The investigationThe full story
The collection that vanished
A son consigned his father’s life-long Star Wars LEGO collection to a friendly neighborhood brick shop in Oregon, on paper that said it stayed his until sold, and then the shop, and the collection, were gone.
The collection had taken a lifetime to build. Retired Star Wars LEGO sets, still in their boxes; loose minifigures, the little plastic people that LEGO collectors prize above almost everything; the kind of hoard that a certain sort of person assembles patiently over decades and a certain sort of son inherits with a lump in his throat. By the autumn of 2023 it belonged, in effect, to Bryan Mansell, who had decided to do the sensible thing with his elderly father’s trove and sell it through people who knew what it was worth.
So on November 22, 2023, Mansell walked into a Bricks & Minifigs store serving the Keizer and Salem area of Oregon and signed a consignment agreement. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A Consignment is an old and simple arrangement: you hand a merchant your goods, the merchant sells them from the shop floor, and when something sells you split the proceeds. The crucial point, the entire point, is that until the sale happens, the goods are still yours. Mansell’s contract said exactly that. Section IV provided, in plain words, that “Consigned merchandise shall remain the property of Mansell until sold.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A The agreement was governed by Oregon law. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A In the language of the Uniform Commercial Code that every state including Oregon and Utah has adopted, a consignor in Mansell’s position keeps title and holds a security interest in his own inventory; the store is merely a merchant known to sell the goods of others. Utah Code Ann. sec. 70A-9a-102(a)(20)✓ His Star Wars sets were sitting on someone else’s shelves, but they were still his.
The shop was a franchise. Bricks & Minifigs is a chain of LEGO-resale stores, buy, sell, trade used and new brick, operating across the country under a single brand. The brand and its franchise system belong to a Utah company called BAM Franchising, Inc., which had registered the “Bricks & Minifigs” trademark and built out the network store by store. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document Bricks & Minifigs 2023 FDD By the time Mansell signed his paperwork, the company was issuing franchise disclosure documents describing the system to would-be store owners, and assembling a portfolio of marks around the brand. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 The federal trademark office would, in late 2025, register BAM Franchising’s standard-character “BAM” mark to the company. USPTO SN98706031: TSDR sn98706031 2025-12-02 Registration Certificate ORC20251129121901 On paper it was a tidy little empire of plastic.
The Keizer-Salem location, like the others, was independently owned. The franchisee on the ground, the people Mansell was actually dealing with, were the local operators of the Salem store, names that recur through the later court record: Bryan, sometimes rendered Benjamin, Gorman, and Chrystal Law. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint They ran the shop. BAM Franchising, up in Utah, ran the brand. To a customer handing over a box of vintage minifigures, the distinction would have seemed academic. It would not stay academic for long.
For a while, presumably, nothing happened that a consignor would notice, sets moving, the slow ordinary commerce of a hobby store. Bricks & Minifigs marketed itself, in the warm way these shops do, as the place for LEGO people; somewhere in the sales patter, according to the later filings, came the suggestion that the store was an authorized LEGO reseller, part of the official family. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint That representation, the franchisees’ own side would eventually argue, was false. LEGO itself said so in writing. In a letter the litigation dates to February 28, 2025, the LEGO Group stated flatly that “Bricks & Minifigs isn’t affiliated with the LEGO Group in any ways.” Exhibit A Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-A-LEGO-Email The franchise’s own disclosure document, read carefully, conceded as much, it carried a disclaimer that LEGO “does not sponsor, authorize or endorse” the business. Exhibit B Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-B-Franchise-Agreement The friendly neighborhood LEGO store was not, in any formal sense, a LEGO store at all.
That is the kind of detail that only becomes load-bearing in hindsight, once something has gone wrong. And by late 2024, something had gone very wrong. The store was gone. Where a year earlier there had been a going concern with Mansell’s father’s collection on its shelves, there was now an absence, the Salem-Keizer franchise shuttered, and most of the consigned collection gone with it.
What had happened, in the broadest strokes that the documents support, was a collapse in the relationship between the franchisor and its franchisee. The franchise agreement that bound the Salem store to BAM had two different off-ramps for a store in trouble: one section allowing automatic termination with no chance to cure, another requiring ten days’ notice and an opportunity to fix a payment default before the franchisor could pull the plug. Exhibit B Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-B-Franchise-Agreement BAM, the franchisees would later allege, terminated under the no-cure clause for what were really payment defaults that belonged in the cure track, and did so, they claimed, after itself failing to meet conditions it owed, so that it had effectively manufactured the very defaults it then invoked. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint Those are allegations in a complaint the franchisees filed against BAM in the Utah Business and Chancery Court; no court has ruled on them. Gorman/Mansell Complaint v. BAM Franchising⏳ BAM has its own answer to all of it, and the case is unresolved.
But strip away the contractual quarrel between two businesses and a smaller, sharper fact remains, the one that should have been untouchable. Mansell’s collection was never BAM’s to take. It was not the store’s either. Under the contract he had signed, and under the commonest principle of consignment law, title to the unsold sets had stayed with him the whole time. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A Conversion, the legal name for exercising control over someone else’s property in defiance of their rights, does not even require an intent to keep the goods forever; it requires only the wrongful dominion. Alta Industries Ltd. v. Hurst✓ When the store was seized and resold, the franchisees would allege, Mansell’s Star Wars collection was swept up and sold along with everything else, by parties who had no ownership interest in it and were on notice that it was disputed. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint He had done everything right. He had the paper. And the paper said the collection was his.
How much was it worth? That question would turn out to be a battlefield of its own. The collection was a substantial one, the sort valued, in the loose currency of a hobby-store promotion, in six figures. A figure of $200,000 would later attach itself to the affair, but the franchise litigation traces that number to a 2023 in-store promotional valuation rather than any appraisal of what was actually taken, and even the genuinely unexplained gap in the accounting is alleged to be far smaller, on the order of ten to twenty thousand dollars. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint What the precise number was, and who exactly was answerable for it, the franchisor in Utah, or the local operators of the Salem store, are matters still in dispute. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint
Set the dollar fight aside, though, and you are left with the human fact that opens this story and animates everything that follows. A man consigned his father’s life’s work to a store that promised to keep it safe and keep it his. He signed an agreement that said so. And when he went looking, the store had vanished and the collection had vanished with it.
That disappearance is the thread. Pull on it, and it runs a very long way, out of a strip-mall LEGO shop in Oregon, into franchise courts and trademark tribunals, into a tangle of Utah and Alaska shell companies and an asset-protection business with a history all its own, and eventually into a documentarian’s camera, a stalking warrant, and a judge’s order to take it all down. But it begins here, with a box of plastic that was supposed to stay where it was put, and didn’t.
The most-repeated number did not survive scrutiny. The viral figure was $200,000; the franchise filings trace it to a 2023 in-store promotion rather than any appraisal, and put the real value nearer $107,000. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint On camera, BAM’s own chief operating officer produced a roughly $10,000 night-of inventory of the seized Star Wars sets and allowed that corporate was “very likely” still holding them; the moving truck BAM denied sending turned out to have existed, as the investigator Coffeezilla reconstructed from the primary footage. The genuinely unexplained gap, on the franchisees’ own accounting, is closer to ten or twenty thousand dollars, and part of it points back at the store’s local operators, not the franchisor. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint
Chapter TwoThe takeover
How a LEGO franchisor allegedly engineered the defaults it needed, seized a store and a stranger’s Star Wars collection overnight, and months later sold the wreckage to its own two men.
Every franchise deal has two or three small hinges on which the whole thing swings. In the sale of the Bricks & Minifigs store in Salem, Oregon, there were two. The bank account had to change hands. The lease had to be assigned. Do those two things and the buyer becomes the store: rent comes out of her account, the landlord’s notices go to her mailbox, the auto-payments to the franchisor run on their own. Leave them undone and the buyer is running someone else’s store on someone else’s paperwork, and that someone is the franchisor.
According to the franchisees’ sworn complaint, those two hinges were never set. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint The store’s operating company, BAMF Salem 1, LLC, bought the Oregon location in early 2023 under a written Franchise Agreement and a Business and Asset Purchase Agreement with BAM Franchising, Inc., the Delaware corporation that owns the national Bricks & Minifigs system. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint The purchase agreement, by BAM’s own account, required the buyers “to obtain landlord consent to a lease assignment” and “to coordinate account transfers.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint Those were the conditions precedent. The franchisees say they were BAM’s to complete and BAM never did.
