CONFIRMEDeverything below comes from public court filings, government registries, and BAM’s own documents; where something is only an accusation, it says so
This is the plain-language version of the amendment report, written to be read out loud. The full page has every number and every source.
Back in March, the couple whose Bricks & Minifigs store was taken, Chrystal Law and Benjamin Gorman, sued the company that took it. On August 14 they rewrote that lawsuit and filed it again, bigger. Lawyers call that an amended complaint. It grew from 168 numbered paragraphs to 241, from twelve legal claims to fifteen, and, most importantly, from one defendant to seven.
Remember: a lawsuit is a set of accusations, not a ruling. BAM has not answered this one yet, and everyone named in it is presumed to have done nothing wrong unless a court says otherwise. What makes this filing worth a report is not the accusing. It is where the accusations come from: mostly from documents BAM and its own people wrote and swore to.
The original lawsuit named just the company. The new one adds six names. Brandon Best and Josh Johnson, the two men who ended up with the store, the ones the Keizer file showed were BAM’s own inspector and BAM’s own recruiter. Their two companies. And the two men who run BAM itself: the chief executive, Ammon McNeff, and the chief operations officer, Matthew McNeff, sued personally this time, not just their company.
Here is the unusual part. BAM has its own lawsuit going, against the YouTuber who covered this story and the man whose LEGO collection was in the store, and BAM chose to make it a racketeering case, under Utah RICO, the state’s Pattern of Unlawful Activity Act. To file a case like that, you have to lay out the facts of the scheme, and BAM went further: it made the lawsuit verified, which means BAM’s chief executive and Josh Johnson signed the facts and swore they were true.
Now flip it. The franchisees’ new lawsuit brings the same kind of racketeering claim back against BAM, its two top officers, and the new operators. And it builds that claim, piece by piece, out of the facts BAM’s own people swore. The company that cried racketeering wrote the sworn timeline for the racketeering case against itself.
The franchisees’ new lawsuit quotes that sworn document back at them, over and over. In their own sworn words: that the company Best and Johnson used to take over the store was created on May 2, 2024, more than six months before the store was taken. That on the night of the takeover, Brandon was working for BAM as its hired inventory counter. That BAM took the store and everything in it, and gave itself credit for all of it at what its own filing calls a paltry thirty-eight thousand dollars. And that a year later, about twenty Star Wars sets with stickers nobody recognized were still sitting in a locked cupboard in the back of the store.
That last one matters most. BAM and the new operators have said, publicly and to the police, that Chrystal Law took the missing consigned sets. Their own sworn lawsuit says sets with unrecognized stickers were still in their own locked cupboard a year later. The new lawsuit says those stickers were her consignment labels, the tags that said the sets belonged to the collector.
The takeover company’s paperwork came first
government registries and filed documents
Blue dots: before the takeover. Red: the night the locks changed. Amber: after. Every date is from a government registry or a filed document.
The takeover company: May 2024, six months early. The Eugene company: August 2024, three months early. Then, on November 8, Chrystal called BAM to ask about selling the store because her family needed to move. Six days later, on November 14, BAM took the store and changed the locks that evening. The very next day, the new operators registered their Oregon business name. The sale paperwork followed in March. The new lawsuit puts it in one sentence: no honest termination process produces a successor whose paperwork comes before the default notice.
The first version of the lawsuit described threats from memory. The new version does something smarter: it quotes the recordings. On the night of the takeover, the franchisees recorded their calls with BAM’s Director of Operations, Kai McAllister. As the lawsuit quotes him:
When Benjamin asked whether BAM’s take-it-or-leave-it offer sounded like kindness, the answer was: “It sounds like a threat and I can acknowledge you feeling that because in a way it is.”
About the store’s lease, which BAM was supposed to have signed over to the couple years earlier: “the lease is technically in our name still.” That one sentence matters, because the unpaid rent BAM blamed them for was rent on a lease BAM itself still controlled.
And when Benjamin said out loud that this all started because they had asked about selling the store, the answer was: “Pretty sure that’s what you just said.”
And you do not have to take anyone’s word for what is on those calls: the couple published the whole conversation on their own channel. You can listen to it yourself.
What did the couple supposedly owe? The night of the takeover, BAM’s letter said about ninety-seven thousand dollars. On the phone the same night, about a hundred thousand. Later, in its own filings, a hundred and seventy-five thousand. And against all of that, BAM gave itself credit of just thirty-eight thousand for an entire store: all the inventory, the fixtures, the equipment, everything.
One of the new legal claims is about exactly that. Utah’s commercial code says a company that seizes property to cover a debt has to sell it fairly, tell people, and account for what it got. And if it hands the property to its own people instead, the law counts the property at what a fair sale would have brought, not at whatever the company felt like writing down. The lawsuit asks the court to rule that under those rules, the debt is wiped out entirely.
On June 4, BAM put out a nationwide press release about the Salem store. It said Chrystal kept three sets of books. It said she had a hidden version of the consignment records. It said she owed close to two hundred thousand dollars. And it opened by calling BAM an authorized LEGO reseller, when LEGO itself had already written, months earlier, that Bricks and Minifigs is not affiliated with the LEGO Group in any way.
That press release is now Exhibit J. The lawsuit says its claims about Chrystal are false, and that accusing a businessperson of keeping crooked books is the kind of statement the law treats as defamatory on its face. And because the release carried the names and titles of the two executives, that claim is aimed at Ammon McNeff and Matthew McNeff personally.
The biggest new claim says this was not one store’s bad breakup. It points to Canby, Oregon, where another franchisee, a woman over sixty-five who put her life savings in, says BAM took everything in her store in 2023 and never gave her an inventory or a valuation either. Her lawsuit is still going. It points to reports about Keizer and Springfield that the collector put in writing to LEGO’s top executive. Under Utah RICO, if you prove a pattern, the court can award double damages plus attorney fees. That is what this count asks for.
One place the new lawsuit actually undersells its own point, and we say so because we grade everyone the same. It says BAM’s disclosure tables reported no Oregon termination at all the year the store was taken. The truth is stranger. BAM’s filings tried to tell the story of this one store five different ways: one exhibit lists the termination, with Benjamin’s last name spelled wrong. The table next to it says zero terminations, in a row where the math literally does not add up. The next year’s edition quietly changed the same historical numbers, and its own new row does not add up either. The full reading is at the disclosure file.
BAM’s side of the story is on the record too, and you should know it. It says Chrystal told them she was going to close the store and walk away. It says the unpaid bills were real. It says the takeover was scheduled with her, not an ambush. And in its own lawsuit it accuses the couple, the collector, and the YouTuber of ganging up on the company. A judge in that other case gave BAM a temporary restraining order against some of those people in June. None of that has been proven either. Both sides are accusations now. That is what a lawsuit is.
The lawsuit names the paper that would end the arguing: the store’s sales records, which BAM took with the store. The price the new operators actually paid. The appraisal BAM promised in its own termination letter and, the lawsuit says, never did. And the recording of the morning meeting. The case is not waiting on guesses. It is waiting on documents that already exist.
This is a plain-language retelling. Every number, every quote, and every source is in the full amendment report, including the amendment itself, with every change tracked. Nothing here is a finding of a court. Both lawsuits are accusations, no court has ruled on them, and everyone is presumed innocent.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam