One of the most prominent examples (if slightly more benign) from Germany is the Hauptmann von Köpenick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Voigt

In 1906, Voigt dressed up as a prussian army captain and managed to seize the towns koffers (signing a receipt no less). Even the mayor did not question the captains authority, even thogh Voigt had no military training, and the uniform was cobbled together from various pieces.

Sorry, where does it say it's sitting under the desk and is the size of a fridge? The inset photo on the right hand side of the page looks quite like it's showing the inside of the apparatus from the underside; the caption is clearly labelled that way. And I don't really see why it would need to be any larger than that, since the mechanics of a rotary dial disk (times 50) are rather small. Even with the disks "extended" to produce many more pulses that the usual ten.

When Munich opened Terminal 2 back in June 2003, I was connecting there on the second day of operations.Lufthansa had scheduled only 45 minutes(!) to change from an internal to an US bound flight, and it all went without any problems. And I don't remember reading about any trouble in the first weeks at all.

It might well be that LHR's T5 has to cope with a lot more passengers than MUC's T2, and I'm sure LHR is operating much more to capacity than MUC ever will, but still...

For the past 5 years, I have successfully avoided going via LHR, and I certainly will continue to do so. Here's hoping that Open Skys will bring back the good old days of pre-2001 trans-atlantic travel :-)