[There was a video here]

The final Republican debate before so-called next week’s “Super Tuesday” series of primaries got real rowdy real quick, with Marco Rubio attacking Donald Trump over his having hired undocumented immigrants to work on one of his real estate projects in the 1980s.

Indeed, back in 1980, Donald Trump hired 200 undocumented Polish workers to demolish the Bonwit Teller building to make room for Trump Tower. For six months, those workers worked 12-hour shifts, 7 days a week, and were paid $5 an hour (if they were paid at all).

“We worked in horrid, terrible conditions,” one of the workers, Wojciech Kozak Kozak said in 1998, after years of litigation. “We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our rights.”

Trump said he didn’t know the workers were undocumented. “All we did was to try to keep a job going that was started by someone else,” he told the New York Times. “In fact, we helped people and it has cost a lot of money in legal fees.”

The case was settled in 1999 and sealed, 19 years after demolition began and 16 years after the suit was filed.

Contact the author at brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.