It’s just a grainy ID photo of an elderly man – but for Ken Widner, the image proves his uncles really did pull off the greatest jailbreak in history.
Widner, 65, says the photograph answers questions that have been lingering since brothers John and Clarence Anglin, alongside cellmate Frank Morris, busted out of Alcatraz in 1962.
The officers who pursued the inmates at the time say they most likely never got beyond the frigid, choppy and shark-infested waters of San Francisco Bay.
But no bodies were ever found, fueling speculation about their fate and even a Clint Eastwood movie about that cool night in June.
What’s never been doubted, though, is the ingenuity of their plan.
The men left papier-mâché models of their heads in their beds to distract guards.
They then crawled out through ventilation ducts, which they’d widened with dining spoons, before fleeing on a makeshift inflatable raft.
Now, Widner, a nephew of the Anglin brothers, has obtained a photo, purportedly showing an 80-something-year-old John in Brazil. It’s thought to be evidence he survived the jailbreak.
Not only did the men reach land, Widner claims, but they were allegedly flown to Mexico the day after the break out by drug smuggler Fred Brizzi.
It’s believed they spent some years living in Mexico or elsewhere before moving to Brazil, where they both got married, had kids and lived out their days in relative wealth and comfort under assumed identities, he claims.
The shocking twist comes as President Donald Trump moves to reopen Alcatraz, and asserts that the island lock up was inescapable.
The Daily Mail can exclusively present the unearthed photo, which was taken in 2015 or 2016, according to Widner, and shows a gray-haired man in his eighties.
Widner says a man in Brazil – whom he believes has some connection to his uncle John – contacted him and sent the image. He’d snapped it with his phone from the security system of an ‘exclusive gated community’ near São Paulo, where the photographed individual is said to have lived with his wife.
‘I was like, “Oh my gosh, it really looks like John,”‘ Widner told the Daily Mail.
‘But the man was so much older than other pictures of John, and I’m just an amateur, so I wanted to be sure.’
A former police forensic artist examined the photo and found 13 telltale signs in the eyebrows, ears and other features that were a ‘positive match’ to John’s prison mugshot, Widner says.
According to the narrative Widner has built up through extensive research, John made a ‘pretty penny’ selling farmland as a fugitive in Brazil.
He was living with his wife under an assumed name, which Widner declined to share with the Daily Mail, in a ritzy neighborhood boasting BMWs in the driveway, according to his ongoing research.
Widner says he’s obtained a 2018 death certificate of the individual in the photo.
He plans to travel to Brazil to gather DNA traces from the home or even the gravesite, and compare it to Anglin family members, he told the Daily Mail.
‘That’ll pretty much seal the deal,’ says Widner.
He declined to identify the Brazilian man who shared the photo. The source, he says, learned about the theory that the Anglins ended up in Brazil from a 2015 History Channel documentary based on Widner’s research.
The photo, which the Daily Mail cannot verify, is just the latest piece of evidence Widner and his relatives have collected over the decades that show the inmates escaped the Rock alive.
Another photo they obtained in the ’90s shows John and Clarence wearing sunglasses standing beside a road, allegedly living on a farm in Brazil in 1975.
The brothers also are believed to have sent Christmas cards to the family home in Florida for three years after their escape. The handwriting did appear to match the brothers’.
In the early 1960s, the Anglins and Morris were serving sentences in Alcatraz for bank robbery when they started hatching plans to break out.
They spent months using spoons and forks to dig holes in the walls surrounding the air vents in their cells, according to the FBI.
On the night of the escape, they used painted papier-mâché heads topped with hair collected from the prison barber shop to fool the guards into thinking they were asleep in bed.
They squeezed through the hole and made their way from the prison roof to the water’s edge, carrying a makeshift raft crafted from 50 pilfered cotton raincoats.
The raft and other items from the escape were found washed up on a nearby island.
Prison officials and federal agents insisted at the time of the escape that the inmates died – the FBI officially closed its case in 1979, turning it over to US Marshals, who continue to investigate.
That same year, their exploits were turned into the movie Escape from Alcatraz, starring Eastwood as Morris.
More than 40 years later, Widner and co-author Mike Lynch drew together their research of family interviews and historical documents to produce the 2024 book Alcatraz: The Last Escape.
In their telling, the men escaped by using wires to hitch the makeshift raft to a passing boat.
From there, they claim, the fugitives met a second boat in the San Francisco Bay area, which took them to dry land.
Widner says his uncles’ fellow prisoner Whitney Bulger, the infamous Irish Mob boss from Boston, helped them prepare their bodies for the freezing water.
