Trump Picks Man Whose Company Tried to Trademark Yosemite to Run National Parks
Inside the Billionaire Family, the Mob Conviction, and the Yosemite Shakedown
Over a century ago, as San Francisco’s power brokers schemed to dam and drown Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite, John Muir fired off a warning that has rattled around the American conscience ever since:
“Every national park is besieged by thieves and robbers and beggars with all sorts of plans and pleas for possession of some coveted treasure. Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded.”
Muir lost that fight. Hetch Hetchy was dammed. He died a year later.
But the thieves and robbers and beggars Muir warned about? They’re doing better than ever. And one of the companies most practiced at the art has just had its man nominated to run the place.
On Wednesday night, Donald Trump nominated Scott Socha to be the next Director of the National Park Service. Socha has spent 27 years at Delaware North, a hospitality conglomerate that operates gift shops, general stores, hotel lodges, and snack bars inside seven national parks. He currently serves as the company’s president of parks and resorts. He is also chairman of the National Park Hospitality Association, the concessions industry’s lobbying arm. His background is in financial planning, risk management, and business development. He has never held a day of public service. He has no training in conservation, ecology, wildlife management, or land stewardship.
What he has done is figure out how to wring every last dollar from the places the rest of us go to feel something bigger than a quarterly earnings report.
And the company where he built that career? It once infamously tried to trademark the name “Yosemite National Park.” I’ll come back to that. But first, you need to understand where Delaware North came from. Because once you know, everything else makes perfect sense.
The Godfather of Sports
In 1915, three brothers named Jacobs — sons of Polish immigrants — started selling popcorn and peanuts at movie theaters in Buffalo, New York. They called the business Jacobs Brothers. When the theaters closed for summer, they hauled their concessions stands to baseball stadiums. Then racetracks. Then arenas. They called the new company Sportservice and grew it into the dominant concessions operator in American professional sports.
So far, so American Dream. But the Jacobs family had a talent for finding business partners that Congressional investigators later described with less flattering terminology.
By the 1960s, the family had reorganized under a holding company called Emprise Corporation. Emprise owned racetracks, ran concessions in major league stadiums, and had financial tendrils in sports franchises across the country. It also had what an Arizona reporter named Don Bolles described to the House Select Committee on Crime in May 1972 as “a continual association with organized crime figures over a 35-year period.”
That same spring, a federal jury in Los Angeles convicted Emprise of conspiring to conceal Mafia ownership of the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Convicted alongside the company were mob figures from St. Louis and Detroit. A congressman read into the Congressional Record the names of underworld associates connected to Emprise’s racetrack dealings: members of Detroit’s Mafia, the Purple Gang, the head of the New England crime syndicate. Sports Illustrated put Louis Jacobs on the cover under the headline “The Godfather of Sports” and ran a lengthy exposé documenting the whole rotten web.
Four years later, Don Bolles — the reporter who had spent years digging into Emprise’s operations — walked to his car in the parking lot of a Phoenix hotel and turned the key. A bomb ripped through the undercarriage. He lived long enough to tell paramedics three things: “They finally got me. The Mafia. Emprise.” He was 47. No direct link to Emprise was ever proven, but the case remains one of the most notorious journalist murders in American history.
After the federal conviction, Jeremy Jacobs — Louis’s son, who had taken over the company at 28 when his father died at his desk in 1968 — dissolved Emprise. He reorganized the family’s holdings under a new name: Delaware North, taken from the Buffalo street intersection where the headquarters sat. New sign on the door. Same family. Same assets. Same business model: find a public venue, lock down the concessions contract, and squeeze.
That instinct — extract maximum value from every public venue you touch — has served the Jacobs family spectacularly well. I want to be clear: none of what follows is an accusation against Scott Socha personally. He wasn’t born when Emprise was convicted. But the corporate DNA of the company he spent his career in didn’t materialize from nowhere, and understanding where Delaware North came from is essential to understanding what it does now. Jeremy Jacobs Sr. is now worth an estimated $5.4 billion. He owns the Boston Bruins, TD Garden, and a stake in the New England Sports Network. Delaware North generates upward of $4 billion a year in revenue, employs 55,000 people across four continents, and runs operations in airports, casinos, stadiums, and — starting with a Yosemite concessions contract in 1993 — America’s national parks. Three of Jacobs’s sons now serve as co-CEOs. The family donates generously to Republican campaigns. The popcorn-and-peanuts origin story has matured into something much bigger and much harder to see around.
