What was Russo and Steele?
Russo and Steele was a Scottsdale collector car auction that ran every January from 2001 to 2020, the hometown counterweight to Barrett-Jackson during Car Week. The famous auction had an arena, television cameras and celebrities. Russo had a tent city off the Loop 101 and a dirt-floor energy that gearheads still get wistful about: the cars crossed at ground level with the crowd packed close enough to smell the fuel.
Founded by Drew and Josephine Alcazar, Russo and Steele billed itself “for enthusiasts, by enthusiasts” and meant it. The consignments skewed European sports cars and American muscle, the two halves of its name; the format, “auction in the round,” put the car on a ground-level stage ringed by bleachers, no elevated block, no distance, and Alcazar, the owner and ringmaster, changed costumes two or three times a night to stay fresh through sales that ran ten to twelve hours. At its peak it ran around 600 cars across a January week, with sister sales in Monterey and Amelia Island, and was, for a certain kind of buyer, the real Scottsdale auction.
It is gone now, done in by a decade of hard luck that ended with a lost venue, a lawsuit and a 20th-anniversary sale on borrowed ground in January 2020, which is exactly why it belongs in this guide. Scottsdale’s event calendar looks inevitable from the outside. Russo and Steele is the reminder that it is not.
The format that made it beloved
Auction theater usually works on separation: car elevated, crowd seated, bidding decorous. Russo inverted every term. The car idled through an opening into a pit ringed by standing and bleacher-seated bidders; ringmen worked the circle like cornermen; the auctioneer ran hot; and when a big Mopar or a Shelby lit its engine mid-bidding, a Russo signature, the room physically vibrated. Alcazar called it a “raucous,” gladiator-style sport and argued that the in-person charge was something online bidding could never match.
The consignment philosophy matched. While the mega-auctions chased seven-figure headliners, Russo’s sweet spot was the enthusiast market: real muscle, honest hot rods, drivers’ Porsches and Jaguars, cars bought by people who intended to drive them. The 2009 Scottsdale sale brought $17.5 million at a 48 percent sell-through, numbers that would not make a Barrett-Jackson press release and did not need to. The crowd was correspondingly denim-forward, and proudly so.
Where it was
For its first sixteen Januaries the auction lived on a 20-plus-acre site at Scottsdale Road and the Loop 101, across the freeway from WestWorld, in tents. In 2017 it moved three miles east to the outfield lots of Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, the Diamondbacks’ and Rockies’ spring-training complex on Community land, under a three-year agreement with options to 2022. It stayed three Januaries. The 2020 sale, its last, went back to the original site at Scottsdale Road and the 101, which Alcazar called “the picture-perfect location for everything that has to do with Arizona Car Week.” That ecosystem is what collectors miss: the arena spectacle by day, Russo by night, dealers working both, the competition keeping everyone’s fees and standards honest. When locals say Car Week feels more corporate now, Russo’s absence is a lot of what they are describing. The auction survival guide covers what remains.
The decade of blows
The 2010s tested the company like a stress lab. First, the storm: on January 21, 2010, during the 10th annual sale, high winds and rain flattened the 800-foot auction tent onto the grounds, damaging many of the roughly 600 consigned cars and blowing part of the structure onto the freeway; Wikipedia puts the damage at about $1.5 million. The fire marshal closed the site for two days, bidding resumed January 24–25, and ESPN later aired a reality show about the recovery. The “Russo storm” entered Car Week folklore alongside genuine respect for how the Alcazars handled their clients afterward.
The killing sequence came at the decade’s end. In October 2018 the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community notified Russo that it was ending their agreement after the January 2019 sale, and the ballpark’s January 2020 dates went to Leake Auctions, the Oklahoma house that Ritchie Bros. had bought. On June 10, 2019 the Alcazars filed suit in Maricopa County Superior Court against Ritchie Bros., Leake, two Leake executives and Mark Landolfi, Russo’s former director of operations, alleging a “malicious effort to take over” the venue; “we aren’t going to be bullied,” Alcazar said. Ritchie Bros. denied the allegations and countersued. A separate autumn skirmish with Barrett-Jackson over a parking parcel ended with the bigger auction pointing out, via public records, that Russo had no signed agreement for a new site. On October 7, 2019, Russo announced it was going home to Scottsdale Road and the 101.
The last sale and the silence
The 20th annual Scottsdale auction ran January 15–19, 2020 with about 600 cars, Josephine Alcazar organizing the opening-night gala as she always had. Classic.com’s unofficial tally shows 181 of 349 listed lots sold for about $8.2 million, roughly half the 2009 total, though the company published no figure. Two months later the pandemic cancelled its 2020 Amelia Island sale. Russo held no Arizona sale in January 2021, and in January 2022 it skipped again, the first time since 2001 that Car Week ran without it; “Josephine and I decided to take January off,” Alcazar told ClassicCars.com, expecting to continue elsewhere. Leake, after its single Salt River Fields sale in 2020, was gone too. No Scottsdale sale has followed.
What Scottsdale lost, and kept
The loss is measurable in more than nostalgia. A second major auction meant hundreds of additional consignments, buyers and hotel nights each January; its collapse consolidated Car Week around fewer, bigger players: Barrett-Jackson at WestWorld, Gooding, RM Sotheby’s and Bonhams at the resorts. The enthusiast middle market Russo served did not vanish; it migrated to online platforms, which is its own story about the 2020s, but the place where that market gathered in person each January did.
What survives is influence. The auction-in-the-round intimacy shows up in how newer boutique sales stage cars; the “by enthusiasts” positioning is now every auction’s marketing; and Car Week’s satellite events still carry the scruffier gene Russo kept alive. Ask a veteran at WestWorld in January about it and you will get the same eulogy in different words: the big show is great, but the little loud one was ours. Every event town has a ghost like that, and the lost events file keeps Scottsdale’s. Russo and Steele earned the haunting.