Bulger, who reportedly took an interest in Scuba diving, advised them to soak towels in cold water from their sink and toilet, wrap themselves in the towels and lie on the cement floor to get used to the temperature, according to Widner, who says he has communicated extensively with the mobster.
After reaching dry land, a private plane chartered from a small airport at neighboring Marin County flew the trio to Mexico to begin a new life, according to Widner’s book.
Fearing that agents were on their trail, the Anglins later moved to Brazil.
Alcatraz Island was first identified in 1775 by Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala.
In 1850 a presidential order earmarked the island for military use to protect San Francisco Bay
Between 1850-1909 the military used the island’s Citadel as a prison.
US military prisoners rebuilt the prison between 1909 – ’11.
The US Military stopped using Alcatraz in 1933 and a new prison was opened the following year.
After opening in 1934, Alcatraz held some of America’s most notorious prisoners such as Al Capone, George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly and the first Public Enemy Number One, Alvin Karpis.
The prison never reached its maximum capacity of 336 inmates.
Disruptive prisoners were sent to Alcatraz.
Between 1934 and 1963, 36 men, including two who tried to escape twice, made attempts to flee the island. Records show that 23 were caught, six were shot and two were drowned.
Alcatraz was closed on March 21, 1963 due to its high running costs because everything, including water needed to be shipped to the island.
The prison opened to the public in 1973 and is visited by on average one million people a year.
*Source: Federal Bureau of Prisons
According to Widner, his family was in contact with his uncles there until at least the 1990s.
Before his death in 2010, another brother of the fugitives, Robert Anglin, told family members he’d been in touch with his siblings for 25 years following their escape.
Now, earlier in May, Trump vowed to reopen Alcatraz as he continues to crack down on violent criminals and illegal migrants.
He said the notorious facility, which was shuttered in 1963 and once held famed gangster Al Capone, will ‘house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders.’
He also declared that, ‘Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz.’
A total of 36 prisoners made 14 escape attempts from Alcatraz in its 30-year history.
Out of those, 23 were caught alive, six were shot and killed, and two are known to have drowned attempting the 1.25-mile swim to shore through brutal currents.
Five, including the Anglins, who were incarcerated there in 1957, and Morris, who had been an inmate there since 1960, are listed as ‘missing and presumed drowned.’
Widner says Trump was ‘wrong about’ Alcatraz being inescapable, but praised his declassification of historic investigations and wants him to do the same with the ‘Alcatraz files.’
His co-author, Lynch, calls plans to reopen Alcatraz wrongheaded, saying it will cost too much to renovate the old buildings and that the site is protected as a landmark and bird refuge.
‘It’s a nice idea, but it’s never going to happen,’ Lynch told the Daily Mail.
‘Everything has to be transported to the island. All the water, food, medical gear and other materials needed to run a prison have to be shipped to the island every single day. That’s just way too expensive.’
Widner and Lynch will sign copies of their book on Alcatraz Island from June 12 to 14, marking the 63rd anniversary of the breakout.
Tide researchers say the daring prisoners may have escaped, but only if they fled Alcatraz at the right time.
Computer models that consider the San Francisco Bay’s tides, winds and other factors reveal the inmate stood a small chance of paddling to freedom on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
According to the Dutch team of scientists that assembled the data, it all depends on the time inmates Clarence Anglin, John Anglin and Frank Morris set sail in their makeshift dingy made of raincoats.
‘Only in the time window between (11pm) and midnight do they get close enough to the shore to have a chance to survive,’ researcher Dr Rolf Hut wrote on his blog.
Otherwise, one of three disastrous things would have happened.
Had they launched in the hours before, the men would have been sucked out into the frigid Pacific and died of hypothermia.
Had they waited until after midnight, the tide would have shifted during their daring voyage and the current would have pushed them deeper into the San Francisco Bay.
There, they either would have perished from cold before they got close enough to the East Bay to make landfall or gotten picked up by authorities when the sun rose in the morning.
Assuming the men did launch sometime around 11.30pm and somehow knew to first paddle their makeshift boat hard to the north – towards Angel Island, where some of their belongings and a paddle would later be found – they could have become the only prisoners to ever escape the so-called inescapable prison.
‘If they hit it exactly at midnight, the beautiful thing is that we see that they would have been sucked out towards the Golden Gate Bridge,’ Dr Hut told BBC News .
As they neared the bridge, the shifting tides would have made paddling far easier.
‘In the best case, the escapees peddle northwards with a speed of almost 1km per hour, an almost Olympian effort. In that scenario, they most likely survive and make it to the north side of the Golden Gate bridge,’ Hut wrote.