The Trial: How I lost $1 million dollars and 7 years in a lawsuit over Brain Flakes

I thought I was good.

Until I met Sol.

Solomon Rosengarten is a lawyer from Brooklyn. He has an AOL email address. He is not great with the mute button on his phone. He sometimes comes across as incompetent.

But, he is the best damned lawyer I have ever known.

Sol is a killer. Sol is bulletproof. He is the angry grandpa I never had, the one who never wanted me as his grandchild.

And nothing, sticks to Sol.

He is the lawyer for the Creative Kids companies, which my company has been fighting for 7 years.

I have lost $1 million dollars and counting.

This is the story of how I managed to do that.

It’s the story of how lawsuits can blow up in your face.

And it’s a story about humanity, or lack thereof.

It will teach you the ins and outs of our legal system in a way that only a non-lawyer can.

Year 1: Cease and Desist

It begins in December 2018 with a cease a desist letter I sent Creative Kids asking them to stop.

They were selling interlocking plastic discs and branding them Brain Flakes.

Just one problem: my company Viahart was also selling interlocking plastic discs and branding them Brain Flakes.

And Brain Flakes® was and is our invention, trademark, and our brand. [1]

The evidence I intended to bring to trial. The real Brain Flakes is on the left (in yellow top packaging), Creative Kids’ products are on the right (transparent tops). I was going to wear the orange tie.

Creative Kids’ products were confusing our customers.

We got angry comments on social media and even a letter with the Better Business Bureau complaining how we had made our discs thinner.

We hadn’t. Creative Kids, presumably to save money, had made the discs of their fake Brain Flakes thinner.

My cease and desist letter earned me a call with their COO to discuss settling our dispute.

CREATIVE KIDS: “We can pay you a 3% royalty on our sales”

VIAHART: “You can’t counterfeit us and then pay a royalty like you licensed our brand. We need $1 million dollars.”

CREATIVE KIDS: “Well, a 3% royalty is all you’re going to get, if you even deserve that.”

VIAHART: “I want to speak to the decision maker.”

CREATIVE KIDS: “You don’t want to talk to Sam.” [2]

Creative Kids’ LinkedIn said they had over 500 employees. They sold to Walmart, Target, and Dollar General. They had licensing deals with kids TV giants Cocomelon and Blippi. They were making big money. We were tiny compared to them and they had ripped off our product, stolen our trademark, and hurt our brand.

I wanted my money and now I really wanted to talk to Sam, especially because they told me I didn’t want to.

Sam is the patriarch of the Lapa family which owns Creative Kids.

Sam, aka Samuel aka Shmulik aka Shmuel (my favorite), has a short-temper and is tough-as-nails. Everyone is afraid of Sam.

He has also gone bankrupt a few times, both personally and through his companies, but we’ll get to that later.

I wanted to talk to Sam, because he was the decision maker.

The best way to settle a legal dispute is to get the lawyers out of the room and have a face-to-face conversation between the people in charge.

It’s contrary to the legal advice of every lawyer, but it works.

I’ve never spoken to Sam, and this case has never settled.

After receiving my cease and desist letter, the fake Brain Flakes were replaced with a new brand from Creative Kids, Creative Flakes.

While it wasn’t as bad as using Brain Flakes, this new Creative Flakes brand continued to confuse our customers and steal our sales.

We needed to file a lawsuit and I needed a lawyer.

It would turn out to be the first of 12.

Lawyers say “you need to trust your attorney”.

I say “you need an attorney that you can trust”. [3]

Year 2: Texas

We filed our lawsuit in August 2019 in East Texas, where I had moved from New York to open a warehouse.

We alleged trademark infringement, counterfeiting, and unfair competition against the 4 companies that seemed to be selling the infringing products: Creative Kids Far East LLC, Creative Kids Online LLC, CK Online LLC, and Creative Kids Enterprises LLC.

It is not enough to win a lawsuit, you must also be able to get paid.

If you sue companies that don’t have assets like cash and real estate, you can be wasting your time and money.

With 500+ employees, a factory in China, and business with big retailers like Walmart and Target, surely, there would be assets to pay the damages for knocking off our brand!

We never got that far in the Texas courts.

Case dismissed.

Home court advantage matters in law and we had lost it.

I wanted to fight this case locally before Texans who would hear how I was sleeping in our East Texas warehouse to make the business work.

But now our Texas judge was saying we had to sue in New York.

Year 3: New York

This is about when this lawsuit started to get expensive and also when I’d first meet Sol.

I needed a new lawyer, one who could help my Texas lawyer litigate in New York.

Lawyers are expensive, especially in New York, and now I wasn’t just paying for the work of two lawyers, I was being charged for them to talk to each other, too.

