Legal YouTube is obsessed with the LEGO/Bricks And Minifigs scandal

This situation has been blowing up on YouTube for months now (Coffeezilla dropped a massive audit on it last week), and the web of liabilities is making my head spin. I’d love to hear some legal perspectives on how this would actually play out in court.

Here is the TL;DR of the facts:

• The Consignment: Guy consigns ~$107k worth of rare Star Wars LEGOs to a local Bricks & Minifigs (BAM) franchise.

• The Messy First Owners: The original franchisees sell a chunk of the LEGOs, don't pay the guy, keep terrible accounting, and eventually lose the store.

• The Corporate Takeover: BAM Corporate seizes the store overnight and hands the keys to a new franchisee.

• The U-Haul: The new franchisee allegedly loads the remaining ~$21k of consigned LEGOs into a U-Haul and takes them to a different location he owns.

• The Cover-up: Corporate publicly claims they knew nothing about the consignment inventory and that the new guy drove a regular rental car. Internet sleuths (and Coffeezilla) prove Corporate actually owned the Google Doc tracking the inventory, and pull footage of the U-Haul.

• The Vigilante: Another YouTuber ("Reckless Ben") gets involved, confronts store employees, and escalates it to the point where the police are called.

So two questions:

1. Who is actually on the hook to make the original owner whole? Does the original franchisee hold 100% of the liability for breach of contract, or does Corporate inherit the liability of a consignment agreement when they seize a store's assets? Furthermore, is the new franchisee guilty of conversion for fencing the remaining stock?

2. Corporate executives blatantly lied to the public (and allegedly the original owner) about the existence of the inventory spreadsheets and the U-Haul. At what point does a sloppy corporate takeover cross the line from a civil contract dispute into criminal fraud, theft by deception, or spoliation of evidence?