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.
I read something about the birth of these private Equity firms sometime in the late 70s or early '80s when a firm bought out this other productive firm and loaded them up with debt, paid themselves every which way they could, sold off any profitable parts of the company, then declared bankruptcy and stiffed everybody else walking away with a boatload of cash, unemployed workforces, and razed Pension funds.
We have been celebrating this type of behavior for decades now, Behavior I think exemplified in Monty Python’s skits of the pirate building seizing the other buildings like it was a pirate ship.
That was much of the plot of Wall Street.