We refiled the lawsuit in New York and now had to “serve the defendants”.

You can’t just email your legal filing, you need to prove that who you are suing really got it.

To do that, you hire what’s called a “process server”.

“Hello, are you Molson Hart, president of Viahart, maker of Brain Flakes?”

“Why yes, I am!”

“Here’s a lawsuit.”

The attorneys for Creative Kids, the ones who managed to have our Texas lawsuit dismissed, refused to accept service for the New York lawsuit, so we had to deliver the papers to Creative Kids directly in New York.

But whenever our process server tried to do that, Creative Kids would refuse and threaten to call the police.

I was beginning to wonder.

With Creative Kids putting our trademark Brain Flakes® on their packaging I thought our case was a slam dunk, but years had passed since that cease and desist letter and no progress had been made.

Surely they would be punished for this, right?

Year 4: Countersued

This time our New York complaint was not dismissed.

It took over a year for the New York court to reach that decision and in the time between I racked up a lot of legal bills.

Creative Kids’ attorney seemed bad. He even missed a court date.

If there was a time to fight, this was it.

But that attorney was Sol.

As soon as their motion to dismiss our complaint was denied, Sol filed counterclaims.

Defamation. They accused my company of damaging their reputation when our Brain Flakes Twitter account and I personally wrote the following:

This is a screenshot from Sol’s and Creative Kids’ counterclaim filing with the Court

Tortious interference. We reported their products to Amazon and Amazon took them down. They said that we knowingly and harmfully interfered with their relationship with Amazon by doing so.

For the damage done, Sol asked for “no less than $1,000,000 and for reasonable attorney’s fees and costs”.

Year 5: Discovery

Discovery is one of the most expensive parts of a lawsuit.

You request documents from the other side and they request documents from you.

The intention is to request documents necessary to prove your claims.

Your attorneys fight over whether the documents requested are relevant or excessive and the judge decides what documents each party must produce to the other side.

Despite Creative Kids changing their packaging and brand name multiple times, they didn’t provide any communications or documents related to that.

Further, even though they sued my company for interfering with their relationship with Amazon, they didn’t provide any correspondence between them and Amazon about Amazon taking down their products.

I knew Creative Kids had illegally destroyed their documents, but also knew that Amazon had kept a copy.

And Amazon kindly provided many of them.

We filed a motion with the court for legal fees for their failure to produce the incriminating documents and waited for the judge to rule.

Year 6: Trial I

There are 5 major moments in a lawsuit: Filing the complaint, surviving the motion to dismiss (we didn’t in Texas but did in New York), discovery, motion for summary judgment, and the trial.

Sol acknowledged that his client should not have branded their product as Brain Flakes so we asked the Court to rule against them in our motion for summary judgment.

Unfortunately, the Court decided it could not because it was not clear which of the four Creative Kids companies we had sued had been the one which had branded their product Brain Flakes.

And by extension, the Court ruled that these four companies were interconnected and would be viewed as one for the rest of the case.

And this is where it gets interesting. This is where Sol begins to shine.

The trial, which will be expensive, is scheduled for July 2024.

Let’s see if we can settle.

They say we need to pay them $40,000 if we want to settle and end the lawsuit.

While the lawsuit at this point was taking a major toll on me and my company, that offer was so disconnected from reality (or so I thought…) that I decided to forge ahead with the lawsuit.

No deal.

The Court awards us a to-be-determined amount of money for Creative Kids’ failure to provide their communications with Amazon.

Let’s take it to trial.

Two business days before the trial begins, with all the flights to New York purchased, all the legal bills paid for, and all the work done, they file bankruptcy with one of the four companies, a shell.

When you file for bankruptcy you are asking the courts to manage your company so that your debts can be paid.

And when you do this, it pauses your lawsuits.

Remember how the Court could not determine which Creative Kids company did what? Well, since the companies were ruled to be one, Sol argues that the bankruptcy of the shell company triggers a pause of the lawsuit for all four companies.

The Court agrees and the trial is cancelled.

It gets worse.

The bankruptcy filing was done by Sam’s son who is a lawyer, David Lapa.

And even worse, the whole bankruptcy is a sham.

According to the documents, the shell, which has no assets and no revenue, only owes money to one company:

Ours.

But since the Court never determined how much money Creative Kids would have to pay for not providing their Amazon communications, they don’t yet owe our company any money at all.

The whole thing makes no sense.

We ask the bankruptcy court to un-pause the main lawsuit and punish the attorneys who filed a fake bankruptcy to delay the trial.

Year 7: Trial II

The court determines that there should be no punishment for the bankruptcy filing.

The government administrator responsible for managing the Creative Kids company in bankruptcy days later writes:

“I have neither received any property nor paid any money on account of this estate…there is no property available for distribution from the estate…I request that I be discharged from any further duties as trustee…This case was pending for 9 months.”

