As co-owner of a chain of area furniture stores, Kalman Finkelstein became successful enough to sprinkle tens of thousands of dollars on state and local political campaigns in recent years.

Then he took an unusual turn: In his late 40s, the father of five became a Baltimore City police officer — and the first Orthodox Jew to join the ranks in a half-century.

For the past three years, however, Finkelstein has been suspended with pay after a search warrant was executed at his home. And on Thursday, the reason became clear: The 54-year-old was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly being part of a blackmail scheme involving a Democratic state senator and former city prosecutor, Dalya Attar.

He’s now suspended without pay from the police force.

Finkelstein was just months into his time on the police force when federal authorities allege that he and Attar’s brother went into an apartment belonging to one of Finkelstein’s family members and installed cameras disguised as smoke detectors to spy on a rival political consultant. They also placed a tracking device on the car the consultant was using.

The alleged blackmail scheme involved illicitly tracking the consultant’s whereabouts, secretly filming her in bed with a married man and threatening to expose the video and interfere with matchmaking to find spouses for the consultant’s daughters, according to the case outlined in the indictment.

His attorney, Ty Kelly, declined to comment at Finkelstein’s initial appearance Thursday in U.S. District Court, when he was released on pre-trial supervision. Attar said in a statement that she hadn’t seen “tangible evidence” to support claims that she knew of the alleged blackmail scheme and that her attorney planned to fight the charges.

More than 20 years ago, Finkelstein teamed up with two others to take a family furniture store in Baltimore and create what would grow to operate under the Price Busters umbrella with nine stores in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. metro areas. Today it has 14 locations and has expanded to Pennsylvania and Delaware.

It’s unclear whether Finkelstein still has a role with the company, but a woman who answered the phone at its Owings Mills location directed an inquiry to a store email address that she said Finkelstein would receive. No one responded.

In an interview with Baltimore Jewish Life in 2017, which featured a picture of Finkelstein with U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Finkelstein said the company in its early days operated on “such a shoestring budget that every day, even the smallest financial problem had potential to shut us down.”

“We didn’t get our MBAs from Wharton Business School; we got our ‘MBAs’ from the School of Hard Knocks,” Finkelstein told Jewish magazine WhereWhatWhen, also in 2017. “Everything we did, we learned by trial and error. Our advice? Work hard. Nothing comes free.”

Finkelstein said his success enabled him to dabble in politics.

“Just last week,” he told Baltimore Jewish Life, “I had the opportunity to have a personal conversation with Governor Larry Hogan, and we joked about having Price Busters furnish the Governor’s mansion.”

Campaign finance records show Finkelstein has given more than $66,000 to various candidates since 2015. The politicians who received the most were were Attar and Baltimore City Councilman Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer. Attar received $20,000 total from Finkelstein and his wife, while Schleifer received $14,750.

“Yitzy Schleifer’s election made me realize we need to pro-actively change things,” Finkelstein told Baltimore Jewish Life. “As a parent and homeowner, I’m worried about Baltimore’s outrageous crime and high property taxes.”

He and his PriceBuster colleagues in 2017 said they were supporting Attar, then a candidate for House of Delegates, to “end the downhill spiral of Baltimore City and shake things up in Annapolis” and asked people to volunteer their time and money to support her. Attar ended up winning that election.

In 2018, he was elected to the Baltimore City Democratic Central Committee for District 41, a position he had to give up when he became a police officer.

Finkelstein told Baltimore Jewish Life that he was “very security and self-defense minded” and trained with a local Israeli combat system program.

He decided to join the Baltimore police force in 2019, graduating from the police academy in September of that year.

“The Department should be comprised of what the city is made up of,” Finkelstein told WMAR in 2019. “The city does have a large percentage of Orthodox Jews in the Northwest.”

In May 2020, he was named the Northern District’s Officer of the Month. “Kal patrols the York Road corridor on the midnight and is known to be a vigilant traffic officer,” his commander at the time, Maj. Richard Gibson, wrote on social media.

Gibson said Friday that few if anyone in the department knew of Finkelstein’s business success. “He was extremely humble,” said Gibson, who retired in 2020.

He was also quick to lend a hand to community members, Gibson recalled. “When I had community members who needed help, because of his business contacts, he went out of his way and never wanted it to be known.”

He also ran into troubles. In 2021, according to an internal police document shared with The Banner, Finkelstein had an internal complaint sustained for conducting an improper strip search of a motorist.

In October of that year, he ran a red light at Caroline Street shortly after 1 a.m. while tailing a car he believed to be stolen and struck a vehicle carrying six teenagers.

A lawsuit was filed the following year, and in May of this year the city agreed to pay $397,000 for “past, present and future medical expenses” for the three teenagers who were “particularly badly hurt,” The Baltimore Brew reported. Police told the Brew that Finkelstein was disciplined for the accident.

A search warrant was executed at Finkelstein’s home in July 2022, with the Police Department saying he was suspended as a result. Police Commissioner Richard Worley said Thursday that it was related to this month’s indictment and that Finkelstein had been suspended ever since.

City salary records show while suspended, Finkelstein was paid $66,887 in fiscal year 2022, $72,984 in fiscal year 2023, and $76,686 in fiscal year 2024.