BAM!

© 3DKiwi incredibly detailed DIY orrery

Bricks and Mortars

What? You haven’t heard about Reckless Ben and the Lego legacy larceny?

I’ve intended for weeks to write about a series of crimes in Oregon and Utah. They didn’t begin with Reckless Ben Schneider, but the scene involves alleged crooked franchisors, alleged crooked cops, and, dare I suggest, an alleged crooked judge. All of them are dumber than a box of plastic blocks — which, ironically, started the whole farce. As SleuthSayers states and prudence requires, I must insert the word alleged liberally.

And by plastic blocks, I mean bricks, the official Lego term for those small and incredibly expensive plastic chips embraced by children of every age. “Legos for adults” is a thing now, especially sets priced in the hundreds of dollars and brilliant user designed mechanical computers, calculators, clocks, calendars, and complex devices by frustrated engineers.

Legos are powerful. When a certain public official proposed seizing Greenland, Denmark snorted and uttered one word: “Lego.” Immediately the U.S. saluted and stood down as the plastic barons continued taking over the planet.

Following the plot of nefarious doings is difficult, so I’ve included a handy chart of the bad guys and the good.

We begin with Gary Mansell, an ill and elderly man in Virginia who’s facing his remaining time on this mortal coil. His hobby became an investment obsession, and he purchased Lego sets until he had amassed the largest private Lego Star Wars collection on the continent. He planned to cash in his gazillion sets to help finance his grandchildren’s education.

Toward that end, his son Bryan took on the task of liquidating the collection and arranged with a Keizer, Oregon Bricks and Minifigs (BAM) store to sell the collection on consignment. Store franchisees Chrystal and Benjamin Gorman initially estimated a worth in excess of $200,000, although some say less. However, with certain individual sets running as high as $10–15k and some minifigs valued in the hundreds, $200,000 doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Every month, the Gormans sent checks to the Mansells… until they didn’t. When Bryan investigated, he learned the Gormans had been unceremoniously booted out and new franchise owners had been appointed: Brandon Best, who claimed he didn’t know nuthin’ about birthin’ no babies, and Josh Johnson, who told the Mansells to get lost or he’d call the cops.

Enter Reckless Ben, who operates YouTube and Patreon channels. Ben helps people recover loss of money and loss of dignity. He agreed to help the Mansells. That’s when the game changed. Reckless Ben might look like he’s seventeen (he’s actually thirty) with hair styled by fanjets, but he’s phlegmatic and very, very creative.

Thus began ducking and weaving. Corporate Bricks & Minifigs has a reputation for bullying, discouraging legal action by threatening to drag out litigation until they financially drain the opposition. Ammon and Matt McNeff didn’t do themselves any favors by not doing the honest thing: We don’t know nuthin’ about missing Legos, and anyway they aren’t worth what the Mansells claim, and they violated our consignment policy, if the Legos exist, which they don’t, and if they did, they don’t deserve them back, and…

But worse than the McNeffs was Josh Johnson, the new franchise owner who lives not in Oregon but in American Fork, Utah, population ~33,500. Much of the drama centered around Ben attempting to serve papers on Johnson, who went out of his way to avoid service. Some reports suggest Johnson is an attorney, and if so, knowingly lied about court documents being fake and that he could refuse service. Even though the cop verified Ben was telling the truth about the legitimacy of the papers, the lawfulness of the process server, and the fact that Johnson could not refuse service, Johnson racked up sufficient lies to get the American Fork police to arrest Ben, claiming his family lived in fear of their lives.

This type of public corruption isn’t a matter of bribery, but “You ain’t from around here,” a willingness to accede to a lying local rather than do the correct and legal thing for an outsider. At one juncture, a cop tells Ben, “We do things different here.”

Thus, day after day at the behest of Johnson, American Fork police tailed Reckless Ben, stopping him multiple times on false pretenses — such as running a stop sign when police cameras clearly show a full stop. It appears Lt. Quinn Adamson so roughly handled Schneider that he apparently dislocated Ben’s shoulder. In another incident, American Fork police claimed Ben was transporting heroin and spent three hours taking apart his car. When Johnson claimed the missing Legos were actually stolen by Ben, police raided his B&B and arrested everyone inside. Throughout, police kept muting their microphones as they scratched their heads trying to find reasons to arrest Ben. However, in court, a recording appears to reveal a judge colluding with a prosecutor looking for a way to jail Ben.