Read BAM’s own verified complaint and the gap is right there, stated as fact by the company that benefited from it: “the lease and various accounts were never properly transferred.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint BAM frames that sentence as the franchisee’s failure. The franchisees’ complaint frames it as the trap. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint Because the lease was never assigned, BAM remained the tenant of record; the landlord’s bills and notices kept flowing to BAM, not to the operator who was actually behind the counter selling LEGO. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint Because the bank account never transferred, the automatic payments the franchise ran on could not run from the right account. The franchisees allege the result was not an accident but a mechanism: the very “payment defaults” and “unpaid lease” that BAM would later invoke as grounds to terminate were, on their account, manufactured by BAM’s own failure to throw the two switches. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint
Whether that is a fair reading is for a court; none has ruled. But the franchise contract itself shows why the distinction matters so much. The Bricks & Minifigs Franchise Agreement has two different doors marked “termination.” FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 Section 14.A, “Immediate Termination,” lets the franchisor declare the agreement terminated “automatically, without notice, at our discretion”, no warning, no chance to fix anything. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 Section 14.B, “Notice of Termination,” is the slower, fairer door: for a franchisee who fails “to make payment of any amounts due,” the company must send written notice and give the franchisee ten days to cure before the termination bites. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026
Here is the catch the franchisees point to. A money default and a lease problem appear on both lists. Section 14.A treats “Failure to Make Payments” when due, and “Breach of Lease; Loss of Right of Possession,” as grounds for no-cure, no-notice termination. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 Section 14.B covers the same failure to pay and the same loss of the premises, but with the ten-day cure attached. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 A franchisor confronting an unpaid balance can walk through either door. According to the franchisees’ complaint, BAM chose the no-cure door, 14.A, for defaults that its own non-performance had produced, skipping the ten-day cure that 14.B would have required for exactly the same dollars. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint Exhibit B Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-B-Franchise-Agreement
The contract gave BAM one more thing it needed. The franchise agreement reserves to the company the right to “assume the lease upon your termination,” and a recordable option to step into the premises if the deal ends “for whatsoever reason.” FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 Stay the tenant of record, terminate under the clause with no cure, and the franchisor can take the keys, the four walls, and everything inside them, without ever handing the operator the chance to make the payments right.
The night the store changed hands
BAM dates its move to November 14, 2024. On its own telling, it issued a written “Notice of Immediate Termination” to the Salem operating company, “exercised its priority rights to the collateral,” and “repossessed the Salem LLC store on or after 11/14/24 and assumed the lease,” taking “any and all fixtures, inventory and other assets.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint BAM puts the unpaid balance at “an estimated $175,000,” and says it credited the seized store against that debt at “an estimated $38,000 paltry value.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint The operator’s complaint describes the seizure differently, an after-hours clearing-out of well over $100,000 in store assets, taken without the notice-and-cure the operator says it was owed. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint
One detail survives in both accounts and it is worth pausing on. BAM’s complaint admits that, as its people took the store, the departing owner “removed certain receipts, a high value Boba Fett minifig and possibly money in the safe, over Brandon’s objection.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint “Brandon” is Brandon Best, and who Brandon Best was on that night is the hinge of everything that follows. By BAM’s own sworn words, he was “engaged as a contracted inventory inspector for BAM” and “was requested to inspect and inventory the Salem LLC store at the time of repossession.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint He was the franchisor’s man, sent to count what the franchisor was taking.
Then the inventory man became the buyer. BAM’s complaint lays out the sequence without apparent embarrassment: “After Brandon secured the location incident to the termination and completed the inventory, Josh expressed to BAM his interest in acquiring a franchise for the store location.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint “Josh” is Josh Johnson, described in the same filing as another insider in BAM’s orbit. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint Best and Johnson, the complaint continues, “agreed to jointly do so and formed Baker Salem,” believing they could “purchase the assets free and clear, assume the lease from BAM and infuse new inventory.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint In the first quarter of 2025 BAM sold the repossessed store and its contents to that new entity, owned by its own inspector and its own recruit, under a January 9, 2025 franchise agreement and a March 27, 2025 purchase agreement. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint The franchisees’ account compresses the turnaround harder still: the store seized one night, the franchisor’s two insiders installed as the new owners within roughly a day. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint
The neatness of it is the allegation. A store is declared in default under a no-cure clause; the franchisor takes it, values it at a fraction of the debt, and resells it to two men who already worked for the franchisor, one of whom had personally inventoried the assets he would shortly own. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint Best and Johnson are now co-plaintiffs alongside BAM in the lawsuit that grew out of all this, represented by the same Salt Lake firm. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint None of it has been tested at trial. BAM insists the resale was an “arm’s-length and legitimate corporate sale” to “bona fide third-party purchasers” who “acquired the business from BAM” with no knowledge of any competing claim. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint The franchisees say the buyers were never strangers at all. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint
The collection that wasn’t theirs to take
There was a problem with the inventory BAM hauled away, and its name was Bryan Mansell. More than a year before the seizure, on November 22, 2023, Mansell had signed a consignment agreement placing “a large collection of retired Star Wars Lego sets and minifigures” with the Salem store to sell on his behalf. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A The terms were ordinary and explicit. The store would take 35 percent of each sale and send Mansell 65 percent. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A And the title never moved: “Consigned merchandise shall remain the property of Mansell until sold,” the contract reads, with any unsold sets to “be returned to Mansell within 10 days of termination.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A The store was a shelf, not an owner. The collection belonged to a man who had never been party to anyone’s franchise deal.
When BAM cleared the store, the franchisees’ account holds, it swept Mansell’s consigned LEGO into the pile of seized “assets” it credited against the operator’s debt, taking goods that the consignment contract says it had no right to take. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A BAM’s answer to that is that it had no idea the collection existed: it took the store, it says, “as a bona fide purchaser, without notice of any third party claims or liens of any kind,” including the “undisclosed and alleged” consignment with Mansell. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint The company also disputes how much was even there, contending its inspector found “less than $5,000 worth of Star Wars LEGO product” onsite. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint
Mansell did not go quietly, and BAM’s complaint records what happened when he came looking. Within a day or two of the seizure he telephoned the store, then arrived in person holding his consignment paperwork and demanding the return of his collection or payment of $80,000. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint He was told the new occupants were not parties to his contract and turned away; he came back that evening with the police. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint By BAM’s own account the responding officer “concluded this was a private civil matter” and left without taking anyone’s side. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint A man’s Star Wars collection had been folded into a franchise repossession, and the system’s first answer to him was that it was somebody else’s problem.
What BAM did next
For most of a year the dispute lived in demand letters and small-claims paper. The Salem operating company sent BAM a legal demand on December 24, 2024, claiming it had been damaged by the termination; BAM denied it on January 10, 2025. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint In Oregon, the fight also reached small-claims court, in complaints against L2 Bricks, LLC (an earlier Salem franchise entity that preceded the Gorman ownership, not the store’s post-repossession operator) and, separately, against Josh Johnson personally. Complaint Oregon-Small-Claims-25SC26531-benjamin-schneider-v-l2-bricks-LLC-small-claim-com Complaint Oregon-Small-Claims-25SC30722-benjamin-schneider-v-l2-bricks-LLC-small-claim-com Oregon-Small-Claims-26SC06134-benjamin-schneider-v-joshua-johnson-claim-cc-1726577 BAM would eventually recast that scatter of filings as a sinister “campaign”, “splitting claims in multiple ineffective small claims actions”, in the sweeping Utah racketeering suit it brought in 2026 against the operators, against Mansell, and against a YouTuber named Benjamin Schneider whose video about the store drew more than 1.3 million views. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction Those racketeering allegations, and the criminal charges that trail behind them, are unproven and contested; they belong to later chapters, and to a presumption of innocence that the law extends to everyone BAM has accused.
But the most telling fact about the takeover is what BAM itself did in June 2026, after the cameras found the story. It closed the Salem store. It parted ways with Brandon Best and Josh Johnson, the two insiders it had installed as the store’s new owners. And it reached out to Bryan Mansell about restitution for the Star Wars collection it had once sworn was an “undisclosed” stranger’s problem. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A A company that had spent its filings insisting the repossession was lawful, the resale arm’s-length, and the consignment claim baseless does not, as a rule, voluntarily unwind all three at once. The franchisees say the unwinding is the confession. Whatever a court eventually decides, BAM’s own retreat is the clearest evidence yet that the takeover did not look, in the end, the way the takeover was supposed to look.
Chapter ThreeThe critic and the crackdown
A LEGO YouTuber asked where one customer’s collection went; the company answered with a racketeering suit, a gag order, and, after a traffic stop, a search warrant that seized nothing.
The collection at the center of all of it was a stack of retired LEGO sets, Star Wars boxes, loose minifigures, that a man named Mansell had handed to a Bricks & Minifigs store on consignment. The paperwork was plain about who owned them. The consignment agreement, signed November 22, 2023, said in so many words that the merchandise “shall remain the property of Mansell until sold.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit A When the goods went missing in the churn of a store changing hands, that single sentence became the seed of a public fight.
The man who watered it was Benjamin Schneider, a LEGO YouTuber who posts as “Reckless Ben.” He started asking, on camera, where the collection had gone, and then asking louder. The videos found an audience and kept climbing; by the time lawyers got involved the company’s own court filing would describe the “Publications” as having drawn on the order of 1.3 million views. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction What had begun as one consignor’s grievance was now a consumer-advocacy campaign with a running headcount in the seven figures.
BAM Franchising’s response was not a refund. It was a lawsuit, and not an ordinary one.
Thirteen counts
On May 27, 2026, BAM filed a verified complaint in Utah’s Fourth District Court, case No. 260402353, built around the Utah Pattern of Unlawful Activity Act, the state’s racketeering statute. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint The named defendants were Schneider himself, his company Reckless Ben LLC, the consignor Mansell, and a fourth man, Victor Nguyen, along with unnamed Does the complaint lumped together as the “Schneider Group.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint The pleading ran to thirteen counts and leaned on seven enumerated racketeering predicates, communications fraud, theft by deception, theft by extortion, criminal simulation, deceptive business practices, forgery, and obstruction. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint
To turn a critic into a racketeer, a complaint needs more than criticism, and BAM’s reached for it. The filing alleged a $200,000 extortionate demand tied to a threat that things would get “very bad,” a separate $300,000 demand built around “damaging videos,” and a $40,000 demand resting on a forged contract. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint It described props from the campaign as crimes: a counterfeit Guinness World Record certificate, fake raffle tickets, allegedly forged court papers. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint Those are the kinds of acts, fabricated documents, dollar demands, that have nothing to do with reputation and everything to do with the elements of a felony, which is precisely why they anchor the complaint.
