How, in all of our collective years reading about Robert Durst, the late millionaire murderer and eccentric, did it not register that he had a best friend who was a former lewd country music rocker? Enter Nick “Chinga” Chavin, whose longtime relationship with and loyalty to the late Durst is the subject of Sunday’s Jinx Part Two episode, “Friendships Die Hard.”
Chavin made news in 2017 when he was unveiled as “a secret witness” in the Susan Berman trial. His bombshell testimony had been pried out of him by his wife, Terry, and Los Angeles deputy district attorney John Lewin, The Jinx sequel reveals, and directly implicated Durst in the murders of his first wife, Kathleen McCormack, and his other best friend, Susan Berman. Chavin’s claim that Durst confessed to killing Berman in 2014 (“It was her or me, I had no choice,” Chavin recalled him saying in his testimony)—along with evidence uncovered during the making of The Jinx—was crucial to Durst being finally found guilty of Berman’s murder after decades spent in the shadow of suspicion.
But there are so many rabbit holes in the Durst saga—three killings, the dismemberment of a neighbor, a national manhunt that ended because of a stolen chicken sandwich, a fugitive period where he dressed as a mute woman—that the story of Durst’s friend who fronted the music act Country Porn quickly faded. To filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, who tried unsuccessfully to get Chavin to participate in the original Jinx docuseries, Chavin was always a key piece to the Durst puzzle though.
“The reason Nick was so important, and the reason all these people [in Bob’s inner circle] were so important, goes back to this thing we said when we started working on [Part Two],” Jarecki tells Vanity Fair. “How do you kill three people over 30 years and get away with it? It takes a village. That village became, to me, the centerpiece of Part Two—the idea that there’s this constellation of people who all see themselves as good, decent people…and yet here they are helping a murderer.”
Like many, if not all, of the people loyal to Durst over the decades, Chavin was financially entangled with the real estate heir, as The Jinx details. Chavin met Durst (through Berman) in the early ’80s, shortly after the musician pivoted to a career in real estate advertising. Durst’s family owns one of Manhattan’s most prestigious real estate empires, and in the episode Chavin tells Jarecki that Durst “gave me my business career, the whole thing, on a platter” by getting his family’s business to sign with him.
Chavin testified that his career took off between the lucrative account and the credibility it gave him.
The two hung out in their personal time too. “We had what we called ‘boys night out,’ and we’d go out and go to nightclubs and bars,” Chavin testified. He further explained in the testimony that the two double dated and, even though Durst was married to McCormack at the beginning of their friendship, Durst would sometimes take his wife and other times bring a girlfriend. Chavin and Durst also visited the famous Manhattan sex club Plato’s Retreat, according to an interview Chavin gave Rolling Stone. “I was a lot more conservative than he was,” Chavin said, explaining to the outlet that Durst would often light up a joint wherever he happened to be. “When you’ve got the money to buy your way out of stuff you can do a lot of shit,” he said.