Man in jail for hoarding Lego loot

PORTLAND – A 40-year-old man is behind bars, accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of a toy geared toward the 6-and-up crowd: Lego.

To haul away the evidence, agents working for the U.S. Postal Inspector said they had to back a 20-foot truck to William Swanberg’s house in Reno, Nev., carting away mountains of the multicolored bricks.

Swanberg was indicted Wednesday by a grand jury in Hillsboro, a Portland suburb, which charged him with stealing Legos from Target stores in Oregon. Target estimates Swanberg stole and resold on the Internet up to $200,000 of the brick sets pilfered from their stores in Oregon as well as Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California.

When no one was looking, Swanberg switched the bar codes on Lego boxes, replacing an expensive one with a cheaper label, said Detective Troy Dolyniuk, a member of the Washington County fraud and identity theft enforcement team.

Target officials contacted police after noticing the same pattern at their stores in the five western states. A Target security guard stopped Swanberg at a Portland-area store on Nov. 17, after he bought 10 boxes of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon set.

In his parked car, detectives found 56 of the Star Wars set, valued at $99 each, as well as 27 other Lego sets. In a laptop found inside Swanberg’s car, investigators also found the addresses of numerous Target stores in the Portland area, their locations carefully plotted on mapping software.

Records of the Lego collector’s Web site, Bricklink.com, show that Swanberg has sold nearly $600,000 worth of Legos since 2002, said Dolyniuk.

Attempts to reach Swanberg at the Washington County jail, where he is being held on $250,000 bail, were unsuccessful. It’s unknown at this time if he has retained an attorney.