What the complaint conspicuously did not contain was a finding that anything Schneider had said was false. On the contrary, by its own paragraph the pleading conceded that no court and no law-enforcement agency had ever found that BAM stole or wrongfully converted anyone’s property, and it characterized the underlying mess as a private, store-level dispute at an independently owned Salem franchise. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint These are allegations, sworn but undecided; none has been adjudicated. There is daylight, too, in the complaint’s own attributions: the $300,000 “damaging videos” demand it pleads is laid not at Schneider’s feet but at those of two non-defendants. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint
There is a documentary wrinkle that sits awkwardly beside the racketeering theory. Days before the suit, on May 21, BAM had circulated a corrective note about the dispute, the company’s own public account, later filed as an exhibit to the very complaint that called Schneider a criminal for talking about the same facts. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Exhibit G And in a separate Utah Business and Chancery Court case, No. 260200029, the franchisee side pressed its own claims against BAM over the seized store and the consigned collection. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint That suit’s exhibits included LEGO’s own letter stating, flatly, that “Bricks & Minifigs isn’t affiliated with the LEGO Group in any way”, a fact that cut against the store’s pitch, and the termination paperwork at the heart of the franchise fight. Exhibit A Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-A-LEGO-Email Exhibit D Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Exhibit-D-Termination-Letter By June 4, 2026, in its own press release, BAM announced it had closed the Salem store, agreed to ‘part ways’ with the insiders who had taken over its inventory, and said it was prepared to compensate Mansell for the collection. BAM press release, June 4 2026
The order to take it down
Five days after filing, on June 2, 2026, BAM got what it most wanted: an order telling Schneider what he could say and ordering the videos gone. The Fourth District Court, through Judge Tony F. Graf, Jr., entered a temporary restraining order on BAM’s ex parte motion, that is, after hearing only one side. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction The order made no finding that any statement was false; it rested on a recital that BAM was “substantially likely to prevail.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction
Two of its clauses reached pure speech. Clause 5(j) barred Schneider going forward from “creating, posting, publishing and disseminating (or any republication thereof) any false, misleading, harassing, interfering, defamatory or unlawful images or content” about BAM. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction Clause 5(k) went further into the past tense, commanding that the already-published videos “be immediately removed and/or taken down from any online streaming platform.” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction No bond was required, and a hearing on a longer-lasting injunction was set for June 22. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction
That same clause reached past the people BAM had actually sued. Clause 5(k) restrains publications relating to “the private legal dispute underlying this matter between Bryan and Chrystal” BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction, naming, in the operative restraint, a non-party: Chrystal Law, who with her husband Benjamin Gorman ran the Salem store through BAMF Salem 1, LLC and is herself a plaintiff against BAM in the separate Utah Business and Chancery Court action, No. 260200029. Complaint Bricks-and-Minifigs-Case-260200029-Complaint On June 16, 2026 the Law-Gorman side did exactly that. Through counsel Sarah Spencer, the former Salem franchisees moved to intervene on a limited basis and to modify or dissolve the June 2 order, and the motion is now in hand. Civil 260402353 - Intervenors (Law-Gorman-BAMF Salem) Motion to Dissolve TRO It makes the constitutional case directly: that Clause 5(k) is an unconstitutional prior restraint entered with no finding of falsity, that it is overbroad enough to sweep in true statements and reports of public court filings, and that an injunction cannot bind known non-parties who were never served, joined, or heard. Civil 260402353 - Intervenors (Law-Gorman-BAMF Salem) Motion to Dissolve TRO It reserves the franchisees’ rights under Utah’s anti-SLAPP statute, and it is pointedly careful to take no position on relief aimed at conduct the defendants are “alleged to have engaged in,” naming “true threats, doxxing, trespass, or impersonation.” Civil 260402353 - Intervenors (Law-Gorman-BAMF Salem) Motion to Dissolve TRO The objection is substantial: a speech-restraining order that binds people who were never named as defendants, about their own dispute, stands on especially thin constitutional ground.
An order forbidding speech before it is published, and compelling the deletion of speech already published, is the textbook definition of what the law calls a prior restraint, “the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,” in the Supreme Court’s phrase, carrying a heavy presumption against its validity. Near v. Minnesota ex rel. Olson✓ Nebraska Press Ass'n v. Stuart✓ Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan✓ The closest case on the facts is one in which the Court struck down an injunction against leaflets criticizing a businessman’s practices, holding that fear of commercial harm does not justify silencing the critic. Org. for a Better Austin v. Keefe✓ Utah’s own Supreme Court has said the same and added a procedural point that fits this order like a glove: a speech restraint entered without notice and a hearing is invalid. KUTV, Inc. v. Conder✓ BAM’s strongest answer is that it was enjoining conduct, threats, impersonation, not commentary; that defense is sturdiest as to the clauses about harassment and weakest as to the two that reach a published video. None of this has been resolved; the question of whether the speech clauses survive is exactly what the June 22 hearing was set to decide.
The order was not the only pressure on Schneider’s ability to speak and to fund the fight. BAM’s campaign extended to demands aimed at the platforms that carried him, takedown requests directed at Patreon and GoFundMe, the crowdfunding and subscription channels through which a working critic keeps the lights on. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Docket Case History Where a content-based gag dictates what may be published and a takedown demand reaches the money behind it, the squeeze is felt before any judge ever rules on whether a word of it was untrue.
A traffic stop, a warrant, and nothing seized
Then the dispute left the courthouse and turned into a criminal case.
After a traffic stop, the American Fork Police Department obtained Search Warrant No. 3352981. Its affiant, Officer Cole G. Richardson, swore he had been a “POST certified officer as of 2024” with “over a year” of experience; the warrant was signed by Fourth District Judge Roger W. Griffin. American-Fork-Police-Warrant-3352981-Search-Warrant The charge was stalking, and the warrant carried an unusual rider: authorization to seize LEGO merchandise. American-Fork-Police-Warrant-3352981-Search-Warrant Statement American-Fork-Police-26AF02033-Probable-Cause-Statement The investigation was opened under the department’s own incident number and written up as a stalking-and-harassment matter. American-Fork-Police-26AF02033-Stalking-Harassment-Incident-Report When officers executed the warrant, the return tells its own story. The line for what was taken reads: no items seized. American-Fork-Police-Warrant-3352981-Search-Warrant A warrant that named LEGO as its quarry came back empty.
The department’s own records name the officers. The raid was led by Richardson, with Lieutenant Q. Adamson on the perimeter, Officer J. Laycock at the point of the entry team, Sergeant Lott, and Officers Spencer Tonga, D. Gonzalez, Jensen and A. Neil; the case detective, W. Nicosia, authored the probable-cause statement. American-Fork-Police-26AF02033-Stalking-Harassment-Incident-Report The affidavit invites one question on its face: its narrative dates the triggering incident to “March 3rd,” although the warrant was sworn and served on March 11 and the affidavit’s own surveillance note bears the later date, an inconsistency in a document submitted under oath. American-Fork-Police-Warrant-3352981-Search-Warrant A profile compiled for American Fork on the national giglio-bradylist.com Brady-list database flags a “Brady/Giglio concern” arising from the matter and asserts that the department “has refused or failed to fully identify its involved officers by complete legal name and headshot”, an aggregator’s characterization, offered here as such and not as an official disclosure.
Officers arrested Schneider anyway and booked him. American-Fork-Police-26AF02033-Booking-Sheet Prosecutors filed a criminal information; he was advised of his rights, and the court entered a pretrial protective order. Reckless-Ben-Utah-Case-261000376-Advisement-of-Rights Reckless-Ben-Utah-Case-261000376-Information-and-Indictment Order Reckless-Ben-Provo-Misdemeanor-Case-261000376-Pretrial-Protective-Order Docket Case History Reckless-Ben-Utah-Case-261000376-Docket-Events It bears stating as plainly as the presumption demands: the criminal charges against Benjamin Schneider are unadjudicated. He has been accused, not convicted. Nothing here decides whether he did anything wrong.
Honesty about those charges cuts the other way, too, and the credibility of everything else here depends on saying so. The American Fork case is not only stalking; its second count is targeted residential picketing, and a companion case in Provo charges criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. Criminal - American Fork Probable Cause Affidavit - Stalking + Targeted Residential Picketing (261401094) The arresting officer’s sworn affidavit describes conduct well past posting videos: after being formally trespassed from a BAM insider’s American Fork home, Schneider and others returned to it repeatedly, parked outside with cars of people, photographed the house with the family inside, sent others to knock at the door, and planted a sign in the park strip bearing the resident’s face and the words “I stole a dying man’s life savings”; one visitor posed as a delivery driver to get a signature. Criminal - American Fork Probable Cause Affidavit - Stalking + Targeted Residential Picketing (261401094) Those acts are confrontational, and the State charges them as crimes. Schneider’s account is that they were attempts to serve civil process and to report a story the consignor’s family had asked him to pursue, against a man his videos accuse of helping strip a dying father’s collection, and the officer’s own report concedes the police understood the visitors “were trying to serve him civil papers.” Criminal - American Fork Probable Cause Affidavit - Stalking + Targeted Residential Picketing (261401094) Both readings can hold at once: the conduct was aggressive enough to charge, and the complainant was a BAM insider who phoned the police day after day to turn a business grievance into a criminal file. Which one a jury would credit is exactly what has not happened yet.