Which brings us to the part that should make your blood boil.
The Yosemite Shakedown
When Delaware North won the Yosemite concessions contract in 1993, it secretly registered trademarks on names inside the park: the Ahwahnee Hotel, Curry Village, Yosemite Lodge, Badger Pass, the Wawona Hotel, even the slogan “Go Climb a Rock.” Some of these names are over a hundred years old. The Ahwahnee opened in 1927. The Wawona Hotel was built in 1876. Delaware North showed up with popcorn machines in 1993 and decided it owned them.
I need to say that again because it sounds like something you’d make up to lose an argument on the internet. A private hospitality company, while operating under a federal concessions contract inside a national park, secretly trademarked the names of landmarks that had existed for decades before the company arrived. Then, when Delaware North lost the contract to a competitor in 2015, it turned to the American public and said: pay us $51 million or you can’t use the names of your own places anymore.
The Park Service, rather than capitulate, renamed everything. The Ahwahnee became “The Majestic Yosemite Hotel.” Curry Village became “Half Dome Village.” Workers covered century-old wooden signs with plastic tarps. Visitors were baffled. The country was livid. And Delaware North sat back and waited for its payday.
It came in 2019. The settlement cost $12 million. Taxpayers kicked in $3.84 million. Aramark, the new concessionaire, paid the rest. All of it went to Delaware North, for the privilege of giving Americans permission to use names that were never theirs to take.
This wasn’t ancient history by the time Scott Socha took over. He became president of Delaware North’s parks and resorts division in March 2017, right in the belly of the trademark litigation. The trademarks were filed years before he arrived, but he ran the division through the fight and the settlement. He managed the unit that was holding Yosemite’s names hostage while simultaneously operating inside other national parks.
The Meeting They Didn’t Want You to Know About
In May 2017, while Delaware North was actively suing the Park Service for $51 million, Socha walked into Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s office for a meeting. The meeting was arranged by Congressman Chris Collins of New York, whose office spent weeks pressuring Zinke’s schedulers to make it happen. Delaware North CEO Jerry Jacobs Jr. was in the room. So was Socha. So were Zinke’s top staff.
Their names were left off Zinke’s public calendar. CNN later uncovered the omission as part of a pattern of hidden meetings.
Collins, the helpful congressman: arrested by the FBI in August 2018, convicted of insider trading and lying to federal agents, sentenced to 26 months in prison.
Zinke subsequently appointed Jerry Jacobs Jr. to his “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee. Socha attended the first meeting in July 2018. The committee proposed privatizing campgrounds, limiting senior citizen discounts, and adding food trucks and Amazon deliveries to national parks. The public response was roughly what you’d expect if someone proposed putting a drive-through at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The committee was dissolved within two months.
And in July 2019, Interior quietly settled the Yosemite lawsuit. Delaware North collected its $12 million. Meeting in the secretary’s office while suing the agency, calendar scrubbed, arranged by a congressman headed to prison, followed by a seat on a federal advisory committee that pushed park privatization, followed by a settlement payout. Nothing to see here.
The Company’s Track Record
Before we get to what Socha would inherit, one more thing about Delaware North — not about Socha personally, but about the corporate culture that shaped his 27-year career and that he would carry into the directorship.
In March 2020, with the Jacobs family sitting on a fortune worth $3.5 billion, Delaware North furloughed two-thirds of its full-time employees with one week of pay. Forbes ran a story calling Jeremy Jacobs “the face of corporate greed during the coronavirus pandemic.” The Boston Globe called it “pathetic.”
