This one was by far the largest operation I was involved with.  Only 3 people took the fall for it, the mastermind, the technical assistant, and a willing but mostly innocent accomplice, but it was a much larger operation than that.
     Enter the mastermind.  He wanted to get a microphone inside the women's dorm and hopefully capture some funny and juicy conversation.  A simple idea, but much more difficult to pull off.  Since the fines could have been quite large for being caught trying to get inside, or being found out after the fact, he decided to tackle the challenge of getting the mic into a good place from outside the dorm, up on the roof to be exact.  Since the roof was wide and flat, it was easy to get on it at night and stay out of sight.
    Enter the technical assistant.  That would be me.  In order to pull all this off there had to be a microphone, something to plug it into to make it work, something to record with, and something to listen with.  Since I had experience in this area and knew where to find stuff I was perfect for the job.  I rounded up an old cable snake no longer in use, a cheap microphone and some cord for it, an audio mixer, a tape deck, and a small instrument monitor.  I used my dorm room to test it out.  The first batch of equipment was old and turned out to be no good.  I knew where to find some alternate equipment and since the sports season had ended, it would not be missed.  It passed a test run with flying colors.  It's hard to imagine that with all the activity and movement of equipment into a strange location, no one, except for a few inside the men's dorm, had caught on yet.
     Now that we had the equipment,  once we figured out how to get the mic in place, where would we put the equipment so we could hook it up?
     Enter the willing, but mostly innocent accomplice.  We needed to keep the equipment inside, and definitely inside the dorm if possible so that there wasn't any danger of someone from the women's dorm finding it.  His dorm room was one of the two closest to the women's dorm and it was on the backside, putting his windows out of sight from the main campus.  Because the roofs of the two buildings were attached we could run all of our cord from one to the other and drop down into his window, which was also hidden by a line of trees. 
    Now for some details.  There was a lot of buzz around the dorm about this one.  There was almost no point to keeping it a secret.  The equipment going in and out of my room was a dead giveaway that something was going down.  Plus, when it came time to execute, since it was done late at night, the activity was a bit much to try and keep it a secret.  We had decided that the bathroom was the best place to locate the microphone.  We spent two nights trying to do a test run on our own dorm by attempting  to get access to the bathroom through the vents on the roof.  We were unsuccessful but noticed that the other dorm appeared to have an extra vent.  On the second night, the mastermind went over to the other roof with a young, very willing, and still nameless accomplice.  They removed the vent cover and found that the vent went straight down and stopped over top of one of the stalls.  Bingo!
    When I say there was a lot of buzz, there sure was.  The young accomplice was very eager to get in on it, though we never pointed the finger at him, and he never outed himself.  Lots of guys came outside to see what we were doing or to volunteer as look outs.  Again, with all the activity, it's amazing we were still not caught. 
     Once the mic was in place, it was plugged into the snake.  The snake was a perfect idea because then we didn't have to string together a bunch of mic chords to cover the few hundred feet we needed to go and we could easily wrap the end in plastic to keep it dry.  Inside the dorm room we hooked the snake up to a mixer and hooked up a tape deck to record and a cheap guitar amp to listen with.  The first time we turned it on it worked perfectly.  We had guys coming in and out at all times to get a listen.  Fortunately or unfortunately, there wasn't much to listen to.  A lot of flushing, teeth brushing, and showering.  Occasionally a play fight out in hall or a brief conversation in the bathroom. 
     For our efforts we got several hours on tape.  Our downfall was that we had a good thing going...for a little too long.  Everyone in the men's dorm knew something about it and eventually someone leaked information and the wildfire spread quickly.  Once we found out that word was out, we hit the roof with lightning speed to remove everything.  Either the mic had already been discovered and removed or it came off when we yanked the cord out.  It didn't matter at that point, the gig was up.  Had we really tried to keep this one under wraps, perhaps we could have left the mic in place for a very long time.
     As I said earlier, only the three of us took the fall for this prank.  It was clear who the mastermind was because he was behind a lot of pranks.  It was also clear that I was technical assistant because of my knowledge of sound equipment and access to it.  The mostly innocent accomplice was easy to finger because of his room was full of equipment.  He was mostly innocent because he didn't help us hook up the equipment or put things in place, he just allowed us to use his room as the control center. 
     Overall it was a pretty big deal and definitely one to remember.  Some fines were paid and the tapes were ultimately destroyed.  I'd like to say that I kept a copy of the final tape, which was just the best stuff edited down into a short segment, but alas, it slipped off into the abyss.