There is a second, uglier thing the record makes plain. BAM’s filings collect a wave of messages the company and the McNeff family received once the videos went viral: anonymous notes threatening to mail “explosive” sets and to burn the stores and headquarters, a message promising a bullet with the chief executive’s name on it, wishes of cancer on the family, racist abuse, and online comments musing that “buckshot solves a lot of issues.” Civil 260402353 Exhibit K - Threat Screenshots (messages BAM and the McNeff family received) Those threats are real and they are vile, and no account of who wronged whom should pretend that a family fielding bomb and death threats is a comfortable place to stand. But nearly every one of them is pseudonymous, sent from throwaway handles and burner accounts, and they read as the work of the furious audience a million-view accusation summons, not as anything traced to Schneider’s own hand. That gap is the whole of BAM’s racketeering theory, which bundles the mob into a “Schneider Group” and asks a court to hold the journalist answerable for what his viewers did. The law has long resisted that move: a speaker is not liable for the independent lawless acts of those who hear him, absent incitement. NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.✓ Whether BAM can bridge the gap is, again, undecided; that it has not is why the threats sit in an exhibit rather than in a verdict.
The criminal matter runs on two separate tracks: the Fourth District stalking case, State v. Schneider, No. 261401094 (stalking and targeted residential picketing) before Judge Thomas Low, with a hearing set for July 1, 2026; and a separate Provo City Justice Court case, No. 261000376 (disorderly conduct and criminal trespass) before Judge Stephen H. Schreiner, in which Schneider entered not-guilty pleas. Reckless-Ben-Utah-Case-261000376-Advisement-of-Rights Reckless-Ben-Utah-Case-261000376-Information-and-Indictment
Three of the people detained at the Airbnb that day, Sheldon Norcross, Sierra Lauts and Tyler Shaw, have since launched a public fundraiser, “Justice for Sheldon and Friends,” to pursue civil-rights litigation against the department; of the five taken into custody, only Schneider was booked into jail. The campaign states that counsel advised their “rights were likely violated” and that a civil-rights attorney is being retained. No suit has been filed, and the civil-rights claims are the organizers’ own, untested allegations.
What makes the arrest more than a footnote is what the body cameras recorded, and what the public was first allowed to see. The American Fork Police Department released its bodycam footage as a set of 56 clips, but only after editing it. According to the bodycam investigation built from the records, roughly three hours of video were blacked out, eleven clips were withheld entirely, and about ninety-four minutes of audio were muted. American-Fork-Police-26AF02033-Stalking-Harassment-Incident-Report The deletions were not scattered at random; they clustered on exactly the moments that mattered, the officers’ own on-scene legal assessment, the warrant’s execution, and the arrest itself.
The reason anyone could measure the gap is that an unredacted copy of the same clips had leaked, and the leak was the department’s own mistake: a misconfigured Dropbox, not a hack. American-Fork-Police-26AF02033-Stalking-Harassment-Incident-Report Laid frame against frame, the official release and the leaked original made the muted minutes legible again. In the recovered audio, the investigation describes officers talking themselves from “letting them go cannot be an option … send a message” to “you’re under arrest for stalking.” American-Fork-Police-26AF02033-Stalking-Harassment-Incident-Report These are the documented findings of that bodycam comparison, drawn from leaked and public records and presented here as such, not as a court’s conclusion.
The recovered audio was not the only thing the black boxes had hidden. The same leak made one of the department’s in-car computer screens legible again, and it answers a question the official release did not: who set the matter in motion. The screen logs the reporting party as Johnson, with a narrative about a “suspicious package” and footage supplied by “my business partner.” American-Fork-Police-26AF02033-Stalking-Harassment-Incident-Report That is Josh Johnson, one of the two insiders BAM installed as the Salem store’s new owners; his “business partner” is Brandon Best, the inventory inspector who became the other. The man who helped take over the store is also, on this record, the one who summoned the police against its loudest critic and handed officers the video. A company that answers a critic with a racketeering suit, a gag order, and a police referral is not a harassment victim defending itself; it is reaching for every institution it can. Whether that crosses into the misuse of legal process, or the kind of private-and-state coordination that civil-rights law reaches, is a question for the arrestees’ counsel to pursue; the charges against Schneider remain unadjudicated, and he is presumed innocent.
The law has names for the questions that exchange raises. A warrant to search a place does not, by itself, authorize arresting the people found there; probable cause must be particular to each person, and “mere propinquity” to someone else under suspicion is not enough. Ybarra v. Illinois✓ A search-warrant affidavit can be attacked if it was built on a deliberate or reckless falsehood. Franks v. Delaware✓ And because the underlying charge, stalking, framed as a course of conduct, is wrapped around a man’s filming and commentary, there is the further principle that constitutionally protected speech cannot itself supply the probable cause to search. Mink v. Knox✓ Whether any of those theories has teeth depends on a record that does not yet exist; they are the arguments available, not findings made.
Strip the case to its spine and a pattern shows through. A customer’s collection went missing. A critic asked where it went, loudly enough to be heard a million times over. The company answered not with the goods or a check but with a thirteen-count racketeering complaint BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint, an order to delete the videos BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction, demands to the platforms that paid him BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Docket Case History, and finally a stalking warrant that hunted for LEGO and seized nothing American-Fork-Police-Warrant-3352981-Search-Warrant. Utah’s racketeering statute reaches real predicates, fraud, forgery, extortion, and BAM has pleaded them; that is why the suit is not frivolous on its face. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint But the statute’s own enumeration does not include defamation, and courts have been clear that ordinary online criticism is not a racketeering act. Walker v. Beaumont Independent School District✓ Consumer commentary about a franchisor’s treatment of customers sits high in the order of protected speech Snyder v. Phelps✓; a quantified, checkable accusation that a named party “stole $200,000” does not, and a court could find such a charge actionable rather than mere opinion Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co.✓ RainFocus Inc. v. Cvent Inc.✓. The two ends of that spectrum are why the fight is real, and why so much of it remains, for now, sworn but undecided. The June 22 injunction hearing, and a criminal case in which Benjamin Schneider is presumed innocent, would have to sort out which is which. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction
Chapter FourPull the thread
A toy-store franchise fight was never the real story; behind it stands a family business that spent a quarter-century teaching clients how to disappear from the reach of the law.
Everything to this point has been the surface. The toy store, the LEGO resale floors, the franchise that sells the right to buy and rebuild other people’s childhoods, all of it is real, and all of it is a distraction. Pull the thread and the franchise unspools into something older and stranger: a family, a doctrine, and a business model built on a single promise. The promise was that you could make yourself impossible to sue, and impossible to collect from.
The business was called Legally Mine. For most of its life it ran out of Orem, Utah, from an address it shared with a captive back-office company called LMRA Services, Inc. Utah UCC: LMRA Services Business 10165814 Detail Its product was an “asset protection plan”, that is the phrase a federal magistrate judge used, dryly, when a customer named Kasra Eliasieh sued the company in California over what he had bought. Eliasieh v. Legally Mine, LLC⏳ What that plan actually was, and whether selling it was legal, would take years and another state to settle.
The man at the center
The plan belonged to Daniel J. McNeff. He built Legally Mine and ran it, and around it he assembled a thicket of limited-liability companies that read, in retrospect, like a demonstration of his own curriculum. He came to the business of advising others about money with a securities-industry ban of his own: the NASD, the brokerage industry’s self-regulator, censured Daniel McNeff, fined him $15,000, and barred him from associating with any member firm in any capacity, in a decision that became final in January 1991, after he failed to answer the regulator’s questions about why a member firm had terminated him. Daniel J. McNeff: FINRA/NASD BrokerCheck (CRD 1193655) His registered securities career had run about six years, at a single small Georgia firm, and ended in that bar. Utah’s business registry ties Daniel McNeff personally to Legal Bear LLC Utah UCC: Legal Bear Business 8097970 Detail, to Procure LLC Utah UCC: Procure Business 10875462 Detail, to Team Dentistry LLC Utah UCC: Team Dentistry Business 13558625 Detail, to DDL Investments LLC Utah UCC: DDL Investments Business 12343181 Detail, and to Medisource Marketing LLC Utah UCC: Medisource Marketing Business 9224895 Detail, a row of innocuously named vehicles, each its own little fortress.
The fortress had a moat in Alaska, a state whose trust and charging-order statutes are friendly to people who do not want to be found by creditors. In November 2016 McNeff incorporated LMRA Services, Inc. as an Alaska corporation; the initial report listed him as the 100 percent owner and as director, president, secretary, treasurer, and shareholder all at once. Utah Registry: Annual Report Utah LMRA Services INC Annual Report LMRA then became the registered agent, the official mailbox and front door, for a sprawl of further entities, the agent of record for thousands of companies across Alaska and Utah. One was Legal Elf, LLC, formed in 2017 with Daniel and Evelyn McNeff as fifty-fifty members and LMRA as its agent. Legal Elf, LLC: Initial Biennial Report (2017-10-12) As late as April 2026, with litigation closing in from several directions, a new Alaska company called Wize Grizzly, LLC was formed with Daniel McNeff as its 100 percent member and, again, LMRA as the registered agent. Wize Grizzly, LLC: Initial Biennial Report (2026-04-24) The same machinery produced layered structures for others, too, paired Alaska entities like Kerala House 101 and 102, one made the general partner of the other, the exact nesting-doll arrangement the strategy prescribes. Kerala House 101, LLC: Articles of Organization (2026-05-04)
This was not a sideline. It was the whole shape of the thing: a teacher who lived inside his own lesson.
