LOL! Oh man, wescat, I tried the power drill thing and it "grabbed" the tobacco and twisted it around the bit, instantly deconstructing the cigar from the filler outwards! It was one of my many ohsh*it moments.
I use a PerfecDraw and if that doesn't work, I toss the cigar. It still p*sses me off, but like DonM says, pitch it and move one. You gotta accept that occasionally you'll get a bad cigar. In my case (when I measured these things) I found by keeping my humidors around 65% humidity, my pitch rate was only ~3%.