Lawsuits, Arrests, SWATTING, And More - Inside The LEGO Star Wars Scandal Rocking The World Right Now

This Bricks & Minifigs/Reckless Ben LEGO Star Wars scandal is the biggest story in the nerd world right now, and one of the biggest stories on the internet period. 

JackMac sent me an article about it the other day, and I had seen the headlines but didn't really dive in too deep at that point. It seemed like it was gaining a lot of traction very quickly, though, so I decided to check out the videos on Reckless Ben's YouTube page - and I was captivated by the whole situation immediately. I'm gonna try my best to break it down in blog form, but I have to warn you, this is gonna be a long one. There's no TL;DR that could do this justice.

Some quick background:

-Bryan Mansell’s elderly father spent years building an absolutely enormous Star Wars LEGO collection, reportedly worth $200,000

-Bryan Mansell contacts the LEGO third party resale chain ‘Bricks & Minifigs’ about selling the collection when his father’s health took a turn for the worse and the family needed money to help out

-The collection is placed on consignment with a Bricks & Minifigs franchise in Salem/Keizer, Oregon, where under the alleged agreement, the store can sell items and take a commission, but ownership remains with the Mansell family until individual items are sold. Meaning if Bryan wants the sets back at any point, they’re still his - and both parties signed this contract

Here’s where everything starts: the owner of the Bricks & Minifigs store that Bryan was working with allegedly reached out to corporate to let them know she was moving out of the country and wouldn’t be able to run the store anymore, and they told her they had found a buyer to take over - before sending someone to terminate their agreement and then literally kick her out of the store. They threatened to call the police if she didn’t leave, and wouldn’t let her finish inventory. She brought up that Bryan hadn’t been paid for a number of sets yet, and they basically told her that’s none of her business anymore, but that the consignment would be carried over. This is all on security camera footage shown in the first video; meanwhile, Bryan hasn’t been paid at all since the transition in ownership….in 2023.

Bryan reached out to a few people to try to get the word out when Bricks & Minifigs ignored all contact from him, and eventually the story got to this guy Reckless Ben. I’d never heard of him prior to this personally, but he’s got a million subscribers on YouTube and I could see why - he's got a weird brain and he's one hell of a video editor. Ben reviews all the documents Bryan sends him and says fuck it, I'm gonna investigate the story.

Ben goes to the store in Oregon and says he’s there to “pick up his friend’s sets” for him, and it gets uncomfortable pretty much immediately. The manager calls the cops on Ben and tells him to take it up with corporate - which is funny considering he shows that he already went to corporate, who deny any responsibility for what the individual stores decide to do, and say he has to take it up with the store. When the cops show up he tries to explain his side of the story, but they don’t give him the time of day. 

I might’ve thought he was crazy too, at this point, to be fair. 

He goes back to corporate after this and once again, they call the cops on him to remove him from the premises while denying responsibility. As a wild next step, Ben and his friends go undercover and convince one of the employees at the Bricks & Minifigs that she won a contest so they could hang out with her outside of the store, and they are able to get the owner's phone number outta her. This guy's name is Josh Johnson and he is the WOOOOOORRRRRRSSSSSTTTTTT. They go back and forth with him on the phone a ton, and Josh's story changes every time they speak. Sometimes he's saying all of Ben's claims are bogus, sometimes he's acknowledging they have Bryan's LEGOs still, and most of the time he's just being an asshole.

Ben starts pulling some crazy stunts at this point, fighting fire with fire - like setting up a merch stand for his new company 'We Steal From Old People' directly outside their store, and even running a real, legal, by-the-books and approved by the state lottery for one of the sets in Bryan's collection. They did this after months of not being taken seriously by the local police, being told this $200,000 theft is a civil case, not a criminal one. 

When Ben found out defrauding an official lottery is a criminal offense, they figured the police would HAVE to at least look into it then, if technically they could argue Bricks & Minifigs stole the lottery prize that was rightfully Bryan's to auction/sell/do whatever he wanted with. Spoilers, tho: the cops do not care and just threaten to arrest Ben once again.

After the story begins to circulate online and looks worse and worse for the store (bad reviews plagued their Google results and whatnot), Josh calls Ben and finally lays out his terms to give the collection back: Bryan has to issue a public apology for claiming the store stole his LEGOs, and Ben/Bryan had to get a bunch of good reviews back for their Bricks & Minifigs page. Ben and Bryan viewed this as a potential lawsuit trap, so in another wild twist, they created a deepfake apology video of Bryan to fool Josh - who then agrees to give everything back….until he doesn't. 

Josh tells Ben to go back to the store to "make peace" with the first manager to call the cops on him, which was a trap. He just wanted Ben to show up so the manager could have him arrested for trespassing. This didn't work, though, because the cops never showed up when she called them. I think they were sick of the whole situation at this point. Ben also reveals he tricked said manager into signing a contract that said she owed him $5,000 for every cop she called on him before any of this even began. Pretty hilarious despite being legally questionable.

Josh then fake apologizes and claims they're getting everything ready to be picked up, but they push it off more and more until it becomes clear they never intended on giving anything back - and then Josh snaps and accuses BEN of stealing the LEGOs! In the same call, Josh dares Ben to sue him - which Ben happily agrees to.

