Bain looked at the target company and thought "I can reconfigure this company so that it would be worth a lot more than the stock market currently says it is."

Bain looked at the target company and thought "I can reconfigure this company so that it would be worth a lot more than the stock market currently says it is." Bain has successfully done this before, so they convince investors to loan them a bunch of money, and they buy the company with the loan (this is the 'leveraged' part), taking it off the stockmarket. The plan is to reconfigure the company and then put it back on the stockmarket at a higher price. But, in these cases, when they got down to the hard work of re-configuring the target companies, they found out that they had done their sums wrong and that the interest on the loan was eating up all the money that was supposed to be used to make the target companies better and more valuable. Oops. So then they ran the companies into the ground and filed for bankruptcy so that they don't have to pay back the loan. This makes the investors mad, and Bain might not be able to play the leveraged buyout game any more, but they collected hundreds of millions of dollars in 'management fees' so they don't really care. And, hey, maybe some investors will still give them money because they certainly know what not to do next time.