The bankruptcy case is dismissed.

Seeing the games played with bankruptcy, we had attempted to add Sam Lapa and his two sons, David Lapa and Daniel Lapa aka Daniel Delapa as defendants to our lawsuit.

It fails.

I am despondent.

For years, I’ve been calling in to all court conferences between my attorneys and Sol, listening to him mumble and bumble, make incoherent statements, unable to keep the facts straight, taking his phone off mute to have conversations with his wife, while the Court repeatedly asks “for the person who has their phone not on mute, to mute their phone”.

But, nothing sticks to Sol.

We get new trial dates: November 17th, 2025, 9 months away. The case is older than all of my children. I’ve been married to Creative Kids, longer than I’ve been married to my wife.

“You know Molson, you remind me of the main character in The Trial”, my 10th attorney tells me.

The Trial is the story of a man whose life becomes a never-ending inexplicable lawsuit.

My wife’s friend is getting married in Brooklyn. Sol is from Brooklyn.

In the freezing cold, I wander the Brooklyn streets, trying to understand and I think I figure it out.

I think I’m trapped in The Trial, but Sol and Creative Kids think I’m in a different book by Kafka, The Cockroach.

And there’s nothing wrong with stepping on a cockroach.

I call the richest person I know for advice.

At first, he’s incredulous — They put the trademark on their packaging? They destroyed documents? They came out of bankruptcy? 7 years? You’re wandering around Brooklyn? But he ultimately gets it.

“Look, Molson, you need to forget about it. You need to let it go.”

He was right.

I make a best and final offer to Sol to settle the case. No answer. I basically forget about it.

I had prepaid for the trial which was canceled so other than to periodically speak to my attorneys, I don’t do much. I just go with the flow and wait for the second trial.

That is until a new company is born.

Born to Play

Blippi is a character created by Steven Grossman aka Steezy Grossman aka Stevin John, which took audiences by storm on Youtube.

Sam’s son Daniel has left Creative Kids and formed a new company called Born to Play with Blippi.

Multiple employees from Creative Kids join Born to Play. Creative Kids stops posting on social media, they seem to be winding down.

They sell the same products with the same packaging to the same customers in an office down the street.

Look carefully and you’ll see how the Creative Kids item on the left is basically the same as the one on the right from Born to Play

Blippi and the Lapas, a business partnership made in heaven.

Daniel Delapa on Blippi: “He was hands down one of the most attentive, detail oriented talents I have worked with and a friend. Last night over dinner he reminded me of how kindness is free and no matter where you are in life, being a good person and success are not mutually exclusive.”

Blippi on Daniel Delapa: “What a sharp, honest, and trustworthy businessman. I couldn't ask for a better business partner in this new adventure. I'm so honored to call him not only my partner but also an amazing friend."

Now I don’t know if Blippi knows what the Lapas and Creative Kids are all about, but I do know that there is a video online of Blippi (then known as Steezy Grossman) defecating on another human being, but I digress.

I let it go. 8 months pass. The trial is 1.5 months away.

The Court rules on our request for legal fees for Creative Kids not providing their communications with Amazon. The Court says we’ve asked for too much, redo it.

We redo it.

Still too much.

The Court cuts it down from $24,730.88 to $22,257.79 out of the $1,000,000 [4] plus in legal fees racked up so far.

But it’s just an order, not a judgment, we can’t yet enforce it, and Creative Kids has never paid it.

2 weeks before the trial Sol files a “motion to enforce settlement”.

According to the filing, Sol has settled with my attorneys for $0 and my attorneys are now reneging on the deal.

He’s asking the Court to end the case by enforcing the agreement he claims to have made with my attorneys.

Meanwhile the trial is fast approaching. He volunteers that he did not prepare for trial because he and his clients thought the case was settled.

An order from the Court drops on the Friday before Monday’s trial:

“The Court ordered the parties to submit physical copies of their exhibits nearly two weeks ago. Trial is on Monday. Defendants have not complied despite repeated reminders and extensions. Defendants' failure to comply with the Court's orders is not excused. Plaintiff asserts that Defendants have also failed to provide Plaintiff electronic or physical copies of certain of Defendants' trial exhibits. The Court will discuss what sanctions if any are appropriate as a result of Defendants' failure to comply with the Court's orders, as well as Plaintiff's request to preclude Defendants from introducing exhibits that they have not yet provided to Plaintiff, prior to jury selection on Monday, November 17, 2025. To the extent that Defendants wish to submit a written opposition to Plaintiff's motion to preclude the use of exhibits at trial that Defendants have not presented to Plaintiffs, that opposition must be submitted no later than November 16, 2025 at 1:00 p.m.”

