The Jinx: Meet Nick Chavin, Robert Durst’s Best Friend Turned Secret Witness

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.

In the episode, Chavin tells Jarecki what he and Durst had in common: “My instincts are to avoid the cops…Bob and I had a contempt for the law and for society and for rules. That was part of what bonded us together,” he says. Perhaps this is why, as Chavin chillingly tells the filmmaker, his affection for Bob didn’t fade after Durst confessed to dismembering Morris Black’s body. “It just didn’t have any impact on me,” he says. “I just don’t have that same moral hatred of murder and murderers.” (Durst claimed he dismembered the body because he did not think that police would believe he killed Black in self-defense.)

Nick Chavin, Susan Berman, and Robert Durst.

Courtesy of Max.

Chavin proclaims his undying love for Durst over and over in the episode: “I’ve never abandoned my feelings for Bob, which just drives my wife up the walls…. There’s never been anybody in my life I’ve felt as deeply about as Bob…. I like him enormously. I’m indebted to him…. No one’s ever gotten as close to my heart and brain as Bob has.”

Chavin’s wife Terry, the hero of his storyline, doesn’t feel as warmly about Durst. “Bob, you know, is a real piece of shit,” she tells Lewin in an interview featured in The Jinx. “He’s just trying to manipulate everybody to do what he wants…”

She confides in the episode that she grew to feel so “unsafe around” around Durst that she got a life-insurance policy: “At least my kids would be taken care of if anything happened to me,” she theorized at the time. Because Chavin had no interest in helping the investigation (see: his thoughts on authorities), Terry forced his hand. She told Lewin how Durst confessed to killing Berman after a dinner in Harlem in 2014—a confession that rocked Chavin. “It was really obvious that something happened at that dinner,” Terry adds in The Jinx. “Nick came home and was really angry. He had to, um, wake up, let’s say.”

Chavin conceded that, a decade earlier, his sense of what Durst was capable shifted after his longtime friend confessed to killing Morris Black.

“One of the primary foundations of my belief that Bob was not responsible for Kathie’s disappearance or what happened to Susan was that I couldn’t believe that he was capable of hands-on violence against someone at that extreme,” Chavin told the Los Angeles courtroom in 2017. “But here after admitting that he was, it’s like taking the gloves off. All things are possible now.”

Chavin’s testimony about Berman telling him that Durst confessed to killing McCormack helped Lewin do what seemed to be impossible at the outset of the trial: prove that Durst killed both Berman and McCormack. (Lewin needed to prove the latter to establish Durst’s motive for killing Berman.)

While in court, Chavin was asked how he felt about testifying: “I feel like it is something I had to do,” he said, explaining that his loyalty to Durst came to feel like a betrayal to Berman. “I feel like there’s two scales. One is a betrayal of Bob Durst and the other is a betrayal of Susan Berman…I feel that the betrayal I had felt of Susan Berman has lightened considerably and I have the weight of feeling grief and sadness about Bob.”

Chavin’s eyes even welled up with tears at one point on the witness stand. “This is not easy,” Chavin said. A prosecutor asked, “As you sit here, do you still feel a bond—and a warmth—toward Bob Durst?”

“It sounds ridiculous, but yes,” he replied. “This is a best friend who admitted to killing my other best friend.”

But even after turning on Durst in the courtroom, Chavin finds himself reflexively coming to Durst’s defense in The Jinx Part Two. “I gotta stop being protective of Bob Durst,” Chavin says, catching himself before uttering the phrase that doubles as the episode’s title. “Friendships die hard.”

Lewin puts a more cynical spin on Durst’s “friendships,” which yielded decades of allegiance and insulation from criminal repercussion. “It turns out that when you have a whole lot of money, people are willing to do things for you,” Lewin says in the episode. “Because they think some of that money might go their way.”

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