Michael Dell, David Geffen, George Soros, the Ziff brothers -- by 2012, all of them, and many more, had peeled away. Not even Lampert’s friends could understand why the hedge-fund manager, once hailed as a young Warren Buffett, clung to his spectacularly bad investment in Sears, a dying department store chain. Granted, other hedge-fund titans have blown it, from Julian Robertson with US Airways to Bill Ackman with Herbalife. But few have ridden a disaster so publicly, over so many years, with such an iconic brand.