The saga is extensive and entertaining, thanks to the humor and imagination of Reckless Ben. The case came to me early on, thanks to John Bryan, “The Civil Rights Lawyer” (TCRL), and shortly thereafter by other attorneys I follow such as Legal Eagle. Soon it seemed every outraged lawyer was commenting, and the case swept into other channels before making the leap to The Wall Street Journal. The Dadvocate dedicated one of her slots to the story from an entirely different viewpoint, altogether avoiding mention of cops and lawyers.

In one dirty trick, Bricks & Minifigs, used to getting their own way in court, sent a takedown notice to Patreon, demanding Reckless Ben's account be shut down, content removed, and defunded. Here’s how that went:

So push aside your 2500 piece Lego rendering of Hogwarts, grab a bowl of popcorn, and google Reckless Ben, Legos, BAM, and/or American Fork. It’s good for an afternoon’s entertainment in the guise of crime research. At least that’s what I claim.

Sleeping Giants

Mysteries rely, perhaps more than we like to admit, on evil. Murder and violence are essential to the genre and often simply a given. Not so in the novels of Rene Denfeld. Yes, there is violence, including violence against children, and murder pops up as often as it does in most mysteries. What makes her four novels different is an obsession with the the roots of evil.

In Denfeld's work, evil stems from evil with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, and it has its roots in the same institution: the family. The sacrifice of children in the House of Atreus caused a cascade of blood violence. In Sleeping Giants, as in Denfeld's terrific The Enchanted and the Child Finder stories, cruelty to children produces monsters who, in turn, terrify and traumatize the next generation.

All this may sound rather grim and formulaic, but Denfeld is an excellent writer with a real knack for creating rounded characters, especially young ones. She also produces sensitive portraits of characters who are more or less outside the norm. These range from the poetic, but truly psychopathic, hero of The Enchanted to Amanda, the dedicated zoo keeper of Sleeping Giants, whose mind, as she admits, does not work quite like other people's.

Amanda has trouble with clocks and making change and simple math, but she understands her charge, Molly, an unhappy polar bear. She proves to be brave and resilient and, though no great student, a very competent researcher.

Unsurprisingly, her twin areas of interest both involve families. She wants to know just how Molly came to be orphaned in the far north of Alaska, and she wants to know what happened to her older brother Dennis, who, unlike her, was not adopted as an infant, but confined in Brightwood, a supposedly progressive facility for disturbed children and youth.

Located on the wild northern coast of Oregon, Brightwood is an abandoned relic by the time Amanda sets foot in it. But the reader knows from the opening pages that Dennis was indeed incarcerated there and that, subjected to holding time, a popular crank therapy, he committed suicide by running into the treacherous and dangerous surf. All that's left is a gravestone and the general reluctance of locals in the small town to discuss Brightwood, although they have some good things to say about Martha King, the former superintendent.

Amanda might well have become discouraged but for another well drawn character, Larry, an ex-cop who is mourning his late wife and falling into depression in his remote cabin. A chance meeting with Amanda arouses his protective instincts, and he adds his expertise and some of his former professional contacts to her search.

The unraveling of the mystery of Dennis's life is nicely done, but the heart of the book lies elsewhere, in the glimpses of the difficult and withdrawn child's life, his friendship with Ralph, the custodian, and his brief moments of joy. Denfeld has some surprises with her adult characters, too, and despite the grim events and the narrowness of many of the characters' lives, the novel eventually comes down on the side of cautious hope.

Rene Denfeld

Evil generates evil, but goodness has its powers, too, if much less spectacular ones. Evil flashes out in violence, all is quick and final. Goodness is slow, patient, in for the long haul. Not too many books in any genre illustrate this contrast as well as Sleeping Giants, which manages to produce an entertaining mystery as well.

---

Janice Law's The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books.

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is also available from Apple Books.