Then in the last hour, on the last business day before the trial, guess what happens.

Sol files for bankruptcy with another shell.

One creditor, my company.

Still owe no money.

And the trial was cancelled for the second time.

Nothing sticks to Sol.

Trapped

For the first trial, they filed for bankruptcy 2 business days before to cancel it.

For the second trial, they filed for bankruptcy in the last hour of the last business day, again to cancel it.

For the third trial, will they file on the courthouse steps? Maybe on day 2 of the trial? [5]

I don’t know, but I do know I’m trapped because I have to travel to testify at trial and my lawyers need to prepare every time one of these trials is scheduled.

I’d love to forget about this lawsuit, but even if we were to dismiss all the claims against Creative Kids, the lawsuit would still continue because they sued us for defamation, tortious interference, and over a million dollars in damages.

We could settle, but Sol is not returning emails and last time I spoke to him his offer was $0.

On the call, I asked Sol what he could do to make the offer better.

“Well, I could make a recommendation for a good psychiatrist.”

I had to laugh — cooked by Sol once again, but you know what?

He’s right.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

After 7 years and $1 million dollars down the drain why would I continue to do more legal work? [6]

It doesn’t make any sense.

And that’s why I wrote this.

Maybe this article will create some change in some way.

No, I don’t think we’ll ever get any money from these guys. There are multiple judgments against them in Rockland county. They have 20 different companies. They operate a charity called the Lapa Family Foundation. Sol accidentally submitted unredacted documents which appear to show how profits are shifted to Hong Kong where they have a company, reducing their taxes in the USA [7].

Yes, they’re rich with nice homes, but if it ever comes down to that, they’ll just flee the country.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with this article, but I had to tell the world.

These guys have screwed so many people, me, my company, and my employees included, that I can’t let them do it again.

We sell educational toys called Brain Flakes.

Yeah, when I started it was about the money, but now it’s about more than that.

It’s about making truly great products that help kids learn.

And this case makes that so much harder.

How do you motivate your team when this hangs over you? We could lose the case, we could lose our brand Brain Flakes. It is possible. [8]

What happened here is not right and I’m sick of it, not just for me, but for our country.

It has to stop.

Thank you for reading.

To be continued, I guess. [9]

Footnotes

[1] We were the first to use the term Brain Flakes® (as well as “flakes”) in connection with interlocking discs. Our building toy consists of discs, wheels, axles, and other connectors. We didn’t invent interlocking plastic discs, but, like Lego did for blocks, we made them better and were awarded a patent for doing so.

[2] All the conversations in this article are to the best of my memory.

[3] This is not a comment about any particular lawyer I have worked with; it’s a general one. I have seen lawyers, not my own, do horrible things to their clients. This is worth noting because lawyers have a special duty, like doctors, to take care of the people and companies they represent.

[4] My company has spent 1.03 million dollars with the law firms who represented my company in this case. A small portion of that was for legal work that was unrelated to this case. It would take me many hours to go through every single invoice to separate out the small portion that was not for this case. I also spent countless hours doing work for these cases, including gathering 100% of the evidence, with some help with my team.

[5] I’m not a lawyer. I have no legal training. I know a decent amount about regular federal litigation for a non-lawyer but my understanding of bankruptcy law is limited. Based on what I’ve read, every company can declare bankruptcy twice to automatically pause their lawsuits. Since we sued 4 companies, that’s 2 bankruptcies down, with 6 to go.

[6] At the time of writing this it has been 6 years and 356 days since our December 2018 cease and desist.

[7] They provided 3 sets of invoices. Invoices between Creative Kids US companies and their Hong Kong company with redactions, the same invoices without redactions, and invoices between their US company and their supplier in China. The invoices between the US company and the Hong Kong company have much higher prices than the invoices between the Chinese supplier and the US company despite being for the same product. This would create a larger expense in the US than the actual purchase transaction with the Chinese supplier would permit, reducing taxes. It’s unclear what is going on here, but Sam did not seem pleased to be shown the unredacted documents during deposition.

[8] To the extent that I understand their legal filings, Creative Kids is trying to destroy our Brain Flakes trademark. Should this happen? No. Is it technically possible? Yes. Sol said that losing this case would destroy our brand when I last spoke to him, encouraging me to take the $0 settlement. If it happens, we will appeal.

[9] If you would like to follow along, you can connect with Daniel Delapa and Stevin John on Linkedin. And for the attorneys, here are the case numbers: Eastern District of Texas: 6:2019cv00406. Southern District of New York: 1:2020cv09943. Southern District of New York Bankruptcy #1: 2024bk22589. Southern District of New York Bankruptcy #2: 7:2025bk23105