PRIMARY SOURCE
This is the plain-language edition of the entity swap. Same facts, same sources, none of the record numbers, nothing put into the colored grade boxes. Every claim below is stated again on the cited edition, with links to the state’s own registry pages.
A LEGO franchise company built its whole defense on one idea: the stores are independently owned, and the company behind the brand keeps its distance. Oregon keeps a public list of who is behind every company in the state. On that list, the paper companies behind the two Oregon stores are dead. The companies that replaced them lead back to the franchise company’s own office in Utah. And at the store where the missing LEGO collection has been selling, the franchise company itself is now written in as an owner.
When someone opens a franchise store, they set up a small company to run it. The store belongs to that small company, the small company belongs to the store owner, and the big company that runs the brand stays out of it. That separation is the whole point. It is why the brand company can say: not our store, not our doing.
After the takeover of the Keizer store, the paper looked normal. Two little corporations existed for the two Oregon stores, each with the store operator’s name signed on them. One was even filed the very morning after the takeover, while the rental truck from that night was being returned across town.
Both are dead. Not closed down by their owner. Killed by the state, because neither one ever filed the yearly report that keeps a company alive. Not once, in their whole existence. The Eugene one died in the fall of 2025. The Keizer one died at the start of 2026. Missed paperwork happens to small businesses all the time, and on its own it means sloppiness, not scheming. What matters is what came next.
Two new companies appeared at the same two store addresses. The store operator’s name is not on either of them. Instead, the man on both is the franchise company’s own chief operating officer, and the home address for everything is the franchise company’s own building in Provo, Utah. On the Eugene company, the state’s page lists two owners: the chief operating officer, and the franchise company itself, by name.
The names of the two new companies are worth a look. The Eugene one is called Willamette Forest Ops, which tells you nothing. The Keizer one is called BAMFSALEM, one word. Read it slowly and it comes apart into the franchise company’s initials plus the name of the city. And because it is written as one fused word, typing the company’s initials into the state’s own search box does not find it. We checked. The search returns a hundred and eight companies, and this is not one of them. You find it only if you already know it is there.
The short state summaries name the owners. The actual founding papers, also public, name who created them, and they were signed under penalty of perjury. Both new companies were set up and signed by the same person: Adam Brimhall, filing from the franchise company’s own building in Provo. On the Eugene one, all three people who organized it gave that same Provo building as their home address, and not one of them is the store operator the company calls the independent owner. This site has met Adam Brimhall before. His statement is one of the two the company handed the police to use against the journalist, and he is, by several accounts, the son of the franchise company’s chief financial officer. So the papers that put the franchise company’s name onto the Eugene store, and its second-in-command over the Keizer store, were signed by the finance chief’s son, from the company’s own address.
Here is the part anyone can check in a minute. Search Oregon’s list for the franchise company’s own name and exactly one company has ever existed by that name there. It is dead. The state shut it down three times over the years for not filing its reports, twice it came back, and after the third time, in the summer of 2024, it never came back. That was five months before the takeover. No version of the company from any other state has registered in Oregon since. To be fair, an out-of-state owner does not have to register in Oregon just to own a piece of an Oregon company, and the company that owns the piece is probably the one now based in Delaware. But the site has already shown that the Delaware one is behind on its taxes there. So the owner written onto the Eugene store’s paperwork is a name that is dead in Oregon, behind on its dues in Delaware, and the filing does not say which one it means.
One more thing is missing. Oregon also keeps a list of the trade names businesses hang over the door. The only live “Bricks & Minifigs” names on that list belong to a different store entirely, the brand’s original location in Canby, owned by someone unconnected to any of this. Nobody has ever registered the brand name for the Eugene store or the Keizer store. Two stores have sold under that sign for years, through four different companies, and the name on the sign is registered to none of them.
The paperwork did not move in silence, and it did not move in a vacuum either. In March, police had raided the journalist’s home with their own cameras rolling. In late May he published his first big video about the missing collection, eighty-five minutes long. The same day, the company posted a note saying consignment deals like the collection’s were flatly against its rules. Six days later it sued him, attached that note to the lawsuit, and within a day the public version of the note grew new paragraphs the court’s copy does not have. At the end of May the police department published the footage of his cases to the whole world, footage he had paid for and not yet received, and his video about being arrested followed the next day.
In early June he posted that all the footage was out. That same calendar day, the company published what it called its official timeline of events, where the claim softened to: consignment had never been part of the rules. And that same calendar day, the franchise company’s name went onto the ownership line of the Eugene store’s new company. Three moves, one date. Which happened first that day, nobody can tell from the record. A week and a half later the claim softened again: never approved. In early July the gag came off and he posted a thirty-seven-second video saying he could talk again, then a forty-seven-minute one whose title says the company tried to get him arrested to stop it. The day after that one, the company put out its next statement, and the claim was simply gone. So over fifty days, the company’s words about the collection retreated step by step to nothing, its paperwork advanced step by step into the stores, and both moved on the videos’ clock.
The state’s list shows who is behind a company, not what the company does day to day. It does not say what share each owner holds. And the timing cuts both ways: the franchise company’s ownership stake at the Eugene store starts in June 2026, and most of the LEGO from the missing collection was sold before that, under the earlier company. So this is not proof the brand company owned the store while those sales happened. What it shows is where things stand now: the brand company owns a piece of the store where the rest of the collection sits, its officer holds the pen at both stores, and every replacement moved the paperwork away from the store operator and toward the brand company’s office.
To be fair: franchise companies do sometimes step in when a location is in trouble, and new paperwork during a legal fight can have ordinary reasons, including a simple change of who runs the stores, which is not itself wrongdoing. An out-of-state owner not registering in Oregon is normal. A missed report or an unregistered trade name is a small lapse with a small penalty, common among small businesses. The document that lists the operator came out a few months before the new filings, so it is a before-and-after, not a lie on its face. Setting up or signing a company’s papers is a normal, lawful thing to do, and none of the people who organized these companies are accused of anything by being named on a public filing. No court has ruled on any of this, and no one named here has been found guilty of anything.
The company said: those stores are not ours. The state’s own list now says: one of them is partly yours, your officer signs for both, your building is their address, and the man you called the independent owner is not on a single page. Both of those cannot be true at once, and this time the record was written by the state of Oregon.
Where this comes from. Everything above is on the Oregon Secretary of State’s public company registry, retrieved the day this was posted, and every registry page and search is linked from the cited edition, so you can pull the same records yourself. Who carried out the takeover is in the Baker Bricks update. The trucks are in the second U-Haul. The storage units are in the storage units. What happened to the collection is in the Keizer file.
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