LI-raised Andrew Simon, now Las Vegas CEO, stars on 'Undercover Boss'

With a wig, beard, oversized glasses and hipster-grunge shirt and shorts, North Massapequa-raised Andrew Simon is transformed into just another worker at Las Vegas' Fremont Street Experience, where he is CEO, as the latest "Undercover Boss" (Friday at 8 p.m. on CBS/2).

"It was the most grueling stuff I've done in a long time," Simon, 51, tells Newsday. A 1988 Farmingdale High School graduate who went on to Cornell University and an MBA at the University of California, Los Angeles, he had worked at a summer camp, at the Sunrise Mall in Massapequa, dealing blackjack in a casino and in other such jobs before eventually moving on to executive positions at Cox Communications, Mark Cuban's AXS TV and elsewhere. Named CEO of Las Vegas' outdoor pavilion Fremont Street in September 2020, he has faced pandemic challenges in restoring tourism and reversing low worker morale and high turnover.

"Undercover Boss," now in season 11, places disguised executives into a company's ground-level workforce. "Doing that kind of work just gives you an appreciation" for such workers, says Simon, who was born in Queens and raised from infancy on Long Island, one of two children of public-school educators Stanley and the late Marlene Simon. Previously married, he is now divorced.

The episode finds him on a janitorial crew, scraping gum; on the canopy high over Fremont Street, removing debris tossed from surrounding hotels; and attaching harnesses onto cables for the pavilion's most popular attraction, the Slotzilla zip line. He hears of frozen salaries and pay cuts, and deals with inadequate equipment such as garbage carts that leak, requiring additional mop-up, and having to carry two 25-pound harnesses at a time down a set of stairs when simple dumbwaiter technology would suffice.

"I was very aware of how hard these jobs were," Simon reflects, "but sometimes you don't really know how much people care and put pride into everything they do."

Yet until "Undercover Boss" showed him, the garbage carts were still leaking nearly a year into his tenure. "For whatever reason, a manager or director doesn't come and tell you that they want to spend money for their department, or they think they shouldn't ask," he says, pointing to a janitorial director he calls "fantastic." And yet, says Simon, "I think his goal with previous CEOs was, 'How do you save money?' Patch it up, do this, do whatever you can to save money."

That level of detail "typically didn't get to me," he explains, noting that through the show he learned to his dismay that some workers pay "from their own pocket" for things like gum scrapers.

Simon has instituted changes, he says. The pay freeze turned out to be temporary due to a pandemic slowdown, and he has given "a 40% raise to all the ride operators," among other incentives not shown in the episode.

Though "I grew up in front-line jobs," says Simon, he credits his experience on the show with making him more "employee-focused."

"Are there ways to make their jobs easier and are there things we're not doing and things that we're missing?" he asks. "It really did affect me in a way that I was, like, 'Shame on me if I can't make these jobs better.' "