What the lesson cost
For roughly a quarter of a century, Legally Mine sold that lesson to clients, by its own account, on the order of twenty-one thousand of them, typically professionals with money to shield and a fear of being sued: doctors, dentists, small-business owners. The sales channel ran through trade conventions. According to the Ohio regulatory record, a dentist who attended a Legally Mine presentation at a dental convention in Canton, Ohio, enrolled in a premium package that promised an asset-protection blueprint and the legal-document work to build it. That enrollment is what eventually brought the whole enterprise before a state supreme court.
On November 10, 2023, the Ohio State Bar Association filed a complaint against Legally Mine and Daniel McNeff, charging that the company’s blueprint-and-document business was the unauthorized practice of law, drafting legal instruments and giving legal advice without a license. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Docket Case History The matter went not to a trial but to a consent resolution: the respondents waived notice and a hearing, and the Board on the Unauthorized Practice of Law issued a final report. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order
On February 20, 2025, the Supreme Court of Ohio adopted it. In a one-paragraph order that carries the full weight of the court, “Legally Mine, L.L.C., and Daniel McNeff” were “enjoined from engaging in the unauthorized practice of law in Ohio,” and a civil penalty was imposed. Ohio State Bar Assn. v. Legally Mine, L.L.C.⏳ Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order The penalty was $5,000, and the order required the company to notify affected clients and offer refunds. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order Daniel McNeff did not contest that he had directed the conduct; the resolution rests on the respondents’ own waiver and consent. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order It is worth being precise about what the order is and is not: a consent decree, limited to Ohio conduct, not a fully litigated finding of fraud. But on the narrow question the bar association posed, was this business the practice of law without a license, the highest court in Ohio said yes, and shut it down there.
Ohio was not the only place the model drew fire. Years earlier, the Eliasieh case in California had already put the “asset protection plan” before a federal court, where it ended up routed into private arbitration. Eliasieh v. Legally Mine, LLC⏳ And in a Washington bankruptcy, a trustee challenged a Chapter 11 debtor’s $7,800 payment to Legally Mine for asset-protection services; according to the complaint the transfer was avoidable, and a judgment was ultimately entered against Legally Mine before being satisfied. Peterson v. Legally Mine (bankr.) 19-01004-CMA doc1 Complaint Peterson v. Legally Mine (bankr.) Satisfaction of Judgment The product, in other words, kept generating the very lawsuits it claimed to make irrelevant.
Set those findings beside each other and a pattern in the man himself emerges. In 1991 the securities regulators censured Daniel McNeff, fined him, and barred him from associating with any brokerage firm. Daniel J. McNeff: FINRA/NASD BrokerCheck (CRD 1193655) In 2025 the Supreme Court of Ohio enjoined him from the practice of law. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order In the years between and since, he built and ran a business whose entire promise was legal and financial protection. Two different regulators, decades apart, found him without the standing to do the very things his company sold.
The sons, and the toys
Here is where the thread doubles back to the toy store. Daniel McNeff has two sons in the business, Ammon and Matthew, and the connective tissue between the asset-protection firm and the LEGO-resale franchise runs straight through them.
The franchise is operated by BAM Franchising, the company behind the Bricks & Minifigs brand. Its origins trace to an Oregon registration in 2011 Oregon Registry: BAM Franchising 76881896, and when that Oregon registration was administratively dissolved and then reinstated in 2020, the reinstatement was signed by Matthew McNeff as secretary, with both Ammon and Matthew listed in officer roles. Oregon Registry: BAM Franchising 76881896 A sister company, BAM IP Holdings LLC, holds the intellectual-property side; Utah’s registry names its managers as Ammon and Matthew McNeff. Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail On the franchise-sale paperwork itself, the state-filed Franchise Disclosure Documents, Ammon McNeff and Matthew McNeff appear among the listed sellers of the Bricks & Minifigs system. FDD: MN Cards E0034F88 C057 FDD
So the two halves are not separate worlds. They are the same family operating two firms out of the same cluster of Utah towns: Legally Mine and LMRA in Orem Utah UCC: LMRA Services Business 10165814 Detail, BAM Franchising a few streets over Utah UCC: BAM Franchising Business 11984597 Detail, BAM IP Holdings in Provo Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail.
And the two halves are stitched together by a financing document that ought to give any reader pause. In August 2020, a Utah UCC filing records that Legally Mine, the asset-protection company, pledged 450,000 shares of BAM Franchising as collateral, to secured parties named John Masek and David Ortiz. Utah UCC: Detail A second filing the following February pledged a 21 percent membership interest in Legally Mine itself, along with its business assets, this time naming Ammon and Matthew McNeff as the secured parties on a settlement note. Utah UCC: Detail The toy franchise was, on paper, security for the family’s debts; the family’s company was, on paper, security for the sons. The ownership of the toy store and the ownership of the shield were the same balance sheet.
The fight inside the family
That balance sheet did not hold together quietly. In January 2021, the family went to federal court against itself. A complaint filed in the District of Utah alleged, these are allegations, never adjudicated, the suit was voluntarily dismissed Mcneff V Mcneff Utd 2-21-cv-00048 doc12 Voluntary Dismissal 2021-02-10, that Daniel refused to cede authority over BAM’s payments, that the nonpayment triggered a repossession by the company’s sellers, and that more than a million dollars in assets were lost as a result. Mcneff V Mcneff Utd 2-21-cv-00048 doc2 Complaint 2021-01-22 Around the same time, in a letter, Daniel McNeff described the situation in his own words: the prior owners had been carrying the loan, he wrote, and Ammon and Matthew had been assigned to run BAM full-time. The picture is of a father, two sons, a toy company, and a debt, all pulling against one another.
Meanwhile the asset-protection side kept changing its skin. The original Legally Mine entity was reported to have become “LM OLDCO LLC” Utah Registry: Filing History LM OLDCO LLC 7228976 Filing History All Internal, old company, the linguistic tell of a business shedding a name. And in 2026, fresh “Legally Mine” and “Legally Mine Tax and Accounting” assumed-name registrations appeared in Utah, this time owned not by Daniel but by an entity called Centra Wealth Solutions LLC Utah Registry: Filing History Legally Mine 2026 Entity 14441858 Filing History All Internal Utah Registry: Filing History Legally Mine Tax and Accounting 2026 Entity 14441864 Filing History All Int, with a different registered agent. Utah UCC: Legally Mine Business 14441858 Detail The brand survives; the legal shell beneath it has been quietly swapped out, which is, after all, the entire point of the product.
This is the real story, and it is bigger than a quarrel over secondhand toy bricks. It is a family that spent twenty-five years teaching strangers how to put their wealth beyond the reach of courts and creditors, and that, when the courts and creditors finally came, reached for the same tools on its own behalf. Everything else is the thread you pull. The McNeffs are what is on the other end.
The McNeffs did not invent the model; they bought into it. Legally Mine descends from the asset-protection seminar circuit of Jay Mitton, the self-styled “father of asset protection,” by way of the National Foundation for Asset Protection, which is how, on the firm’s own telling, Daniel McNeff came to it in 2007 as “a student of Mitton.” Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Docket Case History The same lineage seeded a cluster of look-alike Orem mills, among them Veil Corporate LLC and Guardian Law LLC, both named in a private fraud suit tied to the Federal Trade Commission’s $16.7 million case against the Nudge seminar empire FTC v. Nudge, LLC⏳, though neither is McNeff-owned; the tie is a shared mentor and a shared town, not common ownership. The network surfaces once more around the Salem store itself: Josh Johnson, sold to the public as an “independent” new owner, doubles as an executive vice-president of a Las Vegas asset-protection firm, on a presenter roster he shares with the ex-FBI principal of an outfit called Fortress.
Chapter FiveThe machine
As the litigation peaked and the cash-advance lenders closed in, the family that sold asset protection ran the same creditor-frustration playbook on its own collapsing franchise, and left the paperwork behind.
For two decades the product was a sentence, repeated at dental conventions and on glossy seminar slides: put the thing the creditor wants out of the creditor’s reach. A preserved Legally Mine sales video lays out the machinery in plain terms, an Alaska holding company on top, a charging-order shield underneath, a “non-prorata” distribution clause and a so-called revenge clause to make a judgment creditor’s victory worthless. The presenter on the recording is Dan McNeff. Legal Elf, LLC: Initial Biennial Report (2017-10-12)
The pitch had already drawn a regulator’s verdict. On February 20, 2025, the Supreme Court of Ohio enjoined Legally Mine and Daniel McNeff from the unauthorized practice of law and imposed a civil penalty, a finding entered against both the company and the man. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order By then the asset-protection business was no longer just teaching the technique. It was using it, on the family’s own assets, while its creditors lined the hallway.
The trademarks move
Start with the brand, because the brand was the last thing worth anything. The Bricks & Minifigs franchise system runs on a name, and the federal registration for the standard-character mark BAM is owned by BAM Franchising, Inc., the operating company at the center of the litigation. USPTO SN98706031: TSDR sn98706031 2025-12-02 Registration Certificate ORC20251129121901 In Utah’s corporate registry, that operating entity now reads “Inactive.” Utah UCC: BAM Franchising Business 11984597 Detail
On July 16, 2025, while the franchisee lawsuits and the trademark fight were live, a new company was organized in Utah: BAM IP Holdings, LLC, filed active, its managers listed as Ammon McNeff and Matthew McNeff, the two sons running the franchise day to day. Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail Utah Registry: Filing History BAM IP Holdings LLC 14333873 Filing History All Internal The name is not subtle. A holding company called “IP Holdings,” spun up by the operators of a brand whose chief remaining asset is intellectual property, formed in the middle of the storm.
