Basically, the company had to pay for its own buyout when private equity firms KKL, Vornado, and Bain bought the company for $6.6 billion, mostly with loans.
Because the company then had to pay off those extreme loans, they were forced to sell off their assets and property, which they leased back from the very private equity firms that now owned them.
The same thing happened more recently with Red Lobster and JoAnn Fabrics.
The best book I’ve read about private equity is called Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss by Daniel Souleles. It’s an ethnography of private equity.
Private equity is the logical extreme of the idea of shareholder value. Companies are bought, stripped for parts, and mined for resources. The money comes from wealthy people and institutional investors like university endowments, pension funds, etc, and some years it is a very high-return investment. Other years, not so much, see the relationship by the University of California and Blackstone as an example in recent years.