1. [Apr 11, 2008: This Day in Bankruptcies - Another Airline and our First Major Retailer] Two months before Linens ’n Things was acquired, it reported $2.1 million in long-term debt; by Dec. 31, 2007, that amount had exploded to $855 million.
2. [Jul 21, 2008: Add Mervyn's to Our Growing Litany of Retailers Headed to the Great Sunset] It would also be an embarrassment to Mervyn's owners. Private-equity firms Cerberus Capital Management and Sun Capital Partners, along with three other partners -- including real-estate investor Lubert-Adler -- acquired the chain from Target Corp. in 2004 for $1.2 billion. The group put up about $400 million in equity and financed the rest. But while thousands of employees would lose their jobs and their vendors would get hurt in a Mervyn's liquidation, the private-equity buyers wouldn't stand to take much of a financial hit. That is because when they bought the company they structured the $1.2 billion deal as two separate transactions -- one for the retailer and a second one for the retailer's real estate.
3. Sam Zell had a run in with Tribune [Dec 8, 2008: Tribune Files for Bankruptcy] Let’s say that a group of corporate executives uses scads of debt to take over a struggling company, sells off some profitable assets, lays off thousands of employees while achieving miserable results. And then, less than a year after saddling the company with $8 billion in debt, they opt for bankruptcy. You’d expect them to walk the plank, or at the very least, spend a good stretch of time in the naughty corner. But you wouldn’t expect the top 700 managers to collect $66 million in bonuses. ... both the company’s union and the trustee appointed to oversee the bankruptcy raised objections, arguing that the bonuses would be the highest ever paid — even as the company has its lowest cash flow in 10 years.

• For most of the 133 years since its founding in a small city in Wisconsin, the Simmons Bedding Company enjoyed an illustrious history.
  
• Simmons says it will soon file for bankruptcy protection, as part of an agreement by its current owners to sell the company — the seventh time it has been sold in a little more than two decades — all after being owned for short periods by a parade of different investment groups, known as private equity firms, which try to buy undervalued companies, mostly with borrowed money.
• For many of the company’s investors, the sale will be a disaster. Its bondholders alone stand to lose more than $575 million. The company’s downfall has also devastated employees like Noble Rogers, who worked for 22 years at Simmons, most of that time at a factory outside Atlanta. He is one of 1,000 employees — more than one-quarter of the work force — laid off last year.
• But Thomas H. Lee Partners of Boston has not only escaped unscathed, it has made a profit. The investment firm, which bought Simmons in 2003, has pocketed around $77 million in profit, even as the company’s fortunes have declined. THL collected hundreds of millions of dollars from the company in the form of special dividends. It also paid itself millions more in fees, first for buying the company, then for helping run it. Last year, the firm even gave itself a small raise.
• Wall Street investment banks also cashed in. They collected millions for helping to arrange the takeovers and for selling the bonds that made those deals possible. All told, the various private equity owners have made around $750 million in profits from Simmons over the years.
• How so many people could make so much money on a company that has been driven into bankruptcy is a tale of these financial times and an example of a growing phenomenon in corporate America.

• Mr. Eitel, former colleagues said, really wanted to bring some sizzle to the ho-hum mattress business. He was paid millions of dollars to run Simmons for several private equity investment companies, first Fenway, then Thomas H. Lee Partners. Like those firms, he fared well, even though Simmons plans to file for bankruptcy.
• ... while Simmons now faces an uncertain future, Mr. Eitel was a winner in The Great Game of Life. As chief executive, he enjoyed country club memberships, personal use of the corporate jet and thousands of dollars a year in free mattresses. Before stepping down last fall, he earned more than $40 million in compensation, bonuses and perks, according to an analysis by Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant in White Plains. He earned the bulk of his money when Simmons was sold to Thomas H. Lee Partners. (heads he wins, tails he wins - $40M to help run a company into the ground; boo yah)
  
• Mr. Eitel ran Simmons as if it were his fief, several former executives said. His son joined Simmons’s sales force and a son-in-law landed in the company’s marketing department. A daughter often sang at corporate functions and even wrote and recorded a series of songs that were pressed into CDs and distributed at a sales meeting in Las Vegas.
• ... many former Simmons executives said that he ruled from afar — that he rarely appeared at the Atlanta headquarters. Instead, he spent much of his time in Naples, Fla., where he and his wife built an opulent home with a 1,000-bottle wine room and a multitier cascading pool featuring glass mosaic tiles. The home was listed this spring for $16 million.
• Mr. Eitel also spent a great deal of time wooing clients from his 80-foot yacht, Eitel Time. With his boat, which had 11 televisions, a hot tub on the flybridge and a sunken granite-topped bar in the salon, Mr. Eitel took customers out for cocktail cruises and junkets to Martha’s Vineyard. The private equity firms that owned Simmons during Mr. Eitel’s tenure appeared to embrace Mr. Eitel’s lifestyle. The first year that Thomas H. Lee Partners owned Simmons, the mattress company even paid the $92,000 salary and benefits for the captain of his yacht.

PE firms in the risk-blind environment preceding the credit crunch got into the habit of producing good to stellar returns by modifying their usual formula. The traditional model was to buy companies with a ton of debt, then improving their bottom line by a combination of partial asset stripping (selling off ancillary operations), cost cutting, and once a blue moon, actually doing something to improve operational performance. Then the company would be sold, either privately, usually to a corporation, or taken public.

But the PE firms found a much easier approach: just pile on more and more debt, and pay themselves a special dividend. No need to do any work, just keep borrowing until you had recouped your investment and then some. And that way you did not need to care how the company fared. If you destroyed the business, it was of no mind to you and your investors. Other saps were left holding the carcass.