Is it legal that minimum wage settlement denied as payment to qualify for unemployment insurance?

I wasn't paid anything for working at my job so I could not claim unemployment, so I filed a minimum-wage case and won a settlement which was paid in one lump sum. However now the New York unemployment office said that that's not considered being paid in two base periods, even though I worked during that time, because the payment was made in the fourth quarter and I worked in the first and second quarters of the year. Logically, this makes no sense to me because that money was a settlement check that was paid through the minimum wage settlement case. Is this really the law? This makes absolutely no sense to me that somebody could do something illegal and then not have to pay unemployment afterwards because of being caught and not being legal initially.