Bricks & Minifigs Claims It Wants To Make Mansell Whole. It’s Still Suing Him For RICO.

from the quite-a-comms-strategy-you-have-there dept

At some point in a PR crisis, someone decides the solution is to hire a crisis communications person. The corporation behind Bricks & Minifigs (BAM Franchising) is in a bit of a pickle and has apparently reached that point in the Reckless Ben/Bricks & Minifigs saga — and their crisis communications person decided the way to respond to my articles on the saga is… to send me a press release claiming BAM is “determined to find an amicable resolution with the Mansell family.”

This would be more convincing if BAM hadn’t filed a lawsuit a month ago accusing Bryan Mansell of engaging in a RICO conspiracy against them.

But before we get to all that, a (very condensed!) reminder of where things stood last time we covered this story. A guy named Bryan Mansell sought to sell his father’s very large collection of unopened Star Wars Lego kits, and contracted with a Bricks & Minifigs franchise in Oregon, run by Chrystal Law-Gorman and her husband Ben Gorman. At some point the Gormans sought to leave their franchise and perhaps through some shenanigans, some buddies of Bricks & Minifigs Corporate (BAM Franchising) showed up at their store and effectively took it over.

There is video showing Gorman telling the dude taking over the store, Brandon Best, that there are consignment sets in the store that need to be settled up, and being told that they are taking over the consignment as well. Law-Gorman alerts Mansell to all this, and Mansell attempts to trigger a clause to get back the remaining sets and/or get the remaining money owed, which the new franchise owners refuse. They later claim that when they took over the store there was maybe $2k to $5k of Star Wars Lego sets on the premises (though, later reporting shows that there is more).

Eventually Mansell gets a YouTuber named “Reckless Ben” Schneider to try to get back the money owed (exaggerated to an amount of $200k) and then everything goes crazy. Ben goes to extreme (and at times unwise) stunts to try to recover money for Bryan, which does succeed in getting the whole thing to go ridiculously viral, but also leads to a series of potential legal problems for Schneider (and potentially Mansell). You had the Gormans suing BAM and then BAM suing Schneider and Mansell, and various possible criminal charges against Schneider (though this is disputed), most of which appeared to be misdemeanors, but with some possible felony charges as well.

Eventually, another YouTuber (Coffeezilla) was able to get detailed info from most parties, and worked out that the $200k number was bullshit, that many sets were probably already sold, that Law-Gorman likely owed some money to Mansell, but that the McNeff brothers who run BAM (and their friends who took over the franchise, Josh Johnson and Brandon Best) were being sketchy and inaccurate in their claims as well, and likely owed Mansell way more than the $2k to $5k they claimed, but way less than the $200k everyone was talking about.

And I’m not even going to get into all the sketchiness by the American Fork Police Department in Utah (where BAM is headquartered) in how it handled all this, but suffice it to say, the cops were bad and did bad things that cops shouldn’t do.

There’s a lot more in all of this, but my first two posts on the topic go deeper into the weeds.

Anyway… when it was left there were a bunch of court dates coming up, most of them in local Utah courts. Around the time of the last post, BAM was able to get a ridiculously overbroad temporary restraining order (TRO) on Schneider, that clearly violated the First Amendment in all sorts of ways, mainly engaging in clear prior restraint, but also limiting where Schneider could go in very broad terms.

Last week, there was some reporting claiming that “a truce had been reached” between BAM and Schneider. But that kinda overstates things. As Legal Eagle nicely explains in Devin’s recent video, the “truce” was that (1) Schneider and Mansell both finally hired lawyers, and (2) that those lawyers talked to BAM’s lawyers and agreed to a stipulation asking the judge to cut back most of the more insane terms in the TRO, to things that a standard TRO would limit, while saying that the two sides had agreed to go to mediation to try to sort out their differences. Amazingly, the local Utah judge, Tony Graf Jr., seemed to wake up to the constitutional problems with his original TRO, and realized that there were still problems with the newly agreed-on-by-both-sides injunction, and asked for further clarification before signing on, even though that meant the existing problematic TRO remains in effect.

If you want to read through all the documentation on that, here’s a 663-page pdf of the entire docket in the Utah local court. The joint stipulation starts on page 613.

As for why there’s a 663-page PDF of all the local court filings, well, that’s because Schneider’s lawyers (smartly) have removed the case to federal court on diversity grounds, which is exactly what they should be doing. Federal judges can better handle a case like this without issuing a TRO or an injunction that clearly violates the First Amendment, and they should easily qualify here as the defendants and plaintiffs are in different states and the amount at stake is over $75k (BAM claims over $300k in damages). As part of that filing, there’s a single exhibit with all of the 663-pages of filings from the local Utah court in one handy massive PDF.

While the McNeffs can try to stop the removal to federal court, it seems like it should stay there, though if they’re really going through mediation to reach a settlement (as they should), then they can basically put the cases on hold while that’s happening.

All that brings us to… BAM apparently hiring a crisis communications person, who, for some reason, thought it made sense to send me the latest “press release” (it’s just a blog post, folks) from BAM announcing that BAM is “determined to find an amicable resolution with Mansell family.”

As I wrote back to the PR person, this is hard to square with the fact that a month earlier BAM had sued Bryan Mansell, claiming that he was engaged in a RICO conspiracy against them. Also, the same press release sticks by the claim that they only have $2k to $5k worth of his Lego sets, and doubles down on blaming the Gormans for not paying Mansell. This is despite what Coffeezilla found — including in his conversations with the McNeff brothers who run BAM, that they not only have more sets than they initially claimed, but that they had a spreadsheet detailing all of that on their own Google Drive going back to near the beginning of this dispute.

The blog post also claims:

The company has also repeated its good-faith offer to make the Mansell family whole monetarily for anything fairly demonstrated to be unaccounted for, including amounts that may be owed to him without his knowledge. The company is committed to give him every Star Wars LEGO item remaining from the Salem store, whether identified as his or not.

Again, this is very difficult to square with BAM’s actual actions throughout this entire process, including the ongoing lawsuit which accuses him of engaging in a racketeering conspiracy against them. Separately, the “remaining from the Salem store” line is a bit squishy, since the Coffeezilla video showed that Brandon Best showed up with a U-Haul truck and there are reports that he removed a bunch of Lego sets around that time (the McNeffs dispute this, and claim that Best moved a bunch of sets from a different store a month earlier). But if the promise is to give Mansell back the “remaining” sets from the Salem store, that’s not all of his sets that it’s believed someone in the BAM universe possesses.

Either way, I sent BAM’s PR person a list of those inconsistencies and haven’t heard back. Which, honestly, tracks. When you’ve filed a RICO lawsuit against someone while simultaneously issuing press releases about your good-faith commitment to making them whole, there may not be a great answer to the question of how those two things fit together, no matter how experienced you are in crisis comms.

And really, that’s the thing about crisis communications: there’s only so much you can say in a crisis when your own actions have worsened the crisis at nearly every possible turn. When the crisis is that your behavior looks bad, hiring someone to talk about your behavior in a press release tends to make it look worse.

Filed Under: ammon mcneff, ben schneider, bryan mansell, comms, crisis comms, legal dispute, legos, reckless ben, rico

Companies: bam franchising, bricks & minifigs