How, in all of our collective years studying about Robert Durst, the past due millionaire assassin and whimsical, did it now not sign up that he had a absolute best pal who was once a former lewd nation song rocker? Input Nick “Chinga” Chavin, whose longtime courting with and constancy to the past due Durst is the topic of Sunday’s Jinx Section Two episode, “Friendships Die Hard.”
Chavin made information in 2017 when he was once unveiled as “a secret witness” within the Susan Berman trial. His bombshell testimony were pried out of him by means of his spouse, Terry, and Los Angeles deputy district lawyer John Lewin, The Jinx sequel unearths, and without delay implicated Durst within the murders of his first spouse, Kathleen McCormack, and his alternative absolute best pal, Susan Berman. Chavin’s declare that Durst confessed to killing Berman in 2014 (“It was her or me, I had no choice,” Chavin recalled him pronouncing in his testimony)—at the side of proof exposed all through the making of The Jinx—was once an important to Durst being in any case discovered to blame of Berman’s homicide nearest many years spent within the shade of indecision.
However there are several rabbit holes within the Durst saga—3 killings, the dismemberment of a neighbor, a countrywide manhunt that ended as a result of a stolen rooster sandwich, a fugitive length the place he dressed as a mute girl—that the tale of Durst’s pal who fronted the song function Nation Porn temporarily pale. To filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, who attempted unsuccessfully to get Chavin to take part within the fresh Jinx docuseries, Chavin was once all the time a key piece to the Durst puzzle regardless that.
“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 Vainness Truthful. “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 now not all, of the folk dependable to Durst over the many years, Chavin was once financially entangled with the true property inheritor, as The Jinx main points. Chavin met Durst (thru Berman) within the early ’80s, in a while nearest the musician pivoted to a profession in actual property promoting. Durst’s public owns one in every of Big apple’s maximum prestigious actual property empires, and within the episode Chavin tells Jarecki that Durst “gave me my business career, the whole thing, on a platter” by means of getting his public’s industry to signal with him.
Chavin testified that his profession took off between the profitable account and the credibility it gave him.
The 2 frolicked of their non-public era too. “We had what we called ‘boys night out,’ and we’d go out and go to nightclubs and bars,” Chavin testified. He additional defined within the testimony that the 2 double dated and, despite the fact that Durst was once married to McCormack firstly in their friendship, Durst would occasionally jerk his spouse and alternative occasions convey a female friend. Chavin and Durst additionally visited the well-known Big apple intercourse membership Plato’s Retreat, in keeping with an interview Chavin gave Rolling Stone. “I was a lot more conservative than he was,” Chavin mentioned, explaining to the hole that Durst would incessantly brightness up a joint anywhere he took place to be. “When you’ve got the money to buy your way out of stuff you can do a lot of shit,” he mentioned.