Inside the national parks, Delaware North’s record with its own workers tells its own story. Indeed reviews reference substandard housing, food safety violations, and a culture “entirely driven by short-term financial metrics.” In 2012 at Yosemite, a hantavirus outbreak in Curry Village tent cabins — operated by Delaware North — infected ten people and killed three. Investigators found rodent nests in the foam insulation of the cabins the company maintained.
None of this is necessarily Socha’s fault. But it is the institution that trained him, the culture that promoted him, and the value system he would bring to an agency responsible for tens of thousands of employees working in some of the most remote and demanding conditions in the federal government.
What He’d Walk Into
Socha’s nomination doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. It lands in the wreckage of what was once the most popular agency in the federal government.
Since Trump took office, the National Park Service has lost 24 percent of its permanent workforce. More than 4,000 positions gone: rangers, scientists, trail crews, search-and-rescue teams, interpretive staff. A thousand were fired on Valentine’s Day 2025 as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE purge. Trump proposed slashing the Park Service budget by over $1 billion — the largest cut in the agency’s 109-year history. Congress blocked the dollars, but the staffing damage was already done. Lines at the Grand Canyon doubled. Visitor centers shuttered. Trails went unmaintained.
Meanwhile, the administration stripped exhibits about slavery from historic sites. Removed references to climate change. Pulled the Pride flag from Stonewall National Monument. Dropped Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from the list of fee-free days while adding Flag Day — Trump’s birthday — because subtlety is dead and irony is in hospice. And just before Socha’s nomination, a congressional hearing exposed the “Freedom 250” scheme, which uses the congressionally chartered National Park Foundation to sell access to the president for $1 million and up.
Gut the workforce. Erase the history. Sell the access. Install a concessionaire executive to finish the job.
The pattern is not subtle. It doesn’t need to be. The question is whether the public will let it work.
What This Is Really About
I want to be precise here, because the distinction matters. National park concessionaires provide visitor services. Lodging, food, guided tours, gift shops. They operate under contracts awarded by the Park Service. They are partners in the NPS mission. They are not the mission.
The mission, as defined by the Organic Act of 1916, is to conserve the scenery, the natural and historic objects, and the wildlife, and to provide for their enjoyment in a manner that leaves them unimpaired for future generations. That is a conservation mandate. It is not a revenue target. It is not a customer satisfaction score.
Scott Socha has spent his entire career on the revenue side of that equation. His job has been to increase room nights, merchandise volume, and operating margins inside parks that exist for an entirely different purpose. Those are the qualifications of a capable hospitality executive. They are not the qualifications of someone who should decide the fate of the Everglades, the Arctic tundra, the old-growth redwoods, or the hallowed ground at Gettysburg.
The people who built this idea — this radical, democratic, deeply American idea that some landscapes belong to everyone and can be sold to no one — understood that the project fails the moment you hand the keys to someone who sees a park and thinks about throughput. Delaware North’s corporate history includes a federal conviction for concealing casino ownership, a trademark shakedown of Yosemite’s most beloved landmarks, secret meetings at Interior while suing the Park Service, and mass furloughs during a pandemic while the owning family sat on billions. Scott Socha spent 27 years rising through that organization. Now he’s been nominated to oversee the agency that regulates it.
Every national park is besieged by thieves and robbers and beggars. That was true in 1908 and it is true today. The only difference is that in 2026, the besiegers are being invited to run the siege from the inside.
What You Can Do Right Now
Scott Socha requires Senate confirmation. This is where it gets stopped.
Call your senators. The Capitol switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. You can look up your senators directly at senate.gov. Tell them that a man whose company tried to trademark the word “Ahwahnee” should not be entrusted with the agency that protects 85 million acres of the most extraordinary land on Earth. Tell them concessionaires are partners, not proprietors. Tell them these places are not for sale.
Nothing dollarable is safe. It never has been. That’s why the rest of us have to fight for it.
Until next time,
Will
There’s always enough scumbags to go around the Trump Administration. It’s truly the party of gangstas. How long will it be before the name is changed to maybe….Trumps Hole.
I have long been an admirer and follower of More Than Just Parks. Today I became a paid subscriber. Our public lands are not for sale.