PRIMARY SOURCEthe email Cookerly sent to researchers, and the firm’s own case studies
The firm now answering press questions for Bricks & Minifigs is Cookerly Public Relations, an Atlanta agency. This site can say so because Cookerly’s own senior vice president said so, in an email obtained by this site. What Cookerly is is a matter of its own public record. For twenty-five years it has specialized in a single kind of work, defeating organized opposition to unpopular clients, and it has described that work, in its own words, on its own website.
An email that Cookerly sent to researchers covering the Bricks & Minifigs story, obtained by this site, shows a senior vice president of the firm, Mike Rieman, writing from his cookerly.com address under his full company signature: “I’m on the media relations team for Bricks & Minifigs, and my understanding is you’re working on a story. Please let me know how I can assist.” He reached out first, then followed with a Bricks & Minifigs press release quoting chief executive Ammon McNeff, sent through a marketing-analytics link of the kind that records whether the recipient opens it. The message’s routing carries the Microsoft 365 identifiers of Cookerly’s own email system, and the direct and cell numbers printed in Rieman’s signature match those on press releases the same executive has sent for the firm’s other clients. Cookerly is not named anywhere in the public coverage of this dispute; the company that has been named in the wire releases is a different, consumer-facing agency. The crisis firm does not sign the press releases. That is what it is paid for.
The clearest example is one the firm no longer displays. In versions of its website archived between 2001 and 2003, Cookerly described representing Von Roll, the operator of a hazardous-waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, in what it called a battle “against Greenpeace and the Clinton administration.” The firm wrote that it had “conceived specific plans of attack on all target groups,” and that founder Carol Cookerly had “served as chief spokesperson” throughout.
The pattern repeats across two decades, in the firm’s own case studies. For a proposed coal plant in Georgia, Cookerly said its job was “countering” the “groups opposed to coal power generation and mining,” in part by placing guest editorials and letters to the editor. For a municipal landfill, it described work to “counter opposition.” For a mining project facing a local ordinance, it ran what it called a “quick strike” campaign “to keep the project alive.” And in a case it describes without naming the client, a major health insurer facing a grassroots revolt by its own employees over changes to their plans, Cookerly says it went to work “aggressively correcting misinformation spread by the opposition,” after which the insurer “retained 94 percent of its members.” Its 2001 menu of crisis services named the category plainly. Among the matters it listed handling: “labor union disputes.”
Most of that history rests on Cookerly’s own account of it. Three engagements are documented independently, and each is instructive. Carol Cookerly was the named spokeswoman for Cobb EMC, a Georgia electric cooperative, as its board fought to hold off its own member-owners during a governance fight whose chief executive was later indicted. In 2018, the firm’s now chief executive, Cory Stewart, was the press contact when World Acceptance, a high-cost consumer lender, announced that a federal consumer-protection investigation had closed. And in 2020, when Twin Pines Minerals pressed to strip-mine heavy minerals about three miles from the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, the Washington Post reported that the company’s defense of the project reached the paper “in an email passed through an Atlanta-based firm called Cookerly Public Relations.” The Environmental Protection Agency had called the project’s likely impact “substantial and unacceptable.” None of these three clients appears on Cookerly’s current published client list.
Several of the case studies quoted above are gone from cookerly.com, and the manner of their going is uneven, so it is worth being precise. The Von Roll incinerator pages disappeared in an ordinary site redesign around 2005, and nothing should be read into that. The later record is more selective. In a 2015 culling of the firm’s case-study catalog, the landfill study was dropped while roughly a dozen other studies were carried forward, and the coal-plant study was kept but stripped of the client’s name from its title and web address. Between June and September of 2016, the mining study was deleted on its own from an otherwise unchanged index. After a 2016 relaunch cleared the entire case-study section, the firm rebuilt only its promotional studies, and none of the contested ones returned. What Cookerly keeps visible today, for clients such as Mercedes-Benz and McDonald’s, is the flattering half of the portfolio.
The fair counterpoint. Representing an unpopular client is lawful, and a public-relations firm is entitled to do it. Nothing here claims that Cookerly owns, controls, or profits from any client’s underlying business beyond its fee, or that the firm is part of any enterprise; on the network this site documents, Cookerly appears to be exactly what it presents itself as, an outside vendor hired for work it openly advertises. The leaked internal “outrage cycle” memo that Bricks & Minifigs sent its franchisees was not written by Cookerly; it predates the firm’s documented involvement, and its language is native to the McNeffs’ own asset-protection business. Every quotation above is reproduced as written in the firm’s own materials, the court and news records, or the email. This site withholds the identities of the researchers who received that email to protect its source, and names no private individual. Nothing here is a finding of law, and every person named is presumed to have acted lawfully.
Sources. The email is from Mike Rieman, senior vice president, Cookerly Public Relations, sent from a cookerly.com address and forwarding a Bricks & Minifigs press release dated June 29, 2026 that quotes chief executive Ammon McNeff; obtained by this site, with the recipients withheld for their protection. The firm’s self-descriptions are from cookerly.com and its captures in the Internet Archive: the Von Roll/WTI case pages (archived 2001 to 2003), the Power4Georgians coal-plant and Greenbow landfill studies, the anonymized mining and health-insurer studies, and the 2001 crisis-services menu. The Cobb EMC engagement is reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (July 19, 2009 and September 23, 2010); the World Acceptance engagement in the company’s BusinessWire release of January 22, 2018; and the Twin Pines engagement in the Washington Post of November 25, 2020. The enterprise this firm was hired to defend is documented on The machine and the map.
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