Ben found out it would be easier to win this case in small claims court rather than regular court, so he had Bryan "sell" $10,000 worth of his collection off to ten different people - and then all of those people individually sued Bricks & Minifigs in small claims court for withholding their purchases from them. Nobody from Bricks & Minifigs responded to their court summons, so Ben filed for default judgement - and the store immediately shut down permanently the next day.

It's a bit of a bummer ending to the first video, because despite getting the store to shutter - justice wasn't really served. Bryan didn't get his money or LEGOs back, and the cops never seemed to care about hearing Ben's side at any point….so Ben decided to keep going.

Reckless Ben's second video opens with him deciding to file lawsuits against both Bricks & Minifigs store owners themselves, Josh Johnson and Brandon Best, one of which gets denied because he couldn't show proof that he attempted to have a "good faith" effort to resolve the dispute with Josh. That leads to Ben driving to Josh's house in Utah to make this good faith effort, but before they could even get out of the car to approach him - the cops show up. Specifically, the American Fork Police Department, who couldn't come off worse in this entire saga. They tell Ben that he's committing harassment and threaten to arrest him, and warn him to stop pursing this. 

Once Ben uses this situation to prove he made an attempt at a "good faith" conversation and his lawsuit is approved by the courts, Ben attempts to serve Josh through completely legal means - and the cops show up over and over again to get in his way. The police even took the papers meant to serve Josh, verified they were real with the courts, and then arrested Ben!

Oh, and prior to this, Josh called the cops on Ben and claimed he had heroin in his car, leading to a three hour search - during which, body cam footage shows the cops claiming they just wanted to "scare" Ben for "being annoying"….

….and Josh even told the cops he was going to shoot someone for approaching them with the lawsuit papers!

Ben looks into it a little more when he's released, and finds out that both owners of the Bricks & Minifigs store and every single police officer that has been heavily involved with this case are all members of the LDS Church. This is where the Mormon connection/corruption theory comes in, if you've seen that on social media over the past few days. Very interesting.

Oh, and another thing I forgot to mention - realizing he may never get Bryan's LEGOs or money back, Ben started a GoFundMe for him. It's already reached over $333,000 in donations….

They printed out that "I stole a family's life savings" image and attempted to take a picture with it hanging on a fence outside their AirBNB to promote the GoFundMe, but surprise, surprise - the cops showed up and arrested one of his friends for this. They claimed Ben's pal was "attempting to destroy evidence" by locking his phone when giving it over to them, and the police department redacted a ton of the body cam audio from this incident before making it public. Unfortunately (or fortunately), though, they forgot to redact the part where one cop pretty much tells the other that nobody was breaking the law by hanging up a sign to take a picture and that you can't arrest someone for upsetting another person. It's an absolute clown show.

Once the friend who was arrested got let out, Reckless Ben and his team all went back to their AirBNB to discuss their next steps - when the entire American Fork Police Department burst in with assault rifles drawn….

The cops claim they received a tip from the owner of the AirBNB that they heard guests discussing stolen LEGOs, and thought their AirBNB guests were the thieves themselves. I have no idea why the police would feel the need to surround and enter the house like it was Osama Bin Laden's compound on that tip, but they did, and also dislocated Ben's shoulder for no reason in the process.

Once Ben and his team are all interrogated, the cops use the creation of the GoFundMe as a reason to lock Ben up. They claim that was probable cause to arrest him WITHOUT BAIL and keep him in a cell for 30 days, despite not telling him what the charge was for….but luckily, the second a judge saw this ridiculous case they released Ben on $2,500 bail. There was then a second warrant issued for his arrest that could've landed him in prison for up to five years - so Ben went to Mexico for a bit - but I believe that has since been revoked as well.

Since Ben dropped those videos, this story has EXPLODED - and he says he's got the best lawyers in the country reaching out to him to help out….

….the CEO of Patreon hit Bricks & Minifigs with a big ol' "go fuck yourselves" for trying to get the videos taken down….

….Ben just got a lawsuit of his own from Bricks & Minifigs this morning….

….an investigation from Internet Detective Coffeezilla is on the way….

….and still, I believe Ben could face potential prison time for all of this. Absolutely outrageous.

Regardless of the outcome, I think this has done irreversible damage to the Bricks & Minifigs brand and I don't think they're ever gonna recover. I absolutely feel bad for the franchisees who have nothing to do with this that are going to undoubtedly see their business tank as a result, but I couldn't possibly support the company after all of this. The CEO comes off so horrible I can't even describe it, and likely threw away his company worth tens of millions for $200,000 of LEGOS that he could've given back at any point. Should we have expected anything less from a guy who unironically rocks this mustache, though?

I couldn't recommend watching the RecklessBen videos enough - they're long but edited like a gripping Netflix documentary, and the story is even crazier than I could get into in this blog. You go from hoping Ben gets Bryan's LEGOs back to wondering if Ben is going to be able to prove that Bricks & Minifigs/these franchise operators/even possibly law enforcement are working together on this theft to avoid accountability. And Part 3 is coming out soon, which Ben says is going to blow even more minds.

P.S. If you are curious for even more talk on this, the ToT Star Wars guys have been covering it on their channel….