What was Russo and Steele?
Every January for nearly twenty years, Scottsdale’s Car Week had two temples. The famous one had an arena, TV cameras, and celebrities. The other one had a dirt-floor energy that gearheads still get wistful about: Russo and Steele, the hometown auction where the cars crossed at ground level with the crowd packed close enough to smell the fuel.
Founded in 2001 by Drew and Josephine Alcazar, Russo and Steele billed itself “for enthusiasts, by enthusiasts” and meant it. The consignments skewed muscle cars, hot rods, and European sports machines; the format — “auction in the round” — put the car on the floor, encircled by bidders and hollering ringmen, no elevated stage, no distance. At its peak it ran hundreds of cars across a January weekend and was, for a certain kind of buyer, the real Scottsdale auction.
It’s gone now — done in by a decade of hard luck that ended around 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 isn’t.
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 into a pit ringed by standing 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. Buyers described it as the difference between watching a fight on TV and standing ringside.
The consignment philosophy matched. While the mega-auctions chased seven-figure headliners, Russo’s sweet spot was the $30,000–$200,000 enthusiast market: real muscle, honest hot rods, drivers’ Porsches and Jaguars — cars bought by people who intended to drive them. The crowd was correspondingly denim-forward, and proudly so.
That identity gave Car Week its ecosystem. Collectors did the arena spectacle by day and Russo by night; dealers worked both; and the competition kept everyone’s fees and standards honest. When locals say Car Week feels more corporate now, Russo’s absence is a lot of what they’re describing.
The decade of blows
The 2010s tested the company like a stress lab. First, the storm: during the January 2010 auction, a microburst — the desert’s signature violent downdraft — collapsed the event’s big tents onto the grounds mid-week, damaging dozens of consigned cars and forcing a scramble to restage. The company survived it, barely, and the “Russo storm” entered Car Week folklore alongside genuine respect for how the Alcazars handled clients afterward.
The killing sequence came at the decade’s end. Russo’s longtime January home — a high-visibility site along the Loop 101 corridor — was lost to a competing auction company before the 2019 sale, triggering litigation and a forced relocation on short notice. The 2019 auction ran, but the economics of the fight, a softening middle market, and then the pandemic’s event apocalypse finished the job: by 2020–21, Russo and Steele had closed for good, its Monterey sale gone with it.
What Scottsdale lost, and kept
The loss is measurable in more than nostalgia. A second major auction meant thousands of additional consignments, buyers, and hotel nights each January; its collapse consolidated Car Week around fewer, bigger players. The enthusiast middle market Russo served didn’t 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’ll 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. Russo and Steele is Scottsdale’s, and it earned the haunting.