What the public record does not yet show is a recorded assignment moving the BAM marks out of the operating company and into the new holding company. A focused pass through the federal Assignment Center turned up no public assignment bridge from BAM IP Holdings to the sampled BAM or Bricks & Minifigs marks; the registered BAM mark still names BAM Franchising as owner. USPTO SN98706031: TSDR sn98706031 2025-12-02 Registration Certificate ORC20251129121901 The Delaware redomestication did not move them either: the surviving Delaware corporation was supposed to inherit the Oregon company’s property by operation of law, yet the marks still name the old Oregon entity, leaving the title clouded across three boxes, the inactive Oregon shell that still holds the registrations, the Delaware survivor that supposedly absorbed it, and the Utah holding company built to receive it. Delaware Certificate of Merger: BAM Franchising (Oregon) into Delaware (File No. 2482543) So the transfer, if it happened, has not surfaced on paper, and that distinction matters. But the shape is the classic badge of a voidable transfer: an insolvent operating company, a new entity owned by insiders, the valuable asset re-housed where old creditors cannot easily reach it while the operating business keeps using the name. It is the exact move the seminar video taught, separate the asset from the entity the creditor can sue. Legal Elf, LLC: Initial Biennial Report (2017-10-12) Whether a court will ever call it a fraudulent conveyance is undecided; the structure is on the registry. Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail
The husk and the resurrection
The second move is cleaner, and it is documented to the day. The company that had been sued for twenty years, Legally Mine, LLC, the original Utah entity formed back in January 2009, did not die. It was renamed. On May 21, 2026, an amendment to its certificate of organization ran through Utah’s Business Entity Search. Utah Registry: Filing History LM OLDCO LLC 7228976 Filing History All Internal Utah Registry: Certificate of Organization LM OLDCO LLC 6045616 Amendment to Certificate of Organization The thing once called Legally Mine became “LM OLDCO, LLC”, old company, the name a lawyer gives a shell after the good parts have been carried out the door. It did not happen only once: that same afternoon, by an identical amendment, the family’s tax-and-accounting arm, Legally Mine Tax and Accounting, LLC, was renamed to “LMTA OLDCO, LLC.” LMTA OLDCO, LLC: Amendment to Certificate of Organization (UT 2026-05-21) Two companies turned into two husks in a single sitting.
Eight days later, the good part reappeared. On May 29, 2026, a separate company registered the assumed name “LEGALLY MINE LLC” as a brand-new doing-business-as, and a companion DBA, “LEGALLY MINE TAX AND ACCOUNTING LLC.” Utah Registry: Filing History Legally Mine 2026 Entity 14441858 Filing History All Internal Utah Registry: Filing History Legally Mine Tax and Accounting 2026 Entity 14441864 Filing History All Int The certificate of assumed name for the revived “Legally Mine” brand is its own filing. Utah Registry: Assumed Name (DBA) Legally Mine 2026 Entity 6069703 Certificate of Assumed and of True Nam The owner of these freshly minted Legally Mine names is not the litigated entity. It is Centra Wealth Solutions, LLC. Utah Registry: Centra Wealth Solutions LLC 6061489 Registration Information Change Form
Read the sequence as a single gesture. The defendant in the lawsuits is hollowed into “LM OLDCO”, a husk for the judgments and the regulators to chase. Utah Registry: Certificate of Organization LM OLDCO LLC 6045616 Amendment to Certificate of Organization The living brand, the name customers recognize, the name on the asset-protection seminars, walks across the room into a clean company with no litigation history attached to it. Utah Registry: Assumed Name (DBA) Legally Mine 2026 Entity 6069703 Certificate of Assumed and of True Nam Utah Registry: Centra Wealth Solutions LLC 6061489 Registration Information Change Form Same product, same market, new shell. It is the corporate version of the non-prorata clause: leave the creditor holding the name that no longer owns anything.
Who is Centra
Centra Wealth Solutions, LLC was organized in Utah, with a certificate of organization on file and a registered agent, BTJD Corporate Services, LLC, that also serves the new Legally Mine DBAs. Utah Registry: Certificate of Organization Centra Wealth Solutions LLC 5892820 Certificate of Organizatio Utah Registry: Filing History Centra Wealth Solutions LLC 14421835 Filing History All Internal Its managers, per the Utah registry, are two men: David Johnston and Mark Comer. Utah Registry: Centra Wealth Solutions LLC 6061489 Registration Information Change Form
The name Mark Comer carries weight. In 1999, after the collapse of the dot-com retail venture iMall, the Federal Trade Commission obtained a stipulated final judgment against iMall and two individuals, Craig R. Pickering and a Mark R. Comer: a $4 million consumer-redress judgment, $3.25 million of it owed by Pickering and Comer, and a five-year order barring each of them from marketing any business opportunity unless he first posted a $500,000 performance bond. FTC v. iMall, Inc.⏳ Whether the Mark Comer now steering the revived “Legally Mine” brand is that same man is corroborated but not confirmed, call it about ninety-five percent. The registry establishes the role; it does not, by itself, establish the identity. What the record does say cleanly is this: the company now holding the Legally Mine name is run by a man named Mark Comer, out of an address in Highland, Utah, that the old operating entity never used. Utah Registry: Centra Wealth Solutions LLC 6061489 Registration Information Change Form
That an asset-protection brand with a federal UPL injunction against it Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order should re-emerge under new managers, in a new entity, weeks after the litigated company was renamed to “OLDCO,” is the pattern stated once more, in a different key. The brand outruns its own record.
The lenders in the hallway
None of this happened in calm water. By 2025 the family’s flagship was being worked over by the merchant-cash-advance industry, the high-cost lenders who buy a business’s future receipts at a discount and then claw the money back by daily debit. The filings come in a cluster, and they rhyme.
In Connecticut, Swiss Fund LLC sued. Its complaint package pleads a future-receivables agreement dated March 10, 2025, a personal guaranty from McNeff, and a cross-collateral security interest backed by UCC filings, followed by default. Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) CT fst-cv-25-6072810-s Doc Complaint 2025-04-07.oc The matter was withdrawn that July. Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) CT fst-cv-25-6072810-s Doc Complaint 2025-04-07 On the Connecticut docket, the defense appearance was entered by attorney Glenn Francis Russell Jr. Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) Docket Case History These are allegations in a civil complaint; the case ended before any judgment on the merits. Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) CT fst-cv-25-6072810-s Doc Complaint 2025-04-07
In New York, Castle Funding Corp. sued the operating entity, alleging a purchased stream of future receivables, an ACH remittance that failed, a guaranty, and a balance of $55,428.66. Castle Funding v. Legally Mine (NY) Summons & Complaint The Castle action was later discontinued. Castle Funding v. Legally Mine (NY) Notice of Discontinuance What makes the Castle file telling is its service roster: the papers reach not just Legally Mine but a row of commonly controlled satellites, DDL Investments LLC, Medisource Marketing LLC, Big Blue Bungalow LLC, and Daniel J. McNeff himself. Castle Funding v. Legally Mine (NY) Summons & Complaint The lender, in other words, understood it was dealing with a constellation, not a company.
Also in New York, DIB Capital Inc. sued, and its numbers are the starkest. The complaint alleges DIB paid $300,000 to buy $480,000 of future receipts, a sixty-cents-on-the-dollar advance, at an 18% remittance rate, secured by a guaranty, with the receipts then allegedly blocked or impeded, and damages pleaded at $501,250. Dib Capital v. Legally Mine (NY) Summons & Complaint That action resolved by a stipulation of settlement. Dib Capital v. Legally Mine (NY) Stipulation of Settlement Again: alleged, then settled, never adjudicated. But the picture across the three files is consistent, a business borrowing against tomorrow’s sales at punishing terms, then accused of choking off the very receivables it had pledged. Dib Capital v. Legally Mine (NY) Summons & Complaint Castle Funding v. Legally Mine (NY) Summons & Complaint Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) CT fst-cv-25-6072810-s Doc Complaint 2025-04-07.oc
The cross-collateral net
The most revealing artifact is the cross-collateral pledge itself, because it shows the machine wired together. The Connecticut docket names, alongside Legally Mine, five commonly controlled co-defendants: Legal Bear LLC, Legally Mine Tax and Accounting LLC, Procure LLC, Shield LLC, and Team Dentistry LLC. Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) CT fst-cv-25-6072810-s Doc Complaint 2025-04-07 The complaint package ties those affiliates to one principal, Daniel Jay McNeff, and identifies him as the signatory and guarantor. Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) CT fst-cv-25-6072810-s Doc Complaint 2025-04-07.oc Utah’s UCC records carry the same cluster: a financing-statement chain repeating the identical roster of Legal Bear, Legally Mine Tax and Accounting, Procure, Shield, and Team Dentistry as related debtors. Utah UCC: Detail
So the same six entities that the asset-protection product would, in theory, keep walled off from one another were instead bound together, pledged as a single block of collateral to secure the family’s borrowing, all tied back to one man. Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) CT fst-cv-25-6072810-s Doc Complaint 2025-04-07.oc Utah UCC: Detail The shield the company sold to outsiders was, for the family’s own lenders, melted into one pool.
