has a long way to go.
Bricks & Minifigs Scandal: Quick Answers
What is the Bricks and Minifigs scandal?
In 2023, Ed Mansell consigned his $200,000 Star Wars LEGO collection to a Bricks & Minifigs franchise store in Salem-Keizer, Oregon under a legal consignment agreement. In November 2024, BAM corporate took over the store with new franchisees. A significant portion of the collection went missing and the new owners refused to return it. When Bricks & Minifigs corporate claimed consignment was never authorized, the original franchisee released her contract proving it was explicitly allowed. The story went viral in May 2026.
Who is Reckless Ben?
Reckless Ben is the YouTube handle of Ben Schneider, an investigative content creator with around 1 million subscribers. After Bryan Mansell contacted him about his father's missing collection, Ben published a series of videos documenting the dispute. His first video, "I tracked down the thief who stole $200,000 of LEGO," reached 4 million views and sparked widespread public attention.
Why was Reckless Ben arrested?
Ben Schneider was arrested twice by the American Fork Police Department in Utah on charges of stalking and targeted residential picketing. The charges stemmed from multiple visits to the home of Joshua Johnson, one of the new Bricks & Minifigs franchise owners, while attempting to serve him with legal papers and get him on camera. Bricks & Minifigs also filed a RICO lawsuit against Schneider and the Mansells in May 2026.
Did Bricks and Minifigs return the LEGO collection?
As of June 2026, Ed Mansell has not been fully made whole. Bricks & Minifigs permanently closed the Salem store on June 4, 2026, and the company's CEO publicly apologized and offered mediation. BAM has stated they contacted the Mansell family regarding restitution, but the RICO lawsuit and Ben Schneider's criminal charges in Utah are still active. The story is ongoing.
Is the Reckless Ben GoFundMe real?
Yes. A GoFundMe was set up on behalf of the Mansell family following the viral attention. As of early June 2026, it had raised over $400,000, more than double the estimated value of the original LEGO collection. The outpouring reflects how strongly the public responded to the story of an 83-year-old man losing a 30-year collection.
What happened to the American Fork Police Department bodycam footage?
Between 52GB and 88GB of unredacted bodycam footage from the American Fork Police Department became publicly accessible via a Dropbox link. The department confirmed in a since-deleted Facebook post that the footage was "not intended for public release." The footage showed BAM CEO Ammon McNeff telling police that Schneider had made threats and attempted extortion, claims that many observers dispute based on Ben's extensive public video record. The AFPD has faced formal accusations of misconduct in connection with the case.
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