And the family had been pledging its core assets for years before the 2025 lenders arrived. In August 2020, Legally Mine pledged 450,000 shares of BAM Franchising stock as collateral to John Masek and David Ortiz. Utah UCC: Detail In February 2021, a further UCC filing pledged a 21% membership interest in Legally Mine, plus business assets, to secure a settlement and promissory note valued at $1.728 million, with Ammon McNeff and Matthew McNeff, the same two sons who would later manage BAM IP Holdings, named as the secured parties. Utah UCC: Detail The sons held a lien on the family business before they held the brand’s new holding company. Utah UCC: Detail Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail
The pattern, named
Set the beats in a row. A regulator finds the asset-protection company practiced law without a license and enjoins it. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order The marks that carry the franchise sit in an operating company gone “Inactive,” Utah UCC: BAM Franchising Business 11984597 Detail while a new insider-owned “IP Holdings” company appears mid-litigation. Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail The litigated brand is renamed to a husk, Utah Registry: Certificate of Organization LM OLDCO LLC 6045616 Amendment to Certificate of Organization and the brand itself is reborn days later inside a clean entity run by a man with a contested past. Utah Registry: Assumed Name (DBA) Legally Mine 2026 Entity 6069703 Certificate of Assumed and of True Nam Utah Registry: Centra Wealth Solutions LLC 6061489 Registration Information Change Form Cash-advance lenders circle, pleading guaranties and blocked receivables. Dib Capital v. Legally Mine (NY) Summons & Complaint Castle Funding v. Legally Mine (NY) Summons & Complaint And underneath it all, six commonly controlled entities are lashed together as one block of collateral, tied to a single guarantor. Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) CT fst-cv-25-6072810-s Doc Complaint 2025-04-07.oc Utah UCC: Detail
No court has yet ruled that any of these 2025, 2026 transfers was fraudulent; the MCA cases ended in withdrawal, discontinuance, and settlement rather than judgment. Swiss Fund v. Legally Mine (CT) CT fst-cv-25-6072810-s Doc Complaint 2025-04-07 Castle Funding v. Legally Mine (NY) Notice of Discontinuance Dib Capital v. Legally Mine (NY) Stipulation of Settlement The criminal matter touching this family remains unadjudicated, and the men named here are entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the documents describe a recognizable thing, and it is the thing the company taught. The family that sold the art of making assets disappear from creditors appears, on the record, to have practiced it last on itself, moving the brand, hollowing the defendant, binding the collateral, one filing at a time. The machine ran on its own builders. Legal Elf, LLC: Initial Biennial Report (2017-10-12) Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail Utah Registry: Certificate of Organization LM OLDCO LLC 6045616 Amendment to Certificate of Organization
And it is not only the lenders’ suits that ended without a verdict. Look at how nearly every dispute this family has touched is closed. The Ohio unauthorized-practice case was resolved by consent, on an express waiver of notice and a hearing, with no facts ever found. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Docket Case History Its own federal lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed. Mcneff V Mcneff Utd 2-21-cv-00048 doc12 Voluntary Dismissal 2021-02-10 The California customer’s case was steered out of court into private arbitration. Eliasieh v. Legally Mine, LLC⏳ And the answer to a critic was a gag order obtained without a hearing. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction Each of these is a lawful way to end a case; the consistency is the tell. A business built to make assets hard to find is run by people who, matter after matter, also make the facts hard to test, closing each one by consent, dismissal, arbitration, or settlement before a neutral adjudicator can weigh the evidence. The asset-protection product and the litigation habit are one instinct aimed at two targets, and it is why the single thing that can force a tested record, an anti-SLAPP special motion, is the most dangerous motion in this file for Bricks & Minifigs.
And the control-grab at the center of this story was not the first of its kind. In a 2020 complaint, a former business associate named David Gibb alleged that Ammon McNeff had gone to the Utah Division of Corporations in November 2019, falsely declared himself the sole owner and registered agent of an LLC he did not own, and then redirected its merchant-account funds to an account he controlled. Afraid OF Lawsuits, LLC: Summary of Online Changes (2019-11-12) The mechanism is the one the Salem franchisees describe: a paper filing that manufactures control, then a quiet move of the money. That case was dismissed without prejudice within months, never tested on the merits, which is itself the pattern; but a sworn allegation of the same maneuver, against a McNeff insider, years before the toy-store fight, sits on the record.
What follows from all of this, whether any of it is a crime, a tort, or a winnable defense, is laid out claim by claim in the legal reckoning further down, every theory graded for how far the record carries it. First, where this can actually go.
Chapter SixThe way in
After the entities, the liens, and the lawsuits, what is actually proven, what is sealed behind unfiled paper, and which regulators already hold enough to act.
Strip away the noise and a story like this comes down to three columns: what a court has already decided, what the primary documents prove on their face, and what remains an allegation someone still has to win. The honest version of this article keeps those columns separate. So here, at the end, is the ledger.
What a court has already decided
One thing is adjudicated. On February 20, 2025, the Ohio Supreme Court entered a final order enjoining Legally Mine and Daniel J. McNeff and imposing a civil penalty. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order Ohio State Bar Assn. v. Legally Mine, L.L.C.✓ The Ohio State Bar Association had brought the matter as unauthorized practice of law, the claim that a company selling asset-protection “blueprints” and entity paperwork to dentists and doctors was, in substance, practicing law without a license. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Docket Case History The board’s record traces the funnel precisely: an Ohio dentist who sat through a Legally Mine presentation at a Canton dental convention and enrolled in a program promising legal-document work. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Docket Case History
That order is real, and it is a finding. But it should be read for exactly what it is. The Ohio docket shows the disposition was a consent decree, entered on a board report with the respondents’ express waiver of notice and hearing. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Docket Case History A consent decree is generally not “actually litigated,” so it carries no automatic preclusive weight in another state, and its reach is limited to Ohio conduct. Ohio State Bar Assn. v. Legally Mine, L.L.C.✓ The decree’s recital that the conduct “constitutes” unauthorized practice is an admission usable as evidence, not a nationwide judgment. The pattern Ohio addressed is the strongest single fact in this whole file; it is also the narrowest.
What the documents prove on their face
A second tier needs no trial, because the proof is the paper itself.
The franchise disclosure document contradicts itself. BAM’s 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document states in Item 1 that “We have no parents or predecessors that are required to be disclosed,” while Item 2, in the bio of chief financial officer Reed Brimhall, states that he “has been the Chief Financial Officer of the Franchisor and the Franchisor’s Parent since June 2016.” FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 The same document says BAM is a Delaware corporation formed October 11, 2023, that completed a Delaware survivor merger on April 18, 2024, a clean origin story for an entity whose Bricks & Minifigs system has been registered and operating since 2011. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 Oregon Registry: BAM Franchising 76881896 Delaware Certificate of Merger: BAM Franchising (Oregon) into Delaware (File No. 2482543) These are the franchisor’s own sworn disclosures, filed with state franchise regulators. A reader does not need discovery to see that an Item 1 promising no parent cannot live in the same booklet as an Item 2 describing a parent the CFO has run since 2016. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026
And the most telling contradiction is an absence. BAM’s own complaint says it repossessed the Salem store in November 2024, and that the store passed in March 2025 to Baker, a company owned by BAM’s own repossession inspector and a BAM recruiter. Yet the same year’s FDD reports zero Oregon outlets reacquired by the franchisor in 2024 and zero sold to franchisees in 2025, and it skips the very financial-statement note that should have explained a Salem sale. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint The transaction at the center of this story is the one the regulatory filing leaves out, and a sale to a company a BAM employee co-owns is precisely the related-party deal a disclosure document is meant to spell out. BAM calls the sale arm’s-length, and it may have been, but the two are not opposites: a fair-terms deal between a company and its own employee is still a related-party transaction, and the audited financials a franchise filing requires must set those out, with their terms, in the footnotes. None appears, for Salem or for the Eugene store also sold to Baker, a gap a franchise examiner can act on by requiring corrected financials and holding the registration until they are filed. Oregon Registry: Eugene Baker Bricks INC OR Filing Records
The insider resale is on the record. The bankruptcy schedules of franchisee Jace & Ace listed BAM Franchising as the franchise counterparty, and the disclosure statement records BAM agreeing to assume the franchise agreement with a twelve-month extension. Jace & Ace (bankruptcy) 20-40193 doc23 Schedules Original Jace Ace LLC Jace & Ace (bankruptcy) 20-40193 doc29 Disclosure Statement for Small Business When a franchise location failed, the chain ran from the independent franchisee to a company-owned store and onward to new buyers, a structure the legal file ties to a March 27, 2025 asset-purchase agreement moving the Salem store to Baker-affiliated buyers. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document Bricks & Minifigs 2023 FDD That a franchisor took over, then resold, a distressed location is not an accusation; it is a transaction visible in the filings.
The family built a separate box for the intellectual property. BAM IP Holdings LLC is its own Utah entity, managed by Ammon McNeff and Matthew McNeff, at its own Provo address, named for the one asset it exists to hold. Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail Utah Registry: Certificate of Organization BAM IP Holdings LLC 5227635 Certificate of Organization Meanwhile the operating company, BAM Franchising, pledged its assets to JPMorgan Chase and watched Legally Mine pledge 450,000 of its shares to outside lenders. Utah UCC: Detail The marks the franchise is built on still name BAM Franchising as their owner, not the holding company, so the box meant to keep them one entity beyond a creditor’s or a franchisee’s reach is built and waiting, the transfer itself not yet on the public record. USPTO SN98706031: TSDR sn98706031 2025-12-02 Registration Certificate ORC20251129121901 Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Name History
And the name itself has been re-homed. “Legally Mine” as a live brand is now an assumed name owned by Centra Wealth Solutions LLC, with BTJD Corporate Services as its registered agent, a fresh wrapper around an old product. Utah UCC: Legally Mine Business 14441858 Detail Utah Registry: Filing History Centra Wealth Solutions LLC 14421835 Filing History All Internal Centra’s managers of record are Mark Comer and David Johnston. Utah UCC: Legally Mine Business 14441858 Detail On Comer specifically the record supports a strong inference, not a certainty: the link to the iMall-era promoter of the same name is corroborated at roughly ninety-five percent, and this article does not state it as confirmed.
What is still only alleged
The third column is the one that disciplines everything above it.
No court has found that the people who bought these asset-protection plans were defrauded into measurable losses. The closest adjudicated event runs the other way: in a Washington bankruptcy, a Chapter 11 debtor’s $7,800 payment to Legally Mine was avoided and a judgment entered against the company in 2019, then fully satisfied months later. Peterson v. Legally Mine (bankr.) 19-01004-CMA doc1 Complaint Peterson v. Legally Mine (bankr.) 19-01004-CMA doc8 Judgment.ocr Peterson v. Legally Mine (bankr.) Satisfaction of Judgment That is a single avoided transfer, paid off, not a finding of a fraud scheme. The fraud-in-the-inducement theory against the franchise disclosures, that franchisees relied on an “authorized LEGO reseller” pitch and the contradictory FDD and lost money, remains a theory; there is no private right of action under the FTC Franchise Rule, and the state-law fraud and rescission claims would have to be pleaded and proven, with a real risk that an arbitration clause sends them to an arbitrator before a court ever reaches them. Coraud LLC v. Kidville Franchise Co.✓
The fraudulent-transfer chain is alleged, not established. Utah’s voidable-transactions statute could reach an insider transfer made by an insolvent debtor for less than reasonably equivalent value, but the controlling Tenth Circuit authority makes “reasonably equivalent value” a genuine, fact-bound fight, and the cleanest pleaded transfer points at Daniel McNeff and Legally Mine, not at the franchise buyers. Utah Code Ann. § 25-6-203✓ White v. Wardley (In re White)✓ Veil-piercing to “the family and its entities” is an unsettled horizontal extension of a doctrine Utah courts apply with great caution and reserve as a last resort. Jones & Trevor Marketing, Inc. v. Lowry✓ M.J. v. Wisan✓
And the criminal charges are unadjudicated. Benjamin Schneider, the critic behind the videos, faces criminal process in Utah, but a charge is not a conviction, and the presumption of innocence is absolute. Reckless-Ben-Utah-Case-261000376-Information-and-Indictment The civil RICO-style complaint BAM filed against him pleads extortion and fraud predicates that are contested in both amount and actor: the headline “$200,000 stolen” figure traces to a 2023 store promotional valuation, the genuinely unexplained accounting gap is alleged at closer to $10,000, $20,000, and BAM’s own verified complaint concedes that no court or law-enforcement body has found that BAM stole or converted anything. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint These are allegations on both sides of a private dispute, sworn but undecided.
The walls
Three things this investigation could not get past, and they matter as much as anything it found.
The Baker asset-purchase agreement is unfiled. The March 27, 2025 document that would show what the Salem store actually sold for, and whether the consideration was arm’s-length, is the hinge of the successor-liability and fraudulent-transfer theories, and it is exactly the paper that has not been produced. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document Bricks & Minifigs 2023 FDD Without it, “the franchisor resold a distressed store” cannot become “the franchisor moved assets to evade creditors.”
The franchise filing cannot keep its own corporate story straight on whether BAM even has a parent. BAM’s own audited financial statements answer it: they consolidate at BAM Franchising, Inc. as the top entity, with only wholly-owned subsidiaries beneath it, so the likeliest reading is a contradictory filing, not a concealed parent.The FDD admits, in the CFO’s own bio, that a “Franchisor’s Parent” exists, while Item 1 declines to name one. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 The certified Delaware record is now in hand, and it settles the lineage against a hidden parent: the State of Delaware’s Certificate of Merger shows the Oregon “BAM Franchising, Inc.” merged into a same-named Delaware corporation that survived, the company redomesticated into a fresh shell of itself, signed by Ammon McNeff as president, effective for accounting purposes on December 18, 2023 and filed with Delaware on April 18, 2024. Delaware Certificate of Merger: BAM Franchising (Oregon) into Delaware (File No. 2482543) Delaware Registry: Delaware BAM Franchising Entity Status BAM did not merge up into a parent; it moved its own state of incorporation from Oregon to Delaware. And the absence of a parent sharpens the asset story rather than softening it: the value moved sideways, not up, toward BAM IP Holdings, the sons’ own sister company stood up to hold the brand one entity over from anyone a creditor could reach, even as the marks themselves still name BAM Franchising as owner and the recorded transfer has not yet surfaced. The vehicle is built; the title is clouded; that is the move in mid-stride, not a finished one. Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail USPTO SN98706031: TSDR sn98706031 2025-12-02 Registration Certificate ORC20251129121901
And the Comer identity is corroborated, not confirmed. The thread that would connect today’s “Legally Mine” wrapper to a much older promotional world runs through Mark Comer’s name, and a shared name, on this record, is about ninety-five percent, which is not the same as proven. Utah UCC: Legally Mine Business 14441858 Detail
The way in
Here is the point of laying it all out. The people best positioned to act on this file need no further discovery, because the contradictions are already sitting in records they hold.
State franchise examiners and the Federal Trade Commission already possess the self-contradicting FDD. Minnesota registered and later cancelled BAM’s franchise offering; Wisconsin holds a 2026 registration that lists the organizing state as Oregon even as the FDD claims a Delaware identity. Franchise Reg: MN Cards E1722ECD Order Registration Franchise Reg: MN Cards FEA39BFE Order Cancelling Registration Franchise Reg: WI Dfi BAM Franchising Registration Detail Item 1 versus Item 2 is not something a journalist had to reconstruct, it is a discrepancy on file with the very regulators empowered to demand an amended disclosure or pull the registration. FDD: Franchise Disclosure Document BAM FDD 2026 16 C.F.R. § 436.5✓
The SBA’s Office of Inspector General can pull a loan file in an afternoon. The IRS-levy complaint in this record alleges a conflict between Legally Mine’s representations and a federal pandemic-relief certification, an allegation, not a proven loan, and stated here as nothing more. Mcneff V Mcneff Utd 2-21-cv-00048 doc2 Complaint 2021-01-22 But an inspector general does not need a journalist’s inference; it can retrieve the underlying Paycheck Protection Program application and certification directly and see for itself whether the representations square.
State bar unauthorized-practice authorities have a template. Ohio already adjudicated the pattern. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order The same conduct, selling legal-document work and entity structuring across state lines, is reachable by the Utah and Oregon bar regulators through their own injunction-and-restitution machinery, on the long-standing civil-enforcement track that does not depend on the newest, non-retroactive statutes. Utah Code § 78A-9-103✓ ORS §§ 9.160 / 9.166✓ Ohio’s consent decree is persuasive regulatory history they can build on.
Consumer-protection attorneys general have the marketing in hand. A preserved Legally Mine video teaches the Alaska holding-company, charging-order, and “revenge-clause” strategy in the company’s own voice, exactly the kind of cross-border solicitation a state AG examines for deceptive practices, against the backdrop of an out-of-state bar’s UPL finding. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine (UPL) Final Order
One caution governs publication. Benjamin Schneider is under a gag. The ex parte temporary restraining order entered against him on June 2, 2026 includes clauses that forward-bar his speech about the plaintiffs and compel takedown of already-published videos with more than 1.3 million views, a posture that bears the heavy presumption against prior restraints that has stood since the Supreme Court vacated an injunction against publication in 1931. Near v. Minnesota ex rel. Olson✓ Org. for a Better Austin v. Keefe✓ Whatever the merits of that order, it means the most visible complainant is the one least able to speak. Counsel walking any of these doors should choose a complainant who is not muzzled, a franchisee, a former client, a consignor, and let the documents, not the gagged man, do the talking.
The gag may also prove a boomerang. Utah’s Public Expression Protection Act, the state’s anti-SLAPP statute, exists for exactly this fact pattern: a lawsuit aimed at punishing speech on a matter of public concern. A special motion under it freezes discovery the instant it is filed, forces the plaintiff to come forward with admissible proof that its case can actually win, dismisses with prejudice what cannot, and shifts the speaker’s legal fees onto the party that sued. Utah Code § 78B-25-101 et seq. (UPEPA)✓ Mackey v. Krause✓ The window to file it has not closed, and a national franchise that sued a YouTuber for racketeering and won a takedown order without a hearing is, on that motion, the party with the most to lose: the exposure runs toward Bricks & Minifigs, not toward its critic. BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) Verified Complaint BAM v. Schneider-Mansell (UT RICO 260402353) TRO Prelim. Injunction
That is the whole reason to put this in one place. No single record in this file is a verdict. The Ohio order is narrow. The FDD contradiction is damning but civil. The transfers are alleged. The criminal case is unproven and the man at its center is presumed innocent. But the records do not contradict one another about the shape of the thing: the same family, the same Orem and Provo addresses, the same registered agents, the same product re-homed under a new name, the same assets pledged and the same intellectual property held one entity to the side. Utah UCC: Detail Utah UCC: Legally Mine Business 14441858 Detail Utah UCC: BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail Spread across a dozen states and as many dockets, each piece looks like an isolated dispute. Assembled, with every claim marked for what it is, it becomes something a regulator can follow without a single new subpoena. The connections were always there. The way in is simply to see them together.